That Takes Ovaries! by Rivka Solomon

face? You betta get that light out my granma’s face! What’chu think you doin’?!’”
    “So, I guess he figured I didn’t steal you from nobody,” she said, the last time I heard her tell the story. She stifles her laughter when she gets to this part, just like she says she did then, when the undoubtedly bewildered and embarrassed officer wished her a good night and walked back to his squad car.
    I don’t remember this incident, but I’ll take Grandma’s word that it happened. After all, she
is
right that it reflects the Tara I grew up to be:
I won’t take nothing from nobody.
    tara betts ( [email protected] ) creates semantic soups as a creative writing instructor, poetry slam team member, and cohost of a monthly all-women open mike in Chicago. She is currently working on a book of poems about Ida B. Wells. To this day, though no longer having sleepovers at her grandmother’s house, Tara won’t let anyone step to Grandma, or any woman, the wrong way.

I Swear!

louise civetti
    A number of years ago, I was invited to attend a technical meeting at an extremely conservative corporation. When I say it was conservative, I am talking about the fact that the company had been in business for more than a hundred years, and I was the first female to attend one of these meetings.
    During the meeting of the “good ol’ boys,” the air in the room became heated, faces red, collars tight, and the language, well,let’s just say,
colorful.
All eyes turned to me. I pretended not to notice.
    Once the meeting concluded, my boss pulled me aside and said, “I’m sorry the language got out of hand in there.” I told him his apology was accepted, but that next time he’d better watch his f *** ing mouth.
    louise civetti didn’t lose her job for at least a couple of years after that.

You Can Take That Law and …

gwyn mcvay
    During my college days, I was one of the founding officers of our local chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. I believed, among other things, that the police should concentrate more on arresting rapists than on chasing basement joint-smokers, and that medical patients ought to have access to this remedy for a variety of ills ranging from cancer and AIDS to severe menstrual cramps (like I had).
    We enjoyed a lot of support on campus, but the conservative local population tended to react differently. One day two friends and I were downtown putting up posters and handing out flyers for a NORML benefit concert we were holding at the VFW (those Veterans of Foreign Wars are so hip!). We were doing nothing illegal. Before long, two cops came and plunked themselves down right next to us, not saying anything, just making their presence clearly known. My friends became visibly upset.
    “Are they trying to censor us?” said one, nervously picking up and putting down our pile of flyers.
    “Can they force us to move on?” another asked, walking around and around in little circles.
    “I don’t know,” I said. More than anything, I felt curious—and ready to be challenged. Instead of waiting to find out their intentions, I took some of our literature, went up to the men in blue, introduced myself, and handed each a flyer.
    My friends were astonished; the cops accepted the flyers and in the ensuing conversation turned out to be quite reasonable and agreeable. (“Would you like to come to our benefit concert tonight?” I asked. “Thank you; I’ll think about it,” one said.)
    We talked for a while, then
they
moved on, and we all continued with a pleasant afternoon.
    gwyn mcvay was raised to question authority.

Not all gutsy acts come straight from the gut. Some make pit stops, even linger for a while in our heads. There we study the consequences, weigh the options, and make choices—not on the fly, but after deep thought. This chapter is about premeditated personal decisions. Decisions about THE BIG THINGS: health, family, career, where and how to spend a life.
    In