Sucker for Love

Listen to the essay and show review here

One of my all time favorite movies is While You Were Sleeping starring the incomparable Sandra Bullock. I love watching her in that film, it’s so satisfying. The film is a comedy of errors and as Lucy (played by Bullock) gets more and more entangled with the Gallagher family the audience also roots for her to somehow make it out of her lies by omission unscathed. There is a happy ending, so it’s not totally Shakesperean but the elements of the comedy and romance move the story across it’s one hour and forty-three minute run time.

At the ChicFinn, we watch this movie at least once every winter holiday season. Sometime between the serving of a turkey, and the take down of our yule tree, we screen While You Were Sleeping with a huge bowl of popcorn for me, and a small, reasonably sized portion for Vaimo. I’ve made this a tradition in our household at this time because I firmly believe this film is an underrated Christmas/Winter Holiday film. I instituted the tradition of non-traditional Christmas movie viewing eleven years ago with this film. And I can confidently say it’s the movie Vaimo has seen more than any other movie in her entire life because of my efforts. A close second would be Die Hard which we started adding into the mix in the winter of 2020, which, as we all recall had its own flavor and timbre in light of all the uncertainties we were collectively wading through from the spaces of our individual homes if we were so lucky.

I love Lucy’s mid-90s midwest fashion, the way Chicago plays a major role in the film as another character, and now, of course, the way that I get so excited when it’s time for the annual screening of the film with Vaimo. The story of Lucy’s happy ending is nice, but the warmth I feel when Vaimo agrees to watch this film again, fills me with more joy. That she knows the characters names, and has committed the plot to her memory delights me. That it’s our family tradition, one of countless tiny things that adds up over time, gives me a sense that life is worth living, especially with someone I genuinely love spending time with.
In May of 2013, Vaimo and I were invited by our State Senator to join him in the chambers when the Minnesota legislature voted to approve a same-sex marriage bill. While I wasn’t able to attend since I was teaching that day, I can’t recall if Vaimo was in the building at the time. We later met up to celebrate on the lawn in front of the Capitol Building to mark the momentous occasion. This legislative victory was unique at the time, our memories can be so short, but as a reminder when Vaimo and I were granted the right to join our lives together in a state-sanctioned manner, it was not the case on a federal level. So while we lived in a border community straddling Minnesota and North Dakota, prior to 2015 when we crossed the Red River our marriage no longer counted in the eyes of our neighboring state.

When marriages were officially legal in Minnesota on August 1, 2013, Vaimo and I celebrated with countless other couples who chose to wed at Minneapolis City Hall beginning at midnight. The first couple included friends, colleagues and fellow anti-homelessness advocates of Vaimo’s whose sweet union served as a kick-off for weddings taking place on a schedule of 20 minute increments. There was a space nearby for a collective reception where couples waited for their time on the schedule. Witnesses, guests, betrothed, and newly wedded came and went from the city hall chapel back to the reception area to enjoy snacks, cake and dancing. Nerves and tears and jitters and joy and relief and laughter and hugs and looks and shouts… so many emotions marked a new beginning of time when some queer folks who wanted a rom-com happy ending that resulted in wedding bells got it. Many of us witnessed unions unaware of the way in which those loves came to be here in the line up of weddings, but beneficiaries of the celebration none-the-less. One of my favorite parts of the evening was happening upon a wedding of friends I’d known for ten years, and getting to share in their sweet vows in city hall, committing to each other again and again. “Love wins!” we tearily exclaimed upon the proclamation of their union being declared state-sanctioned by their officiant.

