Some Misplaced Joan of Arc

In a way, Marjorie Light’s life is a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s which is not such a far-fetched comparison once you get to know her.

Here are the particulars on Marjorie: She is 15 and Filipino and has braces and a great smile and her own zine and a Web site. She just finished the 10th grade and is an honors student in Eagle Rock, the town she lives in. Her best friends--Nadia, Danielle and Nick--all attend Eagle Rock High School with her, and they all agree that Marjorie can be brassy and opinionated and, at times, argumentative, making her a sometimes-blunt friend, but that they like her a lot anyway. Together, they form a clique. They are all funny kids. Marjorie is the clique’s master of the ironic comeback, followed by a deadpan stare and then a laugh that crumbles her face into a hilarious mess.

As it happens, the WB network show is one of the few things she likes on television. If Marjorie were a network programmer, her station would run “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” music videos, documentaries like they have on the Independent Film Channel, and nothing else. She is an admirer of Buffy as a role model, but she is also an admirer of Patti Smith, Frida Kahlo and Jane Austen. This means that, at 15, she is already a self-described feminist. It also means that she is not a huge fan of the actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays Buffy on TV, and who has been quoted as saying that “feminist” makes “you think of women that don’t shave their legs.”

Buffy’s legs have gained supreme importance in this country to untold thousands of 15-year-old girls since they first appeared two years ago. As a team, those legs have defended Buffy from all sorts of vampires and demons and werewolves who wanted to hurt her in terrible ways. Some of those vampires started out as pretty cute guys, Saturday-night dating material. This, as any 15-year-old girl can tell you, is the cultural subtext of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and their own lives as well--the emotional battlefield of relationships girls often find themselves facing at about 15. “She grew up too fast, her boyfriend’s a vampire, and her parents have had problems from an early age,” Marjorie was explaining not long ago. “The show stands in for girls’ lives. Inside boys that you can’t trust there’s a vampire waiting to come out. And when you conquer the vampire, that’s like conquering the problems in your life.”

Marjorie’s friends play different roles in her life. She calls Danielle her Voice of Reason because Danielle reminds her who she really is. She is the kind of friend who counsels you from doing things you might regret horribly. Nick is her ambassador from boyland. He is handsome, with black curly hair and a beaming personality. He helps her understand what’s in boys’ minds when they get around girls. Nadia is Marjorie’s wild friend. She credits herself with having introduced Marjorie to thrift shops and the Cure--two important elements in this teenage girl’s life. Together they go to parties and thrift shops and bake cakes and come home from Pic ‘N’ Save with Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese to eat, and then dress up with Nadia as a model and Marjorie as Frida Kahlo and take pictures. They go bowling together if it’s rockabilly night at the All Star Lanes and they both have the $12 entrance fee. Sometimes for fun they dress up really weird and walk around Eagle Rock’s sidewalks inviting stares.

In other words, they live like 15-year-old American girls, a station in life that is also known for its bulimia, anorexia, self-mutilation, depression, pregnancy and suicide. When you spend enough time around Marjorie and her friends, you soon comprehend what a wonderful and terrible time 15 is for girls. Still children, they are pressured by magazines, music videos, advertisements, television, movies and even peers to assume roles of new, culturally scripted selves. Ironically, because these identities are often passive, they are robbed of a daring individualism that suited them as children. Their choices are few. They can abandon the girl they have been, or they can establish two selves, public and private identities whose clashes can lead to the worst emotional straits. The brightest and most sensitive of adolescent girls may pick up on American culture’s ambivalence over women’s social identities. But that knowledge can also be an overwhelming burden.

Some boys who read Marjorie’s zine--it is called “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” and costs $1 plus two stamps--mistake her as a national banner for teen feminism. Likely they are thinking of articles such as “The World’s Guide to Being a Girl,” which reads: “Be sexy, but don’t be a slut. Stand up for yourself, but don’t be a bitch. Be thin, but don’t have an eating disorder. Play sports, but don’t be aggressive or competitive. Be smart, but not a nerd. Believe in yourself, but don’t be conceited. Speak up, but don’t be too loud or have a big mouth. Be original, but not weird. These are some of the stupid standards people expect from girls and women.”

