Seattle Girl

The official biography that KSEA sends out reads:

Georgia Fulton, popular host of Seattle Girl, says she got into talk radio because, “I have a really big mouth and I could never find any other job where my boss appreciated that skill.”

But while I’ll admit that I rarely do shut up and that I can’t keep an opinion to myself even if it’s gonna get me lynched, the simple truth is that I got started in talk radio because of a guy.

Six guys to be precise.

(Hey! Watch who you’re calling a slut. It’s not like that, I swear. Well, mostly not like that, anyway.)

And if I ever get the chance to write my biography, it’ll read more like this...

* * *

When I was a little girl my mother told me repeatedly, “Georgia, boys don’t like girls who talk too much.”

I think she got her greatest pleasure from making proclamations like this during breakfast. Really, who wouldn’t?

Later, when I was living at home one summer in college, she announced, “Georgia, boys don’t pay for the cow when they are getting the milk for free.”

So much for the great strides of feminism.

And that was when I figured out that it’s not the establishment holding us down.

It’s not the Man holding us back.

It’s the Mom.

But after giving it some more thought, I can see that since my mother endured twenty hours of excruciating labor to push me out into the world, suffering the indignity of a ripped hoo-ha while she was at it, she very well might feel that giving me such charming motherly advice is only her due.

And that I should listen to it.

As if!

Thanks Mom, I’ll be sure to file that beefy black and white farm animal tip away. Pass the Fruit Loops, would you?

I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. It’s not that my childhood was particularly bad. My parents certainly didn’t beat me or anything. We were comfortably middle-class in a nice suburban neighborhood and there was always enough food on the table and a trip to Disneyland every summer.

My childhood was sort of weird, that’s all.

Like we lived just down the block from normal.

To be fair, though, I think I’ve always been a bit of a freak. Take my brother, for instance. Same parents, yet John is a perfectly normal high paid executive, white picket fence in the suburbs, great wife, two kids, and golden retriever kind of guy.

But me, I’m a whole different ball game. And the fact is that no matter what anyone ever said to try to get me to quiet down or button up—and kids and teachers and parents said a whole lot of stuff, like “Shut up,” and “Don’t be so loud all the time,” and “How many times do I need to tell you to settle down young lady?”—I was never the kind of girl who came in a neat little package.

You remember those neat, little, perfect girls from high school, don’t you?
 

No? You’ve spent thousands of dollars in therapy to block out the pain of your blissful school years? Lucky you. Well, I’m happy to refresh your memory.

They had perfect little bodies, they wore perfect little T-shirts tucked into perfect little jeans, and they walked around in perfectly white tennis shoes.

I was never one of those girls. Thank God.

Okay. Settle down, you. I can hear you giving me shit already. And yes, maybe I did envy them some, but I’d like to think that I’m the one that’s happier now.

I love, love, love bumping into fellow ex-geeks from high school so that we can trash on all of the Barbie cheerleaders from our past. So we can say things like, “Oh my god, have you seen Susan from high school lately? You’d die if you saw her—she’s really fat now and has three snotty kids!”

I like to think that girls like me are having the last laugh and that God’s big joke is that pretty girls from high school get uglier and fatter as the years go by, while the rest of us get infinitely more gorgeous.

Oh, who am I kidding? Certainly not you. You can see right through me.

We all know that I would have given my left arm to be one of those perfect girls.

Or even to have let one of them cheat off my math test from time to time.

But I ask you this: Who wouldn’t have wanted to be blonde and blue eyed and thin and cute and giggly, given that originality and uniqueness are completely over-rated from ages five to eighteen?

And for those of you who were perfect, I’m dying to know, was it as good as it seemed? And are you fat and ugly now with a bunch of brats driving you crazy? I sure hope so...

Just kidding. I’m happy for you, really I am.

* * *

Looking back, I’m always surprised by the fact that I was actually pretty okay looking as a little kid. Your regular all-American lanky, tan, long-brown haired girl.

Sadly, this nirvana only lasted until puberty struck.

At nine.

There’s something spectacularly unfair about getting one’s period when one is nine. (In fact it’s so unfair, I can’t even bear to talk about it like it happened to me. I have to revert to the universal “one” or it’s too damn distressing. Suddenly, even I can see the wisdom of therapy.)

But what I’m getting at is that while most of the other girls are still blissfully unaware of womanhood, when you start
menstruating
before you can even pronounce the word, let alone spell it in a spelling bee, you’re pretty much totally screwed. One week a month you’re dealing with sopping up bloody messes during recess and hoping that you don’t stain another pair of pants, because if that happens (and it will...) you’ll have to spend the rest of the day with a huge parka wrapped around your waist.

All of this before you’ve even hit double digits.

As far as I’m concerned, scientists should really be putting some effort into developing a pill we can take to just bypass puberty altogether. Think how much happier people would be?

Except the perfect girls, of course.

No, to be fair, they went through puberty too. Popped out two perfect breasts, stuck in a slim-fit tampon, and they were done.

