The Un-Weird

There’s this really interesting financial gap between the Massachusetts Gottwalds and the Virginia Gottwalds. Actually, it’s more than just a financial gap. There seems to be a political gap as well. Schockingly, when surfing the web for “Gottwald Family”, it is not this blog that pops up but instead many pages that unveil a wealthy Republican family from Richmond, Virginia. These are two items I found:

• “Richmond's Gottwald family worth $965 million”
• "The Gottwald family, the owners of Albemarle, one of the largest manufacturers of methyl bromide, donated $345,000 to Bush and the Republican Party between 2000 and 2002.”

The picture below is of the $37 million Gottwald Science building at the University of Richmond.

I am not totally surprised. When I arrived at Bates in the fall of 1994, a fellow freshman from Virginia Beach realized that my last name was Gottwald and with eyes ablaze, asked if I was any relation to the “Richmond Gottwalds.” I laughed and said, “Not that I know of.” He told me that they were a very powerful family and over the course of the next four years, I know he subconsciously associated me with that family. Or maybe I had a subconscious desire to be associated with the rich Richmond Gottwalds. After all, I have this identity issue. I mean that’s why I started writing this thing in the first place.

Going to Bates was the most liberating thing I ever did. I dare say it will be the most liberating thing I will do in my lifetime. In some ways, it was typical: going away to college, living away from family, securing an identity, establishing ‘adult’ relationships, taking responsibility for life, going into debt. But for me, and I am sure for a handful of others, there was an aspect of fantastical escape. Entering freshman year was dreamlike. By the second day on campus, I distinctly remember feeling like I belonged to a community and I sensed that I had many more things in common with the students at Bates than with students at BB&N. There was more personal depth and complication which immediately made me comfortable. In general, stereotypes were much more difficult to come by at Bates. I was no longer the ‘Financial Aid’ student that I felt I had been in high school.

The president of my Bates class is Rob Curtis. He came to college to play football but by senior year, he had quit the team and was focused on his studio art major. Rob and I weren’t close friends, but we were friendly. I remember waking up in a hostel in Paris, while I was traveling during my Junior Semester Abroad, prying my eyes open because I heard a loud American voice talking about beer in the courtyard downstairs. I got out of bed, walked out of the room, onto the balcony and looked downstairs. Squinting in the bright sunlight with my pajamas on, morning breath and all, I called out, “Rob Curtis!” And Rob, mid-morning beer swig, looked up, threw down his beer, ran up the stairs and gave me a bear hug. Rob and I have honors theses photo pages in our yearbook that face each other: his art, mine dance.

For all four years, I dated a touchy, feely, metrosexual, U2-adoring lacrosse player who my gay dancer friends had crushes on. Crossing a dancer with a lacrosse player helped integrate the general dance audiences as the “white hats” tended to fill the seats of the theater (white being the preferable baseball cap color at the time, I guess). But this never left us short of acid-tripping hippies in the audience who had spur of the moment monologues in the aisles during intermission.

I befriended a dancer whose FBI Agent father had something to do with the capture of the Unibomber or Timothy McVeigh (I can’t remember) and who forbade her to carry a United States Passport because of “the things he knew.”

I had a roommate who was from Berkeley, California, had a boyfriend at Bates and a boyfriend at Dartmouth. Both boyfriends were aware of the other and were ‘okay’ with the situation for two years. I’m not sure how that one panned out.

I met this guy from Texas who convinced his friends to take a dance class so that he could meet female dancers. I thought he was funny when he wasn’t trying to be and thought he was sincere when he was trying to be funny. Our chemistry was a little off. I got the sense he was intelligent but not totally harmless. Ignoring my cautious side, I asked him to do the lighting design for a dance I choreographed. As we were hanging stage lights high above the lip of the stage, I was strattling a few pipes, using my wrench to tighten a Leko and he made some comments on my flexibility. I wondered if I had made a good decision with my lighting design proposal. Making a comment to a dancer about her flexibility in tight quarters at 35 feet above a stage while she precariously balances each butt cheek on either side of a pipe and reaches over her toes to screw a lamp by his feet seemed overtly insinuating (if there is such a paradox). But his stage lighting was excellent (in hindsight I wonder if that was the best aspect of the piece). This guy from Texas introduced me to another guy from Texas. That other guy from Texas is grinding his teeth next to me in bed as I write this.

The diversity of Bates was refreshing to me. People were mostly weird. I fit in.

Being associated with the Virginia Gottwalds tickles me. I imagine that they are not very weird. They probably don’t have problems with their water pipes at home (“SHUT THE WATER OFF!”) and haven’t spent much time in trailer parks. I bet they don’t worry too much about getting to the Laundromat on time or concern themselves with fellow vomiting subway riders.