storm clouds over party shoes:
Etiquette Problems for the Ill-Bred Woman (Raincoast, 1997, 78 pages, $18.95)
To order copies of the book, email me.

In the fall of 1994 I was at the Hadassah Bazaar while visiting Toronto. The event was being held that year in the Automotive Building on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. I was rummaging around in the book section when one small tome caught my eye. The books were arranged standing on their front ends with their spines uppermost. One said “It’s More Fun When You Know the Rules”. I was so intrigued I put down my plate of knishes and opened up the book. The sub-title was “Etiquette Problems for Girls”

By 1994 I had been a visual artist for almost 10 years and for much of that time, a ‘Nice Girl’ and a ‘Bad Girl’ had been duking it out in my work. I didn’t always refer to them that way. They first showed up cloaked in metaphor, looking more like a battle between my head and my heart, between rationality and impulse, between right and wrong. In 1991 I threw out the euphemisms and created a series of block prints using the terms ‘Nice Girl’ and ‘Bad Girl’. And once the girls were loose, there was no stopping them. For the next three years, these two mud wrestled in my psyche and in my studio. I created well over 50 works incorporating the Nice Girl/Bad Girl theme; works with titles like “Bad Girls Rock the Boat” and “Nice Girls Wouldn’t Say No if Their Mouths Were Full of It”. What became clear in all of this was that I had a deep split operating in me. There was my ‘nice’ girl, who believed in taking small portions and doing the right thing at all costs; and then there was my ‘bad’ girl, whose appetite was less curbed and less refined. She wanted to take up space, not worthy causes. You could say that my Bad Girl aspired to a certain level of ill-breeding, although at the time I didn’t think of it in those terms.

By the time I came across the little book at the Hadassah Bazaar, the din in my psyche from the skirmishing girls was deafening. As I began to read it on my flight back home to Vancouver, I laughed at first at the sheer folly of it. Imagine, an entire treatise based on a kind of original sin of the female personality. But it wasn’t long before I felt a deep and disturbing resonance. The book’s tone of admonishment and reproach soon had the colour rising in my face, and I could feel the same hot shame I’d known as a girl, straining toward self-hood against immeasurable odds. I had never actually seen an etiquette book much less read one. Now before me lay the printed words, the bald and brazen exhibitionism of a choking and insidious doctrine. I realized I’d stumbled across the original Nice Girl’s operating manual, her primer, the Michelin guide to the hiways and biways of good taste. This is what my Nice Girl had been trying so desperately to live up to, and this is what my Bad Girl was fighting so hard to overthrow.

I began to collect more and more etiquette books, and the more I read, the more I knew I would make art out of it somehow. And I did. In the next year I cut and pasted my way through an entire body of work taking quotes from the etiquette books and matching them with images from magazines of the same vintage. The hand-coloured mixed media pieces were exhibited in the fall of 1995 at a small Vancouver Gallery. Women who came to see the show wrote pages and pages of heartfelt comments in the gallery guest book. In attendance one day was a publisher, who offered to turn it all into a book. Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes, Etiquette Problems for the Ill-Bred Woman was released by Press Gang in the fall of 1997. The first printing sold out in two weeks. The Book was reviewed across the country, shortlisted for the VanCity Book Prize, and named one of the Best Non-Fiction Books of 1997 by Quill and Quire, Canada’s national magazine of book news and reviews. I could hardly fit my head into my favorite pill box.

In the publishing world my little book is long dead. But the women I meet who still want copies to give to their niece or their sister-in-law, know that what was then is with us today. Women and girls are still being targeted as candidates for makeover. And while we’re busy trying to fix what ain’t broke, we fall to notice things like that in Canada, women still only earn 73% of what men earn for full-time work. Out of the world’s 29 most developed countries, only Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Korea have larger wage gaps. Call me strident…just don’t call me late for dinner.

But you know, there is hope. In spite of my mother’s best intentions, and those of an entire culture, I – like a lot of women I know – am apparently impossibly ill-bred. I want my art work to be remarked upon and openly admired. I also dash on ahead and climb into taxicabs unaided, go about looking a fright, and break down every now and then. My brains show more often than my slip, and I have been known to start a great many conversations on subjects of interest to me. Most importantly, I make it a policy never to leave my personal feelings at home, or anywhere else for that matter.

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