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2 Mar

Baby, You’re A Firework

Last week – almost a full week ago now, which kind of freaks me out, because, holy doodlebug, how long does it take me to post about this sort of thing these days, seriously? – I did the closing keynote for Blissdom ’12. Well, me and Rufus, and also Brooke Chaffin from Disney Interactive Media Group, although it was supposed to be me and Alisa until she got super sick and her baby got super sick and lo, the difficulties of being a working mother. Anyway, it was complicated, sort of, but we worked it out and the whole thing turned out pretty well, I think.

Except for the part where I tripped coming onto the stage. Which might have been because I was wearing four-inch turquoise suede heels, but still.

These shoes. (Thanks, @kristahouse, for capturing the moment that was not the moment that I tripped.)

Anyway. The story that I told was this: that we are all storytellers. Not just some of us, all of us. And that we are all, in our way, revolutionary storytellers. Epoch-changing storytellers, culture-shifting storytellers. You’ve heard this from me before. I’ve beaten you over your collective heads with it. But I do that because I believe it. This moment in history, the one that so many sneer at – the age of the ‘mommy blogger,’ the age of the ‘ladyblogger,’ the age of relentless storytelling about our children and our homes and our private lives and our private parts and our handbags and our diaper bags and all of that stuff that we previously only talked about over kitchen tables and backyard fences – is a radical moment because it is a cultural first. It is pushing a cultural transition. Women – and mothers especially – have never had a broad-based, widely-accessible, public platform for our stories. (We haven’t. Don’t argue with me. I did my academic research in this field, and I know my stuff.) Now we have that platform. And we are using it. We are lifting the veil on the private sphere and we are telling our stories, our own stories, in our own voices.

And it is epic. We are epic.

And so are our shoes. Well, mine, anyway.

(Here’s the video that I played during the keynote. Baby, you ARE a firework. We are fireWORKS. We are exploding EVERYWHERE.)

(In a good way.)