“Guys are scared of her because she’s tough and intelligent and because of the way she holds herself,” Nadia will say when she thinks of that passage. But Marjorie is also as mercurial and confused and unnerved by the wrong boys and self-conscious and emotionally tentative as any 15-year-old-girl growing up in America.

Like other adolescent girls suddenly aware of the cultural territory mapped out for them at the end of the 1990s, Marjorie often feels that she has been split in two. She is supposed to be confident and secure but there are all these forces aligned against her to make her feel vulnerable and insecure. This is also Buffy’s problem. “Buffy never really wanted to be a slayer,” Marjorie was saying the other day. “Sometimes she just wants to be a normal teenager. She was more popular before she became a slayer. So now she really only has a small group of friends who all accept her for what she is. But even though she would rather not be a slayer sometimes, its still her duty and her responsibility to herself.”

*

When Marjorie was 5 years old, she wanted to grow up to be a perfume-maker, a housewife, a nurse, a queen, an actress, a model and a writer. Now that she is 15, she wants to be a punk rock goddess, a zinester, a journalist, a feminist writer, a women’s/ animal /gay/ pro-choice/ earth activist, a teacher, a stage actor, a zoo employee, an artist, a drum/ guitar/ bass/ piano /violin player, a songwriter and a poet. You can read about these career choices in “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” #2.

*

If you were to come upon Marjorie’s zine 100 years from today, it might read like the epic diary kept by a 19th century explorer of the African continent, if only because it charts the obscure route of a teenager navigating the tangled landscape where her internal life collides with her family, her school, her friends, boys, pop culture and the world. “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” is full of high drama and danger and occasional comic relief and even pathos, yet, in fact, it is written in Eagle Rock, a town known for its many fast-food outlets, famous lawns, abundant aviary life and little else. Marjorie lives behind a well-tended garden on a quiet street, inside a white two-story house with her older sister, Lian, her younger brother, Chuckie, her mother, Shatto, her father, Charlie, and her mother’s parents, Antonio and Cunigunda. Because Charlie Light is a contractor of considerable skill, the house has a fresh, remodeled look. Marjorie’s room has a dissembled look: Everything is on the floor. When someone first walks in, they think, “How did this room fit into this house?”

You can learn a lot about Marjorie from piecing together articles in the three issues of “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” that have been published so far. From an afternoon’s reading you could guess that her favorite dinner would consist of Kozy Shack rice pudding, Go Gurt, Velveeta cheese shells, enchiladas, chocolate mocha milkshakes, cake of any kind, Tang and champorado, a sweet and sticky Filipino rice dish with chocolate sauce. You could find out that she is fond of wearing pink gingham shirts and green satin shifts and hair snoods and pleated wool skirts and anything that has music lyrics scrawled in glow-in-the-dark paint on it. You could learn that a good day out for Marjorie would start at the thrift store, then move on to anywhere that she feels out of place but still has a good time at, avoiding all malls because “they represent superficiality and everything that shouldn’t matter to people,” and would include a stop at a Bikini Kill/Sleater-Kinney/Ani DiFranco concert, and finally end up with swing dancing somewhere all night. And you could discover that she is sometimes guilty of acting dumb or weak to get what she wants, that she feels like a stranger in her own home, that she believes adolescence is designed to conform individuals to a norm, that she worries she is only rebelling against society in her head, that she wonders if her personality is not unique at all but only a collection of social cliches and stolen ideas, that she feels like a blob of jealousy and disgust sometimes, and that the mass media are killing the creativity and closing the minds of students she sees every day at school. You might conclude that, as a teenager, Marjorie is of the world and rejecting it at the same time.

