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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome back. I'm Tonya Pinkins. You're listening to You Can't SAY THAT and my conversation with my friend Sarah Stengle.

[0:14] Tonya Pinkins: We gotta say what truth for you. So, you know, there's so much of, you know, just a belief that, you know, white girls, they marry into money, they are just trained to marry for money, and then they can have this easy life and they don't care what their husbands do because they just have the money to live the way they want to live and vote for Trump. And you made different choices. Like, why didn't you make the easy choice?

[0:47] Sarah Stengle: Well, there's no simple answer to that. And first of all, I think no matter what, whether I have actual money or not, I'm tremendously privileged because of my education and because I have the support that I have from my extended family and friends. So, like, for example, I don't own a summer cabin, but if I want to go to a suburban cabin, I have three I can go to for free because I, you know, so I am extremely privileged. I'm privileged enough to make the choice that I don't have to suffer. I would never ever describe myself as not privileged. I have the choice. Some people don't have the choice.

[1:31] Tonya Pinkins: And you made the harder choice. So why'd you make the hard choice?

[1:34] Sarah Stengle: It was the easier choice. I'm going for joy. What do I love? I love my kids. I love peace and quiet at home. I love making art. I love singing. So I just let, like, it sounds really, really corny, but I try not to let my fear and anxieties, which are considerable, run my life. So I just want to add before we move on to the next topic, that I try to set my compass towards the things that I love. And for a long time, you know, the kids came first, the studio came second. Now that my kids are adults, I really am trying to keep the studio first. My energy is lower than it was. So my productivity hasn't skyrocketed, but I would say it's continued.

[2:22] Tonya Pinkins: Let's talk about that joy and that love because I feel like that is just a privilege that women don't get until they've gone through the change. Like all this energy that you've been expending on everybody else suddenly comes back to you. And as one of my friends said, then you just start doing spring cleaning that is people.

[2:43] Sarah Stengle: That's so funny. I absolutely love being post-menopausal. Everybody talks about it in such terrible terms. I've lost, I get to make reasonable decisions without my head clogged up with that nonsense.

[2:55] Tonya Pinkins: Yes!

[2:55] Sarah Stengle: And I sleep at night and I do what I'm interested in.

[2:59] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, yes, it is the best.

[3:03] Sarah Stengle: I have actually, I've never been happier.

[3:06] Tonya Pinkins: Agreed.

[3:07] Sarah Stengle: This is the happiest time of my life, the most productive. I am at the top of my game. I could run a country. And you know what I have in my bed are some good hard books. And I get to read them in peace.

[3:29] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, yes. So I'm telling you, young women, you don't know. The best is yet to come. Don't let them make you afraid. They're scared of the power that you are going to come into.

[3:41] Sarah Stengle: Exactly.

[3:44] Tonya Pinkins: So you had shared with me something because you know I have this movie Red Pill, and it's a lot about cults. And a lot of some of what I learned about cults, I learned from you. How do you know anything about cults?

[3:58] Sarah Stengle: I was doing my research on initiations because I feel like there's a link between initiation, trauma bonding, and rape culture. And it started by accident. So it started when I dropped my daughter off at college. I went to an antique store and I was looking for postcards. And there was this box of real photo postcards, and I noticed that it had a false bottom. So I took all the postcards out of the box and I looked under the false bottom. And it was this red book called Console. And I flipped it open, and there was this bizarre picture of two men standing with buckets on their feet, boxing blindfolded. I thought, I don't know what this book is, but I'm gonna buy it. So without knowing what it was, I went up to the counter.

I said, I found this, but it didn't have a price on it. They're like five bucks. Bought it. Driving home, and I'm reading it in the diner, and there's this bizarre list of supplies that includes like wooden boats, wooden goats, goats, like, you know, goats with animals with the horn, wooden goats, and axes and rope and all of this stuff. I'm like, what is this book? Well, it turned out it was a guide for conducting false trials for the Modern Woodmen of America. And I read the whole book, and it was supposed to be secret. It had these little ticket things, and it had these little like, it was just this little strange little dark book. And I thought, oh my gosh, this sounds just like Grandpa Fred.

And then I was thinking about three days later, and I looked on eBay, Modern Woodman of America, paraphernalia, and up came this little pin that said WMA. No, MWA. And I was like, I have that as Grandpa Fred's tie clip. And I was like, that's a 25-year membership of the Modern Woodman of America.

[6:14] Tonya Pinkins: So what is it?

[6:17] Sarah Stengle: So the Modern Woodmen of America now is an insurance company. Their net worth is in the billions. I'm not good at numbers. I think it's like the fourth largest fraternal order, and they're worth like 80 billion. It's a tremendous amount of money. And it's privately held and I think unregulated, and it grew out of these fraternal orders. In the heyday of fraternal order, if you could join a secret society, you did because they were very serious about their mission and supporting the widows and children of their club members.

