Adventure Divas
CONTENTS
I
n which the author relates naïve and hubristic start-up stories of how she got into estro-charged globetrotting. Author also teases some of the saltier adventures and debacles to come
—headhunters! fugitives! emotional turmoil!—
yet tries not to give away too much of the story.
I
n which a film crew sneaks into Cuba to make the pilot for the
Adventure Divas
television series. A hurricane, a budding mother-daughter dynamic, and elusive interviewees all contribute to a far from seamless production. Nonetheless, a hip-hop group, an exile, and a Santería spiritual leader (among others) reveal divadom’s unique elements in Castro’s pinko outpost: Eros, Risk, and Machismo-Leninismo.
I
n which the author tells of a Malaysian gig that helped fund the Adventure Divas enterprise during one of many fiscal doldrums. Here, the author starts to sneak in larger geopolitical issues, such as globalization, environmental devastation, the obliteration of indigenous peoples, and the like—but after reading this chapter, you’ll probably only remember the giant snake.
I
n which the crew experiences a country of uber-divas and deities, all of whom operate amid humbling realities. Author struggles to integrate serious social issues with the relatively lighthearted mandate of the television series. (Also, the crew is faced with what to do When Good Divas Go Bad.)
SHORT-ROPED TO HEIDI’S GRANDFATHER
I
n which the author must attempt to climb the Matterhorn on about a week’s notice. The chapter features an excess of boys and cheese, as well as some disturbing
Lord of the Flies
behavior.
STROPPY SHEILAS AND MANA WAHINES
I
n which the
Divas
crew endeavors to find out why it is that women run New Zealand; the prime minister, the attorney general, the Maori queen—all ladies. There is also a quixotic hunt for the reclusive author of
The Bone People.
I
n which the author walks through Niger’s Sahara with Tuareg nomads, the legendary “blue men of the desert.” And then, due to a rogue strain of competitive DNA, she insists on entering a camel race against warrior tribesmen who have been at it for five thousand years. A very bad idea.
I
n which the
Divas
crew goes to Iran, takes on the Western obsession with the veil, and explores part of the “axis of evil” via an unlikely collection of people, among them a taxi driver, a painter, a poet, and a presidential adviser. A trip to the beauty parlor yields both pain and insight.
I
n which the author meant to write a profound epiphany-laden ending to the book, offering a definitive perspective on divadom and an image of personal spiritual deliverance. Instead, said author flees to Brazil and learns to surf.
B
ooks, films, and other media created by the women featured in this book.
For Jeannie / Mom
THEY WERE NOTHING MORE THAN PEOPLE, BY THEMSELVES. . . . BUT ALL TOGETHER, THEY HAVE BECOME THE HEART AND MUSCLES AND MIND OF SOMETHING PERILOUS AND NEW, SOMETHING STRANGE AND GROWING AND GREAT.
TOGETHER, ALL TOGETHER, THEY ARE THE INSTRUMENTS OF CHANGE.
—KERI HULME,
The Bone People
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Aided by notes, transcripts, and memory, I have faithfully re-created events and conversations to the best of my ability. The exact chronology of my travels has been altered somewhat for the sake of the narrative.
That said, memory is both capricious and dodgy—you know the spiel. I take responsibility for all errors and omissions herein (unless they are someone else’s fault, that is).
PROLOGUE
“
M
y pod days are over, dammit,” I thought to myself as I stood in my bedroom back in Seattle, looking at the wall. In my family, “pods”—the dispirited hulks from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
who walked through life with eyes open but not really living—were the lowest form of being. I had stripped clean my walls, painted them white, and hung huge sheets of white paper and scrawled on them painfully self-conscious resolutions for the future:
BODY, SOUL, WORK.
All had subdivided categories. My gray backpack lay in the corner covered with Indonesian dust, and I was struggling to hold on to my hard-won modicum of actualization.
My mother, who was visiting, walked in. “What,” she said, looking wide-eyed and askance, taking in the graffiti of self-help plastering the walls, “is this about?” I mumbled something about a headhunter and magic mushrooms in Sumatra, and tried to tell her how all this added up to something important. I rolled a new ethos around in my mouth, feeling for a name—a single word on which to hang the emerging philosophy that would mark a new phase in my life. The word needed to embody potential and individuality. Above all, it needed to be proactive, rather than reactive. Always a fan of four-letter words, I blurted out, “Diva.”
“You want to be an opera singer?” Mom said. “Honey,” she added delicately, “you’re tone-deaf.”
True, I could carry off neither the range of notes nor the plunging bustline of a traditional diva, and furthermore, I already had a job: I was a book editor.