There are two competing theories of how “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” came into existence. The first concerns a boyfriend from hell Marjorie had in the eighth grade. The more interesting theory centers on the Internet, which was connected to the Light household in the fall of 1997, and which introduced Marjorie to a virtual world of other girls’ manifestos, zines, diaries, music, poetry and Web sites, a world completely unknown to her up to that time. The cinematic treatment of Marjorie’s discovery would have her dropping accidentally into a secret passageway to find a hidden underground. “This is like a girl revolution,” Marjorie remembers thinking at the time. Girls were writing about their inner lives in ways you couldn’t find on television or in the movies or magazines; in fact, they were writing about the shabby treatment their inner lives were receiving from television, movies and magazines. She discovered Riot Grrrls, a broad-based term for girls starting their own bands and zines and salons. She wanted to start her own zine and attend salons and Riot Grrrl concerts and conventions, but she felt her friends and family wouldn’t understand. In ways, this proved true. The first time Marjorie told her mother that she was going to a Riot Grrrl meeting, Shatto warned, “If they ask for money, you’ll know they’re crooks.”

Marjorie has since stepped into her enthusiasms. Her Web site--its address is https://www.angelfire.com/sk/misplaced--shows off diary entries, zine articles and links to other zines she thinks are cool. She has pulled her friends along with her. Even Charlie Light started calculating 150,000 zines times one dollar in his head, and then went out and bought his daughter a Xerox machine, to which Marjorie replied, “Thanks, Dad, but it’s about expressing myself, not making money.” Nadia, Danielle and Nick all make guest appearances in “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc.” They write of their parents and all the ways 15 can make a teenager feel trapped. Generally, there is a trapped tone in their writing. Marjorie’s writing is expansive. It has the sound of someone who is constantly stretching out her silhouette as far as the world will allow. Reading her articles, you feel as if you’re in the presence of a kid who is trying on a dozen new ideas a day, and then casting 11 of them away. She treats the world like her thrift shop. You could call this postmodernism or the Age of Madonna or the breakdown of identity in a world of simulacra, but, really, it’s just adolescence. In five years, Marjorie will likely not suffer the doubts and apprehension the world fills her with today, but neither will she enjoy the freedom of skimming through them so quickly. In that way, “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” reads like the diary of an explorer who found a wild place, just before a large city was built atop it.

*

In “Parties, Filipino Style,” Marjorie tallies 30 essential ingredients needed to throw a family Filipino party, a list that includes “one or two mah-jongg tables”; “an aunt wearing cheap designer knockoff clothes and feeling sexy”; “a grandma who keeps telling you Kain! Kain! (Eat! Eat!)”; “a gross purple ube cake”; “at least one token white person who pretends to like the food”; “a lot of people who ask other people questions about you instead of asking you, mostly when you’re right in front of them”; “and one weird person (me).” Marjorie’s family, which is extensive--her father is one of nine siblings--enjoys throwing parties. In fact, it is generally agreed that somewhere in Los Angeles one of Marjorie’s relatives is throwing a party every weekend of the year, except for the month of January, when they all knock off to rest. The parties are known for their considerable size; if you invite one relative, goes the rule, you invite them all. “It’s a package deal,” says Shatto.

At Uncle Richard’s party, everything on the list was happening at once. A grandma was worrying over the purple ube cake. Aunts looking sexy in designer knockoffs were playing mah-jongg. In fact, every one of the 50 or so relatives was playing a game of some kind. If it wasn’t mah-jongg, it was pool, or Ping-Pong, or basketball, or smacking plastic Easter eggs with golf clubs, and if you weren’t doing that, you were inside singing karaoke. Charlie Light is famous for his karaoke stylings. If you walk into the right bar in downtown L.A. and ask for Frank Sinatra, you will immediately be shown to Charlie Light’s table. At Uncle Richard’s bash he worked impressively through the Northeast corridor with “My Kind of Town” and “Chicago.” Marjorie, after sitting through a series of relatives asking other relatives questions about her, was outside on a swing, quietly slurping blueberry Go Gurt.