[7:01] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[7:02] Sarah Stengle: So it wasn't unusual between like 1890 and the plague of 1918 to be in one of these societies.

[7:14] Tonya Pinkins: And it was this poor people or like why were you in these societies?

[7:18] Sarah Stengle: It was a tremendous amount of money in it was like the, it was a tremendous amount of money in those days to buy in. You know, it doesn't sound like a lot now, like $100 a month, but back then that was a lot of money. But when the epidemic of 1918 happened, a lot of these clubs went bankrupt because so many people died in the Spanish flu. So then I looked at the historical records of Goodhue County where Reading is and found that my great-grandfather and actually other people I know, great-grandfather were in the same Modern Woodmen of America club in Red Reading, Minnesota. And I became interested in kind of the larger phenomena. So I think that when you are traumatized, and then somebody is there to support you immediately afterwards, never mind that they're just the people who mocked, buried you, or threatened to execute you, or dropped you off in the woods and made you walk home 20 miles.

Then when you get there, like, oh you did it, you succeeded, and now you're one of us. That those bonds that form are tremendously powerful, and that in our society to rat on somebody or to be a tattletale is to be weak and to be a traitor to the group and traitor to the brotherhood, and to undermine all this horribleness that we have gone through in order to bond with one another, you are just making that meaningless.

[8:59] Tonya Pinkins: But then I'm thinking about the, like growing up in the shadow of Lehigh University. Lehigh University has now cleaned up its act. So I do not want to cast aspersions on the current incarnation or the current administration. But in the 70s and 80s, a lot of people died in hazings.

[9:14] Sarah Stengle: Wow.

[9:15] Tonya Pinkins: And one year, four students died in one night of alcohol poisoning. And Lehigh made the front page of the, I think it was Newsweek, and the president of the university was asked to leave, and they were pretty much in the public eye at that point because parents were understandably upset. But hazing traditions and frats are not all bad. Like when I started doing my research, I was definitely like, oh, frats are terrible, they allow all this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I realized, like, actually, young people leaving their family need a support system, and there are frats that provide that and provide a fellowship that's the foundation for their future business. So I'm not going to go into the good side of it, but I'm just going to say I acknowledge it's there. The problem with initiations is that if a sadist, if a charismatic sadist gets in charge, there's no checks. There's no, so it can go very badly.

[10:12] Sarah Stengle: And there's all kinds of stories about, um, what's the rating of this program?

[10:19] Tonya Pinkins: It is you can say anything, honey.

[10:21] Sarah Stengle: Anything? Okay. So, like there's elephant marches where they get all the freshmen to stick their thumb up the butt of the person in front of them and parade in a circle naked in front of everybody. So, like it's about sexual penetration and humiliation as like this. How do you withstand that? If you withstand it well, you get to join in the circle of bullies. Like to me, it's so foreign because if somebody asked me to strip naked and stick my thumb up somebody else's butt, I would be like, I don't want anything to do with you people. It's so, why would I want to join that?

[10:54] Sarah Stengle: This is fascinating because I was reading a book about cannibalism. And, um, this gentleman had gone and lived with the cannibals. And as their culture, they just, that was just part of everybody touched everybody. They were all naked all the time, they were all sticking, and that was just how they all lived. They also ate human beings. Um, and there was no fighting or killing within the tribe. That was all, you know, projected on the other. I've been reading this book, the, um, Evolution of Woman, and it was her theory is that there was not a um incest taboo in, you know, Neolithic or primitive man because they didn't understand DNA. But what they understood was that my people who are my tribe family, we are man and everyone else is animal.

So there were like these huge prescriptions on pain of death that you couldn't hurt, have sex with or eat, fully like 75% of the people in your tribe, but other tribes who are just considered animals, you could do anything you wanted to do with them.

[11:57] Sarah Stengle: And so I start wondering how those things start evolving from, you know, animalistic behavior. We forget we are just animals into these ritualized forms of abuse with, you know, charismatic psychopaths.

[12:12] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, it's a complicated topic. There are people who have compared it to baboons, and they said, like these frats that are doing this, it isn't homoerotic behavior, it's dominance behavior, and this is where I feel the connection between rape culture and large at large is it isn't really like rape is not about being attracted to somebody, rape is about dominating somebody. And I think there are men who are powerfully attracted to women, and it enrages them that this desire clouds their mind and it makes them feel less powerful. And so, in order to regain that feeling of power, they do this dominating behavior. But don't you? And some of that is about people not being trained to manage the frustration of their will, like they have not been trained to just deal with the fact that you can't have what you want. And so, since I can't tolerate that, it's your fault. And so, to get rid of this awful feeling that I don't know how to manage, I'm going to subjugate, dominate you and release that tension.