* * *

Which reminds me—and I don’t want to get too sidetracked by the whole tampon thing—but my mom always thought that only non-virgins can wear tampons. (In her defense, yet again, she grew up in China where I’ve heard they give birth in the fields while they’re working and then immediately get back to shucking corn or whatever the crop is, so I’m not sure that her theories regarding the female anatomy were all that accurate.)

In any case, I had the pleasure of wearing big old pads up until I got to college and my best friend Diane screamed, “What are those?” when she opened my closet and bag of maxi-pads fell on her head. She made it her personal mission to show me how a tampon worked.

I was so naïve I asked her if you had to take it out every time you went pee.

After she picked herself up off the floor, she calmly said, “Oh my god! Pee comes out of a different hole.”

I couldn’t believe I didn’t know that.

Can you believe I didn’t know that?

* * *

Ah, those formative years. Those golden high school years.

I suppose I should be thankful for them because I’m certain that they helped me develop my warped outlook on life. Which is oh-so-important when you make your living chatting with strangers on the radio. But it’s hard to know how great it is to be a big weirdo when you’re thirteen.

I have to admit that sometimes, after a particularly bad day at the microphone, where my listener’s panties are in severely mangled wads, I’ve longed to be normal. To be the kind of person who could just get along with everyone right off the bat. I would say all the right things. I’d be able to smile the right kind of ‘I’m friendly, but not needy’ smile.

But because I was born with a mutated gene—the one that gave me a special knack for pissing off total strangers—it has never happened.

Several years ago, a friend and I were talking about this and he told me that when he first started to go to faculty gatherings with his Ph.D. candidate wife he was afraid to say much at first. He really didn’t want to put his foot in his mouth and mess things up for her. But then he had an epiphany, realizing that nine times out of ten if he spoke up he was going to be just fine. And that no matter what he said or did, one time out of ten he was probably going to be hosed. And if he didn’t talk the other nine times he was definitely going to miss out on some really cool stuff.

I thought about what he said and I had an epiphany: Like hell if I was going to miss out on the good stuff, just because I was trying to play the role of good girl, just so everyone would like me.

That day I settled on a new mantra: Speak up, live long, and prosper.

But when I tried to thank my friend for his fine words recently, he couldn’t remember having ever said anything of the sort.

Figures, doesn’t it? A big life changing mantra, and no one remembers it but me.

The day after my twenty-first birthday Diane and I made the mistake of going to a frat party on the University of Washington campus, where we were juniors. As soon as we walked in the door and I scanned the crowd of jocks, bleached blondes and burn-outs, I knew that this was going to be my last frat party, ever.

Diane immediately wandered into the depths of the party, so I stood in the corner pretending to drink a Corona Light while I waited for her to break Jim or Scott or Bob’s heart, or whatever guy was on her brutally honest “it’s not me, it’s you” agenda for the night. As I dribbled warm beer between my lips, I pondered the important questions.

Like, why do frat houses always smell like they have been housing a pack of wildly urinating dogs?

To keep the boredom at bay, I compiled a quick multiple choice quiz:

(a) A bunch of dirty, stinky guys live in frat houses.

(b) Guys who live in frat houses think it’s fun to drink until they’re having spontaneous pissing contests that take place far from the urinals.

(c) They really, really, really need their mothers to clean up after them.

I had just decided that
(d) All of the above
was the correct answer and was standing on my tippy toes looking through the crowd of meat-heads for Diane so that we could try to salvage what was left of the evening by renting a chick flick and eating popcorn until we exploded, when some guy appeared from out of nowhere, smashed into me and spilled beer all over both of us.

Lucky me, it was cheap keg beer, extra fermented from sitting out in the sun all day. Guess who now smelled like a wild pack of dogs had been urinating directly on her?

Me.

Needless to say, I was seriously on the verge of freaking out by this point. In my vision of what my life would be like when I finally turned twenty-one, I hadn’t figured on such a lousy start.

Don’t worry. I’m not delusional, or anything. It’s not like I thought that I’d turn twenty-one and then suddenly I’d meet Mr. Right and never have to listen to another one of my mother’s riveting lectures on how to behave properly to get a guy and not become a spinster.

But a girl can dream, can’t she? Because, really, the spinster lectures had gotten kind of old over the past few years.

“I am not going to have a hissy fit until I get home,” is what I told myself as I tamped down on the multitude of nasty comments that were gurgling their way up my windpipe, just dying to be unleashed on Mr. Clumsy.

Anyone else would have taken the grim set of my lips and furious muttering as a sign to make a quick exit, but wouldn’t you know it, instead of getting out of my way, he who was entirely responsible for my cheap-beer-is-the-best-leave-in conditioner hair started falling all over himself apologizing and trying in the most bumbling way to wipe me off.

I wished he would stop his attempts at cleaning me off, because all he was succeeding in doing thus far was making the beer soak through my clothes even faster.

“Cut it out!” I said when I couldn’t take it any longer. “Can’t you see you’re just making things worse?”

“Oh god. I’m sorry. I’m such an idiot,” he said, but even then he didn’t stop trying to make amends.

On any other night, I suppose I might have thought that his concern was a sweet gesture. But since we all know that I wasn’t in the world’s best mood by this point—no Mr. Right, more spinster lectures to look forward to, plus the excellent addition of bad beer perfume—I agreed with him.