Eagle Rock has a large Filipino community. Estimates run as high as 25% of the population, though no one in the community can tell you why Filipinos started settling there in such large numbers in the early 1980s. Eagle Rock High School is filled with Filipino teenagers. Marjorie says a traditional Filipina girl is supposed to play Mozart and “Happy Birthday” on the piano, act innocent and pretty, and that the whole idea makes her cringe. There is actually an ideal Filipina woman, named Maria Clara, from a folk tale that goes back to the Spaniards’ arrival in the Philippines. “Maria Clara,” says Shatto, “is a virgin, attractive, wears no makeup, wears the national dress, and knows how to set a beer glass down in front of her husband.” Shatto says she was expected to be Maria Clara when she was 15, but she wondered if “being educated was part of Maria Clara.” She says she doesn’t want Marjorie to be a Maria Clara, but, on the other hand, she doesn’t want her to end up like her older daughter, Lian, either, “cussing and playing drums all the time.”

Marjorie is building an American self. She wants to abandon Filipino traditions like parties every weekend and no sleep-overs at your girlfriends’ houses. “I am sorry,” Shatto will protest. “This is not my culture--we do not have sleep-overs.” The malleability of Marjorie and her friends’ cultural identities is fluid and amazing. For instance, though Nick is by most definitions white, everyone in the clique will say about him, “Oh, Nick, well, he wants to be, like, a white boy,” as if Nick was picking out an outfit in a catalogue, a choice that might lead a stranger to mistakenly remark, “Well, you’re already wearing it, aren’t you?” There are Filipinos who are black at Eagle Rock High School, and Latinos who are white. Marjorie has decided she is simply Marjorie, which is to say more white than Filipina. “I can’t speak Tagalog,” she says. “I feel a little alienated when I’m around other Filipino kids my age, and I have mostly white friends. I guess I relate to them more because they have no defined culture.” This thinking--the ease of operating within the undefined space immigrant children discover in America’s media culture--is on par with Marjorie’s trying on ideas and identities like thrift store merchandise. It can lead to a blurry image that sometimes troubles others. Once, when a boy told her, “You would look good if you didn’t dress like that,” Marjorie replied, “You would look good if you didn’t have a fat head.”

*

These are some people who inspire Marjorie: She admires the musician PJ Harvey because she’s sexy and strong at the same time; she admires Hannah Hoch, the dada artist, because “her collages made fun of what a woman was expected to be and because all her male artist friends were slackers and she was the only one who had a real job”; she admires Linda Hamilton because she kicked ass in “Terminator 2”; she admires Sigourney Weaver for the same reason in “Alien 3,” “even if it was only because she was an alien”; she admires Carla Bozulich of the band the Geraldine Fibbers because she has a nice voice and can play her instrument well; she admires would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanis because “even though she was crazy, she had some really witty ideas in her S.C.U.M. Manifesto”; she admires Lauryn Hill for all the obvious reasons; and she admires the writer Francesca Lia Block, whose first sentence in the novel “Weetzie Bat” reads, “The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood.”

*

Tthe other day, Marjorie and Danielle were sitting in the back room of their journalism class, working up the layout of the Eagle Scream’s opinion page, which they are co-editors for and, at that moment, in total disagreement over.

“See, I told you you’d make it sucky,” Marjorie growled at Danielle about the page’s confused-haystack layout.

“You made it sucky!” Danielle protested back.

It was ever thus in newsrooms. All around Marjorie and Danielle, debates were flying among the paper’s other editors over the merits of the new “Star Wars” movie and the WB network. (They were both sucky and non-sucky.) The Scream’s newsroom is a narrow space with a sink and a long counter on which a half-dozen computers are situated. Danielle, who was running for junior class officer that week, was trying to fix the newsroom’s radio by hitting it with a giant dictionary. She had also surreptitiously taped a promotion of herself to Marjorie’s butt.

“I hate this radio,” said Danielle, bringing the dictionary down on it.

“I feel like listening to Blondie,” Marjorie said absently to her computer. She was absorbed in the editing of her article advocating the banning of all guns. The working title on the screen was “Guns Suck.” Other articles slated for the opinion page that week included working titles like “Kosovo--No One Cares,” “Death Penalty Bad” and “Free Speech on Internet Out of Control.” Danielle found a Depeche Mode song on the radio and began dancing around Marjorie like a robot coming undone.

“When did that song come out?” Marjorie complained. “In the 1950s?”