[13:22] Sarah Stengle: I also think that we're just a violent species in that it is the white liberal thing of everybody's really nice. I'm sorry, I've shot a gun. It's fun. I'm a gun owner, yeah. I'm with you. You know, I it's it's like bloodlust is not discussed. But I think bloodlust exists. And we export it to the media. We look at Rambo and we say, This has nothing to do with me. This is just entertainment. But why is that entertaining? Why is revenge entertaining? Why is killing—seeing like this white guy go into the jungle and shoot all the bad guys who definitely probably usually aren't white? I actually didn't see Rambo, I confess. And then like, yeah, is that—I don't think that's a Rambo story. I don't know.

Okay. You know, like this violent, you know, you kill the bad guy, and then you come home, and some president figure or the captain of the marine says, Yeah, done good son. But it must have a massive appeal because it keeps getting rid of it. We're animals. Come on, we're just animals. We are just animals. I actually think, you know, you can psychoanalyze it as individual narratives, but I think behaving in a civilized manner is learned behavior, and that people are innately violent. Sad but true.

[14:50] Sarah Stengle: Um, you were gonna share one of your allegories. You want to tell us about the whole history of the allegories? Because I was forewarned that you were going to say how white I was, I did the allegory of white. Okay, the allegory of white. But tell us about the whole series of allegories. Tell us about the whole series of allegories. Okay, so the series of allegories is a personal writing project. I don't know yet, even whether I want to what where I want to go with it, but it is now just very recently finished. But there's one allegory for each of the heavenly virtues and one allegory of forgiveness, which is the most ruthless of all, but it's also long. There are downsides to the virtues which are never discussed, and so many artists have covered the seven deadly sins because they're kind of a fun topic to cover, but the virtues are just like submerged in this stodge aura, stodgy, stodgy, stodgy words that come from another, like not even last century, but the century before last, like prudence and chastity.

And I happen to love stodge. I just love. And I'm not kidding because I love absurdity. So I am going into this stodgy territory with a very fresh and twisted take. And or at least I hope it is. Well, I've loved every one of the allegories. So you're going to share an allegory with us. And so the title of the book is Dormant Spectrum. And initially I had all these um virtues tied to a color, but those colors didn't always fit. But chastity and white stuck. So this is the allegory of chastity called guiltless white. And there's one word that most people aren't familiar with, which is saponification. Saponification, I'm just going to tell you it comes up at the end. It means turning into soap.

Okay. All right. One morning, after waking up alone, feeling vaguely slimed and deeply ambivalent about her recent string of disappointing trysts, Chastity decided to actually be chaste henceforth. And so she was. Eating often wasn't enough. In order to feel sated, each meal had to be continued until a certain pressure was achieved. A vague feeling of the belly pressing up against the base of the throat, a shortness of breath, and a numb, taut feeling provided temporary relief from the otherwise gnawing hunger. So it was that over time she grew paler and larger, and her appetite increased with her size. Eventually she became white and rather spherical. One day she became so pale that even her inner lips had turned white.

Only her eyes remained unchanged. Peering out her window, she saw another spherical white form. It glowed. She went outside and was shocked to discover a small male member protruding from its north face. Intrigued, she touched it gently, and to her surprise, it exploded. A white caustic liquid covered her, and she found herself melting into a saponic puddle. Although no longer upright, she was able to reflect that, as clean as she now felt, her habit of lapsing into lukewarm lust had had a few good points after all. It beat saponification hands down. Seeing what had become of herself, she glanced at her male counterpart and found that he was also rather in a ladder. Woo!

[19:00] Tonya Pinkins: There were so many things in there that I'm like, yeah, that's me. That's me. That's me. Yep, I have that feeling and that feeling and that feeling. And interestingly, because I was talking about um, you know, Neolithic man, that's one of her other theories is that they recognize two hungers: the hunger for food, the hunger for sex, and that they were these driving things that had to be taken care of. And that if they were taken care of within the community, it would wipe out the community. Interesting. And so they could project that out on the other community. They could rape, eat anybody who wasn't man because they were the only man. I love that. I love the allegory so much. Thank you. And they have drawings to go with them, they're all illustrated as well.

They're not seeing. I mean, I have so many people can't buy your books, but I'm lucky that I actually get so many of your books, and people can't even see the books. I have my little triangle book here, my three-dimensional book that's here. That is that be for sale. Okay, well, how can people come and buy your books? Central Booking Arts. So Maddie Rosenberg is an art dealer who specializes in artist books, and she sells my books. Awesome. So that's, you know, Central Booking, it's in Brooklyn. Well, you know, I love you, and I'm so grateful for you coming in and having this little intimate chat with me about things that people probably don't know that black girls and white girls talk to each other about after 40 years. There is another topic that I want to broach, just very closely, which is bad.