When I left for that month in Sumatra I was the editorial director of a feminist publishing company, Seal Press, and weary with burnout. My work, on books covering everything from domestic violence to third-wave feminism to adventure travel, was gratifying, yet a part of my original spirit had atrophied after years behind a desk. I needed to move from theory to action, from the intellectual to the visceral. I had long believed that adventure was a way of life, not just a weekend theme; but I wasn’t living it. Adventure is about hurling yourself at the unexpected; it’s how you walk to the corner store,
and
how you walk the Australian Outback. Up in that Sumatran tree, I had determined that my next professional move would satisfy my hunger for politics
and
adventure. And over the next several months a plan took form.
In publishing and in life, I had started to see in divavision: to connect the dots, the acts, the scrappy charge toward ideals that characterized the people I admired. There were risk-taking, grassroots leaders—artists, activists, politicos—women who were making change on micro and macro levels around the world. I wanted to find them, expose their work, plumb their spirits—and add a new brand of iconography to the media landscape.
Tone-deaf? Pshaw. I embraced the first-person, power-injected moniker
diva,
and combined it with a philosophy of living I saw embodied in the women I respected. Together they formed the perfect name for the project: Adventure Divas.
I followed my feeling that there were unsung visionaries who might represent another way to wield power in this world that had become increasingly polarized between the dueling forces of imperialism and fundamentalism—between the profit-driven, culture-homogenizing multinationals that are turning the developing world into a “parts car” for the First World, and the tribal, regressive camps that advocate burkas, clitorectomies, anti-choice legislation, and, in general, a reactionary reliance on orthodoxy.
The ladies of divadom—adventure divas—I imagined, represented this alternative, third way. I wanted to hit the road and test my theory.
Could their leadership, vision, and habit of rewriting the rules represent a new empire simmering out there? Or at the very least, would there be value in creating a public testimony of global sistah-hood? (
Was
there a global sistah-hood?) In bringing these people to the attention of the world, would their ability to make change increase exponentially?
A truly global pilgrimage would provide a deeper understanding of how individuals live in, and change, the world. As a committed traveler, I knew that diving into other cultures and gathering the fruits of wanderlust enabled one to see the world with a wider, more original lens. “Travel,” as Mark Twain put it, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” So while the principles of divadom certainly play out locally, I was committed to acting globally.
I would pull together a team of people who shared my belief in divas and the possibilities media held in leveraging them. I would quit my job, swallow my print pride, and turn to the medium with the largest global impact: television. After all, charting a coming paradigm was an ambition that required drastic measures, like tearing down the master’s house with his own media tools. Why not use television to
change
people’s minds, instead of deaden them?
So, the plan was to take divavision to television—and to the Web, and now this book, too—to storm the bully pulpit and launch a cross-media empire. The use of the word
empire
was quite deliberate. “Imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others,” wrote the late cultural critic Edward Said, which, metaphorically speaking, seemed an apt description of this bid for bandwidth. Of course, I was just talking about making a television series, not exactly taking over 30 Rock; making like Ted Turner, not occupying anyone’s homeland. On one level I was just mucking around in the syntax of empowerment; on the other hand, I was serious: This was one destiny worth manifesting.
But book publishing
had been my career of choice, and I was relatively clueless about TV. I didn’t even have one.
What’s a girl to do?
Call Mom.
My mom, Jeannie, had years of experience in local television news with CBS. She is five foot two, very energetic, and a born optimist. I shared exactly none of these traits with her, so I assumed we would make a complementary team. Because she had spent her career in corporate news media (mostly covering sports), I figured an independent venture just might appeal to her. And I knew the global adventure would be irresistible. When I was eight years old my mother had pulled my siblings and me out of school and dragged us and our father on a yearlong road trip through Eastern and Western Europe and the then Soviet Union. Putting her career on hold in the name of adventure proved her own divaliciousness (though for me, missing third grade means that to this day I can’t write in cursive or do fractions). Jeannie had witnessed the graffiti in my bedroom, but when I actually told her The Plan, her response went something like this:
“Honey, TV is
very
expensive, especially good TV. TV thinks women just like to cry and portrays us as sexpots or victims. Television is about image, but executing this, well, it’s gonna be all about
work.
A series can take years to get off the ground—and most never fly.
“Also,” she said, “TV is run by myopic guys.”
(Long pause.)
“Okay, I’m in,” she said.
We filed the papers, slapped down ten thousand dollars each, and Adventure Divas was born. Take that, Rupert Murdoch.
Any Fortune 500 CEO
will tell you that the first thing you have to do when you have an idea is get a focus group. So I called all my friends, pulled out a High-8 video camera, and asked,
What’s a diva?
“Eleanor Roosevelt. The fact that she made it through life with power
and
buck teeth always made me proud,” said Kate.