Marjorie’s earliest memories are of dancing in her living room to Madonna videos when she was 3 years old. By the time she was 5, about the same year Madonna’s popularity peaked, she was already over the singer. For an adult, it’s almost scary hanging around Marjorie and her friends when you weigh how briefly their lives stretch back with the fact that they are almost adults.

Here is a short list of things that happened before Marjorie was born: MTV went on the air; Apple sold its first personal computer; Ronald Reagan finished his first presidential term; the Sex Pistols disbanded five years earlier; “Saturday Night Live” was almost a decade into its run; John Lennon was killed; the last of the first three “Star Wars” movies was released. Critics who left grad school a decade before Marjorie was born generally agree that the successes of MTV and “Star Wars” helped launch the most massive marketing aimed at adolescents in the history of the world.

Hollywood has since built a bubble of entertainment around teenagers, and Marjorie’s generation is the first to be brought up within the bubble. They are overwhelmed with competing meaningless information. It’s not too startling to meet 15-year-olds at Marjorie’s high school who have never heard of Charles Manson or the Grateful Dead or “Apocalypse Now.” It has also become alarmingly common to find students in Marjorie’s class who think the Vietnam War was fought on American soil, who believe that slavery as an institution lasted well into the 1960s in this country, and who could not tell you for a dollar who won the American Revolution. This is not necessarily because of the teaching at Eagle Rock High School; it’s the opacity of the bubble.

Danielle was busy layering green Kiwi Fruit Balm on her lips.

“Let me have some of that crap,” demanded Marjorie.

“OK, but it smells like crap,” warned Danielle.

“The best one is Cool Mint,” Marjorie advised sagely. Her voice often sounds blurry and low, like you are reaching her long distance from the bottom of a dream. But now she took on a tenor-bellow spiked with sarcasm. “See,” she smiled. “Boys like your lips shiny when they kiss you.”

A Duran Duran song came on the radio.

“This song was recorded the year I was born,” said Danielle, jumping up. Nadia walked in. “I call it ‘Nadia,’ ” said Nadia to explain her outfit, which looked like one of Lorraine Bracco’s in “GoodFellas.” Nadia and Danielle commenced jumping around to the Duran Duran song like robots who had transformed into slinky go-go dancers.

“You’re making me claustrophobic!” Marjorie yelled at the two girls, and then, to another editor who had just stolen her chair as a joke, “You’re testing my limits, buddy boy.”

Holly Campbell, the journalism teacher, walked in and said, “If you call Mr. Kibler snookums, he’ll say yes to anything,” then turned around and walked out.

“More useless information,” said Nadia, who was now looking for a disco station on the radio. A debate broke out over the merits of the upcoming student elections. It was generally agreed they were sucky. Nadia soon found a Spanish radio station.

“Let me translate, let me translate,” yelled Danielle. “Love . . . .”

“Turn it,” said Marjorie.

It was now lunch, and Danielle had to leave for a basketball meeting. A debate over playing sports versus being lazy broke out, which turned into a debate over KROQ versus any other radio station, which led to a debate over boyfriends. “I don’t feel like hanging out with my boyfriend,” said Marjorie. The conversation turned to summer school, and Danielle drifted away for basketball. After a while, it grew quiet.

Marjorie looked out the window. “Right about now Jason is starting to look for me,” she said to no one in particular.

*

Jason is Marjorie’s boyfriend. He is tall with voluminous hair and the rubbery good looks and excitable personality of a cartoon character if a cartoon character were the most popular boy in the 12th grade. He has been the leading male in all school theater productions this year. Some people call him Archie because he actually resembles the teenager in the comic books. He pursued Marjorie for weeks before she finally said, “Yes, I’ll go out with you on Friday night.” Marjorie’s friends think that because Jason is so popular, and that he could have almost any girl he wanted, he set his eyes on Marjorie because--even at two years his junior--she was the only challenge on the horizon. Marjorie, who eventually agreed to go steady with him, says simply, “I’d made all these assumptions that he was a superficial idiot, and he’s not.”