[20:48] Sarah Stengle: Boundaries, go for it. I grew up in a family situation where I felt emotionally safe at home, but I was so unguarded in so many ways and not prepared for the public world. Um, you know, we—I went to private school. Um, terrible things happened, uh, which I don't need to go into, but in general, at home, I felt pretty emotionally safe, but I had so much trouble drawing boundaries. And when we would go out, and people were rude to us, you were so great about not taking any shit from people. You were just so great, and you didn't get upset. You shut it down so calmly and with such confidence. And I learned so much that helped me navigate the New York art world in the 80s and um dealing with clients just by how calm you were in the face of this kind of—I want to call it like ambient expectation that you're just gonna go along with, you know, people asking you to do things that you want, don't want to do, or make say things you don't want to say, or whatever the pressure was, or do something.

You were just so calm and clear and how you shut that down, and it has been a friendship that I have to say has helped me and my life so much, just undeserving how you handled situations that I had no idea how to handle.

[22:23] Sarah Stengle: It it like I'm like, What you—that's what you saw me as? Because I feel like it's taken me till right now in my life to get to that point. But you know, you never see yourself, and clearly I've evolved over time, but wow, wow, okay, okay. I mean, I do know that I've always been very um, very self-righteous, and especially if I feel that there was a cause or something was—someone was violating a moral ideal that I had, I could just—I just go in on it. But always with a cause, never without a cause.

[22:59] Tonya Pinkins: You didn't start there.

[22:59] Sarah Stengle: Yeah, I guess so. I guess that's who I've been, and I didn't even know it.

[22:59] Tonya Pinkins: You don't start there.

[22:59] Sarah Stengle: Yeah, well I love you, and hopefully there'll be a new world in a year or two, and um we'll be able to visit each other again.

[22:59] Tonya Pinkins: I love you too. Thanks for this opportunity, and um, I just, you know, I still owe you some fabrics you can make my dress. You know what, there was one last thing I wanted to touch on before you got off, and that is you were talking about—you told me a while ago about the fact that in Minneapolis the way they traffic the girls, they use them and then they just kill them. That is my—I think that human trafficking in the Twin Cities is a big look the other way thing. You know, it's the downside of Minnesota nice is that trafficking out of Duluth and trafficking of, you know, mostly of Ojibwe and Somalian girls. Like when you see these um TV shows about it, it's always a white girl getting kidnapped, but in reality it's Native American girls who are lured off the reservation and sometimes shipped out of Duluth harbor and sometimes brought down to the Twin Cities, and I don't think it's—I don't think most of them live to tell the tale. That's a—you know, that's a big topic, but well it is heartbreaking that there's so many agencies that provide support for survivors, but there's so little prosecution.

[24:41] Sarah Stengle: Or none.

[24:41] Tonya Pinkins: So there's no consequence.

[24:44] Sarah Stengle: Yeah.

[24:44] Tonya Pinkins: Besides make money.

[24:45] Sarah Stengle: There's no—there are no consequences, is the long and short of it. Statistically. I mean like one or two per people get prosecuted if the external pressure is on, but if there's no external pressure on people looking at it. And if we as a—as women as a majority can't get behind protecting one another, we can expect protection from the oppressors, the people who are buying and selling us. We women gotta get it together.

[25:18] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, it's like a huge topic.

[25:18] Sarah Stengle: It is, it is, it is.

[25:20] Sarah Stengle: But you know, I like to touch on it and then, you know, people can if they're really interested, go into it a little further.

[25:31] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[25:32] Sarah Stengle: Yeah, I mean, we could think about doing something.

[25:35] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[25:36] Sarah Stengle: I'm open to that.

[25:37] Tonya Pinkins: So that's another thing.

[25:39] Sarah Stengle: Absolutely.

[25:40] Tonya Pinkins: Thank you, Sarah, for coming and chatting with me.

[25:44] Tonya Pinkins: Uh, this is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[25:53] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, the show where you can.

[25:58] Tonya Pinkins: I'm Tonya Pinkins. This is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales, edited by Derek Gunther, music by Anthony Norman.

[26:08] Tonya Pinkins: Available wherever you get your podcasts.

[26:11] Tonya Pinkins: And visit me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and let me know what you'd like to hear me talk about.

[26:18] Tonya Pinkins: For more information, visit bpn.fm forward slash YCST.

[26:25] Tonya Pinkins: It's not a kid if you don't give it.