“The New Freedom lady gone bad,” responded Casey, with a flip of her skateboard.
“Well, it’s like George Clinton’s definition of funk,” Evelyn said. “
Diva
is the awesome power of a fully operational mothership.”
“She, against all cultural insistence, listens to the song in her heart,” said my friend Inga, who was slated to write a travel advice column for the Adventure Divas website.
On the last day of our focus-group research, Inga came by and plopped a box on my lap.
“Look,” she said, gently pulling from the box an eight-inch-tall plastic doll, with dark skin, a gauzy aqua tutu, and sturdy, sparkly wings.
Sky Prancer.
“She flies unfettered.” Inga pulled the string on the doll’s launcher-base, which jettisoned her, arms up, up, up, spinning into the air. “She’s magic. She’ll bring you gifts. And her tutu matches her hair.”
“She’ll always stay with me for good luck,” I said, thanking Inga for the talisman.
Focus-group testing complete, Jeannie and I decided we needed a promotional video shot in “locations around the world” featuring international divas. Our personal funds were going fast (especially after, like any good garage band, the first thing we did was make T-shirts).
Right. So. We gathered up our frequent flier miles and got creative in a three-state radius.
Lara, I know you’re an accountant, but here’s a camera. Can you pretend to be a Japanese film director?
Evelyn, can you just stand at this podium and shake your fist as if in front of an assembly in Cape Town? We’ll use the George Clinton quote if you do.
Stacy, there’s a Russian freighter in port. Can you fling a seabag and make like a Russian sailor?
Steve, we’re going to interview a bush pilot in Alaska. Would you shoot it? We can pay you in T-shirts.
“Deb,” I said, on the phone to my sister who wrangled horses in Utah, “do you think you could help us out with our ‘riding across the Mongolian steppes’ shot?” “No problem,” she replied, “and if you drive an hour south into the desert you could get a ‘biking across the Sahara’ shot.”
We found a Buddhist monk in Tacoma and for a “contribution” he agreed to squat and counsel for the camera.
Our pitch tape went out to television executives and we received an impressive number of meetings. Jeannie and I developed a dog-and-pony show in which we tossed around words like
synergy, psychographic,
and
cross-media branding
with the strategic zeal of new MBAs. The meetings usually began with the executives saying “We love it!” yet, oddly, ended with them describing a version of the show that didn’t even remotely resemble the vision we (thought we had) put forth. The collective response, after months of courtship with a handful of networks, was that they were intrigued, but confused. Encouraging, but noncommittal. Once, we got all the way to contract stage and they pulled out. Twice, we walked away from contracts because of the creative compromises being asked of us.
It seemed most networks were not prepared to take on a project that melded genres, tossed around terms such as
girl world pilgrimage
and had a whiff of a political agenda.
Either that, or our presentation sucked and the project was a dud.
We interpreted our situation not as an ominous warning to bow out, but as a sign that we needed to Go It Alone. That is, make the show without initial support from a broadcaster—colloquially known as the “If they don’t get it, screw ’em” phase in every entrepreneur’s career. We would rally investors to fund a pilot, on the strength of which we would then go sell the series.
I strapped on false confidence and gave speeches to organizations such as the Outdoor Industry Council.
“It is up to all of us to make our attitudes visible and desirable. In doing that, we will prove the market. Our media and our products should rejoice in our multiplicity, and send a message that fame, beauty, and wealth do not necessarily drive us, nor are they the criteria of our chosen icons . . .”
“Do you really have to use ‘creative
dominatrix
’ on your business card?” Jeannie queried after one particularly unsuccessful meeting in a potential investor’s office.
“It wasn’t my card. There was no hope from the get-go. Did you see that picture hanging on his wall of him shaking hands with Reagan? And your comment is a perfect example of the generational thing this project is trying to move beyond,” I pressed. “Your generation was promised a decent husband and maybe a job on the side. Mine,” I said with some nostalgia and a hint of disappointment, “mine was promised
jet packs.
”
Even though I pretended I was not listening to my mother, I often was. And she was partly right. There was a fundamental conflict: defiance and idealism constantly butted heads with fiscal and marketplace realities. The diva wannabe in me demanded to have exactly what I wanted. But the broke neophyte TV producer was in no position to demand it. I learned over time not to use the word
feminism,
to stress the travel aspect of the show, and to downplay its bedrock social consciousness.
Still, we were already growing tired and had not even gotten out the door yet. “Jeannie,” I said privately, hoping to drown my feelings of defeat in her optimism, “maybe it was a bad idea. I mean, how much blood can we let over this?” By this time we had both been working full-time for several months, without pay and with only one staff member, Stacy Lewis, as well as a half-dozen interns.
