VERY OLD NEWS

FEAR OF BLOGGING:
That's why it's taken me four (4) months to make my first report in this space, but hey! Here I sit at 8A.M., typing this in with trembling hands, and so far my computer hasn't blown up.
Okay, rewind to last May, which is when I flew to New York for the opening of She Draws Comics at MoCCA (The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) located in fashionable SoHo and found on the internet at http:www.moccany.org
It was amazing to be in a room with all that art by women (I only curated the first half, women cartoonists of the early 20th century, so the contemporary art was all new to me) and all those women cartoonists, including the three oldest living women cartoonists, Hilda Terry, Valerie Barclay, and Lily Renee. If you haven't gotten to the exhibit yet, you have until November, and meanwhile, you can find a good writeup by Beverly Wittenstein at www.womensnews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2857
A short piece about the show will be in the calendar section of MS Magazine's Fall issue.
Aside from the MoCCA show, the high point of my trip to The Apple was meeting Lily Renee, who was the star woman cartoonist for comicbook publishers Fiction House during the 1940s. During the war, when so many men were in the military, women filled their jobs, and it was the same in comics -- there were more women working in comics than ever before, and of all the comics publishers, Fiction House had the most women working for them. But Lily was the best, the only woman who drew covers for them. I found her to be a gracious, elegant and still beautiful woman, living in the West 80s in an apartment filled with ojects d'art. (That's Lily to the right, below the hula girls) My interview with her, along with 36 pages of her gorgeous comics, will appear in the Comics Journal soon -- look for it. The adventures of the intrepid teenage Lily, escaping the Nazis in occupied Vienna, finding herself alone in England and accused of being an enemy alien, are the stuff of thrillers, but they really happened!
After New York, I returned home to San Francisco for exactly one day before flying off to Wiscon, the world's only feminist science fiction convention, in (You guessed it!) Madison, Wisconsin. Three days of women and feminist men, including some of my favorite writers (I keps running into Carol Emshwiller in the halls but was too chicken to get all fannish and tell her how much I loved her writing) -- and nary a kid in a Spiderman suit -- was heaven. I presented a paper on Wonder Woman at Wiscon, that is unlike anything you'll be reading in any of the D.C.-snactioed books on the amazon princess. Check it out at http://girl-wonder.org/papers/robbins.html The high point of that experience was getting together with Katherine MacLean again. I had actually been room mates with Katherine at the last Wiscon I attended, and was happy as a clam to become her friend. She is the oldest woman science fiction writer alive (And is more energetic than I am -- when we were roomates she kept waking me up at 7 A.M. to go for a swim) and was one of the very first women to write science fiction, having sold her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction in 1949. So I'm writing about Katie, too (do you see a pattern here?) -- in the Women's Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Science Fiction, due out in 07.
Then I came home and did the hula. No, really, I take lessons in hula and tap, and my dance teacher, who also teaches tons of other dance classes around the San Francisco Bay Area, gets us all together for public performances twice a year, in really classy theaters. So we danced at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason (A great venue and nothing to sneeze at) in June, and here I am at the top of the page as a hula girl, in a cellophane skirt. Yes, I'm the redhead, and yes, everyone in the class is Asian, except for me.
Hey, this wasn't so bad! I may actually return soon, with more recent news. Stay tuned!