In conversation, Marjorie can opine about feminist classics like “The Feminine Mystique” and “The Beauty Myth.” If you spent enough time with other girls in her grade--who, almost as a rule, don’t read books--and then struck up a talk with her, the first thought in your mind would be, “Whoa, who’s this girl?” Nadia remembers her as a “girly-girl” in the eighth grade who “wore T-shirts, cute short shorts and tube socks you pull up.” But Marjorie claims to have been a feminist since grade school.

She links her self-awareness to around the first time she saw the Disney movie “Ladybugs,” about an all-girl soccer team. Feminism informs her self-confidence (“Boys know not to mess with me or I’ll humiliate them in front of everyone or something”) and her almost-dialectical writing style (“Feminism means believing in yourself regardless of your gender”). Regular readers of “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc,” taken from lyrics in the Patti Smith song “Kimberly,” have followed her articles on feminine individualism, the act of writing as a girl’s defense against the world, the seduction of acting weak and passive, the dangers of toxic shock syndrome, the terrible power that fashion magazines have over girls’ body images, and the social shaming teenage girls suffer during menstruation. (“Endometrium, menarche, discharge . . . these words are music to my ear.”) The zine has the informed, rollicking, scattershot, proactive tone of the best alternative press as it existed 20 years ago. It also has some really cool Trader Joe’s recommendations.

But any 15-year-old feminist knows there is a difference between pedagogy and praxis. Marjorie thinks that her mother has let her true self be buried in her relationship with her husband, and that neither of her parents are as happy as they appear to be. But her relationship with Jason has challenged Marjorie. They share CDs and go to parties and art shows like many other L.A. couples. Yet when Marjorie hangs out with Jason and his friends at lunch, she is generally quiet and subdued while they are loud and boisterous. And when she accompanied Jason as his date to this year’s prom, Marjorie spent much of the evening sitting alone and looking solemn, while Jason and his friends swaggered from table to table like a Rat Pack.

“Feminism is a matter of survival,” Marjorie has written. “If you act weak, people will walk all over you.” Writing is a girl’s self-defense against the world. The world, however, is old and strong--especially in examples like relationships. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marjorie displays incredible strengths that can be quickly disarmed in the presence of certain boys, making her relationship with Jason a mixed gift. “I’m more self-conscious when I’m around Jason and his friends,” says Marjorie. “I don’t really say much and he sort of ignores me. That’s annoying. But when we’re alone, it’s OK.” That contrast, of a brash self-confidence undercut by a world that still celebrates weak images of women, must inform who she will be as a woman. In that way, “Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” is the blueprint of an adult in process.

*

Everyone in the clique agrees that the group will not survive after high school. Already there is a consensus that the clique was strongest in the ninth grade. Its members are following different callings--Marjorie, writing; Nadia, acting; Danielle, grad school; Nick, singing or ice hockey or something. But there is also a general acceptance of the clique’s impending breakup, even a self-awareness that the seeds of its dissolution exist. As Nadia says, “I’m already beginning to accept the fact we won’t be friends after high school. Just look at Marjorie’s and my CD collections. The only two we share are No Doubt and Bjork.”

*

“Some Misplaced Joan of Arc” is changing, too. When Marjorie looks back at the first issue--it was almost 10 months ago--she thinks her sophomore effort was pretty immature. “I was censoring myself a lot,” she says, “thinking what other people would think and changing words. I don’t think about it as much anymore.” Lately, Marjorie has found herself staying in bed a lot, listening to music and doing absolutely nothing. She feels she is wasting her time in school, and she has no interest in ctenophores and sponges and the strictures of biology class. Even her GPA has slipped, from a 3.8 in ninth grade to a 3.1 this year. A dreamy quality has crept into the zine. It is filled lately with stream-of-consciousness writing and poetry and is missing the scratchiness of earlier diatribes. Still, the zine holds its position in her life. She loves the feeling of holding a stack of finished copies. The Xeroxed pamphlets feel like the thing she was meant to do, something that centers her. “It’s self-worth,” Marjorie says, explaining the zine in solitary terms. “It’s like saying, ‘Here I am.’ ”