Nicole’s first birth story can be found here. You should also read Meaghan O’Connell’s, it’s a triumph of the genre.

The last few weeks of pregnancy are pretty bad. Even when you’ve already had a baby, it’s hard to remember that they’re easier to look after while they’re still inside your body, because you have to pee constantly and your back hurts and your feet hurts and you can’t shave anything you used to shave without putting yourself at serious risk of slipping on a pool of your own blood.

As a result, when my midwife offered me a membrane sweep at 39 weeks, I told her to go for it. If you are unfamilar with the concept or execution of a membrane sweep, it’s like a normal pelvic exam but one performed by a drunk teenager with ragged acrylics.

It is a truth universally acknowledged – all right, perhaps not universally, but many people I know happen to agree – that Colin Firth is the quintessential Mr. Darcy, the gold standard against which all other Darcys shall inevitably be judged. However much Mr. Firth may privately wish to leave Mr. Darcy, his sideburns, his horse, and his pond behind him once and for all and move beyond his most beloved role, the brilliance of his performance as Fitzwilliam Darcy is so well-fixed in the minds and hearts of all his fans that he is considered the rightful choice of anyone who has ever let her mind wander into a Regency fantasy or two. And I, dear readers, am no exception.

I have a few celebrity crushes, just like everybody else, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a single one as long-standing or fiercely loyal as my nostalgic attachment to Colin Firth. For some reason, looking at the man still makes me feel like a fourteen-year-old girl – maybe because that’s approximately how old I was the first time I saw the BBC Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and the marvelous Jennifer Ehle. At the time I had already made my way through Mom’s complete box set of Austen novels and commandeered her red “I’d Rather Be Reading Jane Austen” sweatshirt. She and I sat together on the couch in our living room, popcorn within arm’s reach, and watched all five hours of the miniseries straight through. The beautiful production made me want to live in Jane Austen’s world in a way that, up to that point, even her novels had not quite done.

I’ve watched that miniseries more times than I can count. To this day I always catch my breath when Colin Firth utters the line It taught me to hope as I’d scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before. I have seen him in plenty of other roles, and admired him in those roles. But I don’t think you ever forget your childhood literary crushes, and his Darcy was my first literary crush personified. So now that you understand how very few actors would have inspired my brief and impulsive foray into the world of filmmaking, what follows is the true story of my one and only day as a movie extra.

A friend came over with a folk album and said, “You’ll like Judee Sill. Real badass. I think she was a bank robber or something.”

And sure, with an introduction like that it was pretty hard not to at least be intrigued by the country-voiced woman singing earnestly about Jesus and the Astral Plane. In fact, it’s basically impossible to talk about Judee Sill’s music without some mention of her twisted, fascinating, totally audacious life.

She was born in California in 1944 to a hard drinking mother and a father who was an exotic animal importer and amateur herpetologist. In the 1940s this amounted to Jeep trips through the deserts of Mexico, trapping iguanas to sell to Hollywood for dinosaur movies. He’d sometimes take the whole family along. He owned a seedy bar in Oakland, where Judee spent much of her childhood, hiding from drunken gamblers under the pinball machine. It was also where she taught herself to sing, practicing harmonies with the notes of the bar’s piano, her little legs dangling from the bench.

Her father died when she was nine, and her mother married an alcoholic, likely abusive animator that Judee disdained. She spent her home life trying to undermine him, until she broke free as a teenager, fell in with a gang of bandits, married one of them, and began robbing liquor stores at gunpoint. “I always had a big appetite for thrills,” she said later. Conscious of her image, of the idea of being an armed robber, she would practice the act in the mirror with her husband’s pistol. She was tall and skinny, with a mop of ash colored hair. At her first robbery she was so nervous she flubbed her one line, yelling, “This is a fuck up, motherstickers!”

She was caught and sent to reform school, where she served as the church organist, and learned her “gospel licks.” During the annual Christmas talent show, she nearly launched a riot by switching up her material and breaking into “The Prisoner’s Song” as the other inmates cheered.

Why is there not yet such a thing as a lesbian icon? I’m not just talking about lesbians who have become famous — spare me your Melissa Etheridges, your Tracy Chapmans. Nor do I consider any of the zillion indie female vocalists who are beloved within the lesbian community to be candidates for iconic status—we all went through our Ani DiFranco phases, and the less said on that score the better. No, I’m talking about big, loud, fabulous mainstream performers who embody a lesbian aesthetic in the same way that Judy Garland or Madonna do for so many of our gay male brethren. Shouldn’t we have that? We deserve to have that! So, in the interest of getting the ball rolling, I hereby nominate Michael Lee Aday, aka Meat Loaf, to the position of number one (butch) lesbian icon.