Jill Rants and Raves: you can tell by the shoes they wear

^{I grew up an outsider at every turn. From my earliest
memories in Malaya where my Jewish father had gone to work as a teacher of
architecture in Kuala Lumpur having failed to find work in Europe after the war,}^{to my
sense of complete disassociation in the city of my father's birth, Berlin, as
my internal battle around gender and sexuality began to tear at my fabric,}^{and then thrown into a Church
of England Girls boarding School in the genteel Surrey countryside where I
struggled not to drown in a sea of bullying schoolgirls,}^{to my escape to San Francisco
in the late 1980's, from a London lesbian community nailed to the wall by its'
own circumscribed hostility to 'differences'.}

^{I have never, nor do I expect
ever to belong anywhere.} ^{Among the places I retreated to as I tried to find a
purpose, a reason for staying alive when I was a teenager was the incredible
richness of literature and theatre and read plays by German and English
playwrights from the 50's, 60's and 70's. Before I had even left school I was
sweeping the floors of one of the earliest lunchtime pub theatres in Britain,
the Orange Tree. I met inspiring performers, directors, and writers and learned
the basics of a craft that would inspire me for life.}

^{An exchange just a few days ago between Chris Matthews
and a Republican Congressman from California, Brian Bilbray, brought me with
shuddering speed back to my teens, when I read the play 'Andorra' by Max
Frisch, written in 1960 as an allegory about the pursuit and killing of a Jew
who lived seemingly comfortably among gentiles until the latent prejudices of
ordinary people turn dangerous when their own existence undergoes upheaval. As
the second Act of 'Andorra' brings closer the inevitable terror, a black clad
'Jew Detector' arrives who can sniff out Jews by looking at the feet of each
masked citizen.}

^{Chris Matthews asks Bilbray to:" Give me a
non-ethnic aspect that would tell you to pick up somebody." Bilbray
answers: "}^{They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different
type of attire, there’s different type of—right down to the shoes}^{, right down to the clothes.}

^{(From May 2002 until July 2005, Bilbray was a
consultant for the Federation for American Immigration Reform a conservative
anti-immigration lobbying group. He is currently on the federation's board of
advisers.)}

^{I am an immigrant - I have always been an immigrant,
always living somewhere other than where I started out - with a Jewish father,
a foreigner, a different class, a caucasian among Chinese and Malays,an english
speaker in a german speaking country, a lesbian in a boy's psyche, an alien in
Amerika. I've even had the experience of INS agents with guns drawn forcing
their way into my Bernal Heights home and leaving only when I could prove my
legal status.}

^{But I will not likely have to prove my legality as a human being if I ever visit Arizona. I'm wearing the right shoes. And of course, I'll still be a Caucasian.}