The Day the Music Died

For the majority of you Cyrsti's Condo readers who live in the United States, you would have to be living in a cave to not know this week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I was a newly minted 14 year old wandering the halls of the school I attended when the news came across the public address system. The day turned out to the first of two (so far) in my life, when time stood still. The other of course was the 9/11 attack.

My first thought was assassination?   What the hell happened and wasn't that just something you read about in history books and not a modern reality?

Well, as the coming years were to prove, the term was going to become all to common. It's not up to me to dwell on the charisma and leadership Kennedy brought to our country or the idea Kennedy was perhaps the last President to be totally claimed by two completely diverse generations.  My parents, because he was a hero in their war (WWII) and a hero to mine because he inspired us to be proud of who we were as a country.  We backed down the Russians, were going to the moon and established a radical idea like the Peace Corps to help other less fortunate countries. Plus lets not forget his wife Jackie whose style and grace seemed to elevate his charisma to another level or the sexy, mesmerizing Marilyn Monroe "Mr President"  birthday song which quickly erased all thoughts of Jackie's style.

So quickly, the era was over and with all due respects to Don McLean and his "American Pie" classic song, JFK's death was the day the music died. Vice President Lyndon Johnson took over and with him any hopes of me not visiting Southeast Asia with him.  All of the sudden our government was not inspiring anyone except with handouts and a totally ridiculous war.  The pressure got to be so much LBJ bailed and "Tricky Dick Nixon" stepped in.  The antithesis of JFK in many ways Nixon stepped into the presidency in 1968, the same year as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Finally let's not forget the fall of 1970 when the music really did begin to die along with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Certainly, John F. Kennedy benefits from being frozen in time. We will never know what directions our country would have taken and I'm certainly not smart enough to speculate.  In my life though, November 22, 1963 was the day the music died. Somewhere deep down inside, I knew it.


 

What Came First?

Or maybe I should say, what should come first, FFS or SRS assuming you are like many and can't afford to drain your 401K and savings and head to Thailand?

In a couple of many chance encounters I have had recently on this enormous thing called the internet,  peeps have bemoaned the fact they went through SRS but then in the next sentence said they were booking FFS as soon as they could.

I guess it's just me, but I think I would reverse the process and do he FFS first and do a bit of living as a woman and then consider gender reassignment surgery.  Then again I think too many transgender women consider SRS the end of the gender journey when indeed it's just the beginning.

I have no idea if the transgender woman featured on this Cyrsti's Condo big screen video has gone through the change but she definitely did go through the facial surgery.  One way or another, she does have the benefit of a body which lends itself to the gender change.

I'm no Angel

Look I'm old and human.  Recently it occurred to me I have been guilty of passing along most all of the good times of my transition years and none of the bad ones. I have decided for a moment to change all that. It is time to look back at a few of the times I flat out lied or operated on the "down low" to get out the door as a cross dresser and into the world. Well, actually more than a "few" times, I did it for years and I'm not proud of how I did it.

As cross dressers go back then or now I had it good. My wife was super agreeable to me living one day a week as a woman and it was fine with her for me to get a hotel room and cross dress then hit the world as a woman. Every couple of months or so we would even go out as two women. Well of course I felt if one day was good, wouldn't three be better? The more I tasted of life as a woman, the more I wanted and just didn't have the courage to do the right thing and tell her. I wanted her badly as my wife but not bad enough not to cheat on her with myself. The lines were drawn in the sand. She would accept me as a cross dresser but we would part as friends if I wanted to go farther.

Cheating was tough but far from impossible I found. For many years before her death, my wife worked as a retail store manager. A couple nights a week she closed the store, which meant she wouldn't be home until around midnight.  If by chance I wasn't working a night on the same day, I was planning immediately how I was going to get out of the house, past the neighbors and spend the evening as a woman.  In order to do it I had to make up a story about where I was, what I was doing and have all traces of makeup off my face by the time she got home. All of the sudden, my one day a week out as a woman became three.  I was quickly learning the ropes but paying a very high internal price.

It was excruciatingly tough.  I hate people who I can't trust for whatever reason and here I was at the top of my own list.

I can go on and on about the less than stellar "adventures" I had but this one is as good a place as any to start with.  In the mid 1980's I was opening a chain of restaurants along the Ohio River and ended up living in the Marietta/Parkersburg West Virginia area for awhile.  On my days off when she was working I began to get dressed up and doing the grocery shopping etc. My wife would see the groceries but had no idea of how I was dressed when I bought them.

This was working well and I was even doing a fair job of negotiating society as a woman until, by pure accident one day I ended up walking right by her boss in a parking lot. The problem was he was very familiar with me as a guy.  He didn't flinch a bit and showed no recognition so I thought I dodged a bullet. All was good until about a week later my wife mentioned him talking about this "big redhead" he saw recently in a parking lot.  She knew of course I had a red wig and there was some sort of possibility if he said "a big red headed cross dresser",  the dots would be easy to connect. On that occasion, I was able to talk my way out of it until about a month later.  She got off early one day and we passed each other on the highway heading to our house.

From that point on, she had no problem knowing who the "big redhead" was driving that day and I was in for a week of deserved hell. Yet again I had to decide between a relationship I cherished and my woman within. The proverbial "rock and the hard place." The decision this time involved an agreement to go to counseling. The therapist did a good job.  Bottom line was my "girl" wasn't going away but unless I could control her effect on the marriage, my wife would. I didn't have to hide her away in a closet but then again I couldn't let her have her own way.

I can make excuses and say I wasn't totally sure of what I thought my gender solution should be but I had a pretty good idea and was afraid to face it. I didn't have the courage to follow what I knew was true all the time. I was more female than I dared admit to myself.

This was one of the times of my life when my persistence overcame any common sense I was rumored to have.  I pushed on and achieved success in my work and for the most part concealed who I really was. Calling it torture would be a bit much but severe internal turmoil and tearing would be very accurate. Looking back, I'm sure all the self destructive actions I took were just a way to sink myself and end the madness.

Of course I know I can't go back and reverse any of my lies and sneaking. The only thing I can do is write about them. One of the reasons I am is I'm fairly sure some people think I have led this "charmed" life as a pre transgender cross dresser. Or, for some reason I don't understand those of you who are stuck in the closet.

Obviously, I have been there and did the closet thing.  It's true, once I started to open the door,  the good did out do the bad. To not mention the bad all though would be as wrong as doing it in the first place.

Replacing a lie with silence doesn't make it right.