transretrogurl

“In tonight’s episode, Queenie manages to burn the bread and has to make some more for husband Lionel, all while bustling the chaotic children off to school, being an agony aunt for her permanently love-lorn sister Cherrie and planning Lionel’s secret birthday party. Only on NBC”

Ahh, fantasy. The only place right now that doesn’t feel like it’s in black and white.

Covid isn’t over, no matter how hard we want it to be, and the ‘new normal’ is barely different from lockdown. At the moment I am at home 99.9% of the time, working, for which I am thankful, for an American firm who are very supportive of their staff.

But, as I said to my therapist in a terribly first world way, it’s hard at the moment because, to put it simply, I work so I can be Sarah. Sarah is my steam vent; when life is too cruddy and coldly masculine I can retreat into skirts and be a different person. A way more fun person that I can live out fantasies with and, if only just for a moment, not be the emotional damaged masculine shell that I drag around with me.

So, aside from first world whinging, what is this blog post about? Well, it’s meant to be a lifeline for people like me. A lot of us are stuck in situations that we use our counter personalities to deal with normally, without the ability to be our, dare I say it, real selves.

Take my sessions for instance. There’s the multiple outfit changes, the multiple looks, the oodles of photos and poses, the rush of seeing her in the mirror rather than the boring and bland visage I’ve seen for so many years I literally don’t see anything in the mirror when I stare at it. But it’s also all the things around it – I’m in London when I do it and I love London in a charming field-mouse kind of way. When I come for a session it’s a holiday in and of itself; I get to have a drink in my favourite watering holes without worrying about work, I eat pizza which sounds uninteresting but when you live out in the rural bits of this glorious green land ‘pizza’ is a mythic and tantalisingly cosmopolitan feast.

And all those things have gone, for now at least. London is an odd ghost town and going to pubs and restaurants is a: risky and b: no fun at all.

So how am I dealing with this second wave of uncertainty, because that is what faces us? Simple. I’m not.

Well, I’ll try not to be a fainting drama queen for just a second there. I don’t think any of us are dealing with it. The way the lockdown is threatening to land on us again, the rise in cases (which is actually statistically explainable but again the media is shouting it from the top of buildings like the worst ambulance-chasing gossip-wives) and the way certain people are flagrantly ignoring the rules which will come back and haunt all of us is not a great place to be. Again we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we are all worn out from the anxiety of it all so far.

So, to combat this unending gray of uncertainty and a lack of the good old fun things we could (and should be) do(ing) I’m falling back on my old friend, Mr, or rather Miss Imagination.

Hence the retro-Queenie bit at the start. I thought a couple of the outfits I modelled at my last session were perfectly cute for a late 1950s sitcom about a glamorous stay-at-home wife and her adventures with her clueless but loving husband. It’s a nice place to spend some time when the world is so bloody awful.

I’m about to do another session but this one is different; I’m trying a flying visit, getting up at the crack of way-before-dawn, driving the three hours to London, frocking up in a set of gorgeous new outfits (with some surprises that should please the retro fans a lot), then wiping the makeup off and driving home the same day(ish). It will be a long day but I’m willing to do that kind of thing for the fun I need at the moment.

Covid truly sucks and we’ve all put our lives on hold. But we have one life, and you need to make it as fun as possible. Me, I’m trying for many lives at once, the one I’m stuck with biologically and the ones where she can have some fun.

Sometimes the fantasies take an odd turn because, well, combination of a masculine sex drive and a fetish for taking on the role of a woman can result in some ‘bodice-rippers’ as they used to call them. I’m not even going to pretend that Sarah hasn’t got down and dirty in my mind; some days it’s nice to imagine her bringing a man to the same kind of warm rush I enjoy thinking about it, some days it’s nice to imagine just the feel of a full circle skirt swishing around your stockings.

And sometimes I imagine her adventures with her adoring husband Lionel. Beats the ‘every day feels like Wednesday’ real life by a long way….

“At the end of each episode Queenie and Lionel share a loving kiss, and the camera pans to them climbing the stairs together, hand in hand, what they get up to in marital bed is left to the imagination of the viewer…”

Stay beautiful and let your imagination soar while your body can’t.