In November of 2012 the voters of Minnesota, five months into my very new relationship with my Sweet (not yet having earned her title Vaimo), had a choice on the ballot on whether to support or oppose two constitutional amendments. One was related to instituting a voter ID law, and one related to the constitutional banning of same-sex marriage. The wheels of advocacy started rolling and folks began organizing to work to secure victories on these two fronts. For the ChicFinn household victory would have been no voter ID requirement, and no constitutional ban on gay marriage. Spoiler alert… both measures failed. The night before election day, my Sweet reached out to her conservative Christian family urging those who could not vote no on the gay marriage amendment to simply abstain from voting. She shared why it was important to her, and what it would mean to her as a member of her family of origin recognizing that her request would be difficult for them. One of her sisters, deeply offended, said she was going to recruit three friends who weren’t even voting to go to the polls to vote yes for the Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage from her home in Arizona. The charming Gallagher clan Lucy fell into of the While You Were Sleeping world, she was not. 51.9 percent of Minnesota voters chose to support their queer neighbors the right to marry in our state. Vaimo and I choose to live in a place that overwhelmingly voted to support the constitutional banning of our marriage.


The true love story magic of While You Were Sleeping is about the entire family falling in love with Lucy. She not only finds a loving, romantic relationship, but she gains a familial love she was lacking. I spend a lot of time wondering if this rom-com could work with queer folks as center of the romantic tale. It’s difficult to imagine for me, that the fantasy of so-called traditional nuclear heterosexual family could work if the daughter was rescued off the tracks by Lucy and her sister fell in love with her as they waited for the other sister to come out of a coma. Or perhaps, a trans sibling is in the mix. It’s difficult to imagine a Sal-like character, the family friend, encouraging the coma-recovering sister to marry Lucy. It’s difficult to imagine a daughter being called up to continue the father’s family estate selling business. It’s difficult for me to imagine because if I had found Vaimo passed out on the tracks of the CTA Ell, this would not have been the energy meeting me from my Vaimo’s family at the hospital. I do feel grateful to have gained two sisters through our union though. The merging of any two families through marriage is messy, though queerness brings its own unique intricacies to navigate. My family showed up for me to my wedding to Vaimo on the side of a mine dump on October 5, 2013 - my soul mate BFF married us, my hermanitas stood by us, and my queer Hermana amiga who I’ve been lucky to have in my life as friend and mentor since 18 was with me. Dear friends who became family when I started teaching in Moorhead, loves who sweat together and celebrate victories together joined dear ones of Vaimo’s who became my new family as we exchanged vows on the cold October, misty day. Neither sets of invited parents were in attendance.

Perhaps in ten more years’ time I will regale you with the tales of the three reception fundraisers we held across the state. Or of what happened on the partybus that transported us from The Wellstone Center in St. Paul to the Iron Range with our wedding party. Or, of the glee our family collectively shared as we jumped into the lake after our family sauna; freezing water shocking us to our core. These too are happy endings for a sucker for love. But today, I simply want to bask in the deliciousness of art, on how art is embedded in all that we do. On how art complexifies and beautifies. From the clothes we put onto our body, to the design of vessels holding our celebratory tequila shots, to the words in the form of poetry that make meaning of our lives, to the artful positioning of a camera’s lens and the skills necessary to edit the image. The beauty of all the parts of a life well loved. The ways that happy endings can only come through a series of moments we alone will live. In late September, Vaimo and I went to some of our favorite places with one of my former students, Ashley Wegh, who is an amazing photographer. She spent the day with us, capturing our love professionally, as a celebration of ten years of married life together. We spent the day together and on the four hour drive back to Otter Tail County from the Iron Range read her the poems we had commissioned for our wedding by the Duluth Poet Laureate Sheila Packa. We commissioned one poem for the purpose of calling in compassion and love for those unable to attend. Sheila threw in an extra one which she published in one of her recent collections. I’ll share it here for you to enjoy, as a plea to request your poet friends write for your special occasions. Art is my happy ending it turns out, maybe yours too?

A Wedding Blessing
      for Liz and Kandace
By Sheila Packa

I meet you here
on traces of the deep red ore
beneath our feet
where much has been taken away—
old growth and mineral rights.
I meet you here on the Iron Range
where immigrants arrived
speaking other languages
—under the sky
they lifted the corner stones into place
from Finland, Albuquerque, the desert,
from east and west.
Where bears walk and ores whisper,
I meet you here among the pines
and thousand lakes
where I swam and drifted as a child.
In the magnetic North—
we join our lives and work.
Like our ancestors,
we are at the edge of the wild where mist rises
and eagles fly
over the Laurentian Divide
that has given us the rivers’ gifts—
to change—to find a new direction—
flowing toward the ocean that calls us home.


What I’m Seeing 

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche at Theater B in Moorhead, MN

When I received the mailer featuring the advertisements of all of this season’s theatrical offerings of Theater B in Moorhead, MN and opened to the page advertising 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche I showed it to Vaimo and said, “We have to go right?” And she agreed. It’s not often I see a show with “lesbian” in the title and I was somewhat heartened by the possibility of the magic of theater bringing folks together for a spectacle centering lesbians. The show, written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood is billed as a satirical exploration of an underground sisterly society of “widows” attempting to wait out communist threats of the 1950s at their annual quiche judging meeting. Five women are on stage and the quiche serves as a bad metaphor for lesbian separatist sentiment during the one hour run of show. Now, dear reader (listener) I did conduct a little bit of research on the show, primarily looking into who wrote it, and I am not of the opinion that one can never write about a group of people different from oneself. But I am of the opinion that if one is going to choose to do that they should proceed with respect instead of creating an entire show filled with the worst steroetypes of the “Other” in order to claim it’s satirical. The dialogue was not funny, the lesbians were simultaneously mean, cultish, and ditzy and sex-crazed, and the complete and utter lack of contextualization or historical knowledge of lesbian political groups was apparent with the writers’ choice of calling the lesbian club the Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein. While I’d love to write the exposition about what I find so troubling about these two being callously put together in the name of the chapter title, that would be an entire thesis. Perhaps the play authors though similarly, given that not a single lick of information about why the club chose these two women is uttered by anyone on the stage. Instead of actually calling attention to lesbian organizers, thinkers, and feminists of the 1950s doing important and intersectional work [LINK, the two writers of the show chose instead a lazy anachronistic pairing serving only as backdrop to the deification of a fake saint of their community pictured as a butch lesbian wielding an ax who happened upon some wild chickens and started a community. If the work was written in Anthony or even Stein’s times perhaps I could find the “satire” radical, but alas, penned in 2012 the authors had more than enough resources to know better and to do better. Watching a character eat out a quiche on stage was not nearly as harmful as the uplifting of Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist ideas in dialogue. The empowerment of characters yelling “I’m a lesbian” from the stage did not outweigh the actual explosion of one character caught outside the bunker, her viscera represented as a gooey egg like substance traumatizing those caught inside the bunker (including the audience) with no warning about sound or theatrical effects mimicking the dropping of bombs. Feel free to call me a lesbian feminist killjoy, but I can’t in good faith support the laughter of men echoing in my ears throughout the hour of my life never to return. Theater has the power and possibility to change hearts and minds. This isn’t it.

I really struggled with including this review in my newsletter because there is enough pain in the world, I want to highlight things that truly bring me joy. However, I also recognize that featuring artistic happenings in the region is part of my goals for this year. The show has three more performances next weekend for you to see for yourself if you feel so inclined. There is also power and possibility in critique, and perhaps the show will encourage you to learn from lesbian scholars instead. 

Creative Ritual

Travel has slowed and I spent the last two weeks close to home for the first time in a long while. As such, deep work on house projects are underway including a painting of a room! One of my favorite activities! I'm including it here in my list of creative work because painting anything fills me with joy and teaches me something about paint. Reminding you all that if you happen to be in the Chicago area (St. Charles, IL to be exact) I have a painting in a group show -- Not Your Mother’s Quilt up through November 15 at the Kavanagh Gallery located in the Fine Line Creative Arts Center. I’m still mostly avoiding working on finishing in-progress paintings but I started a new painting and textile project and am looking for an installation space for it, so if you want a time-based, indefinite project that you have space to house for someone raging about student loan debt let me know! As always I've got paintings for sale in the shop. The candy portraits would me a great gift for yourself or someone else who is trying not to eat all the Halloween candies but is a die hard candy lover none-the-less.

Questions to ponder

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 
-KCF

The Art of KCF Newsletter is a fiscal year 2023 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.