An Introvert In Disguise

An introvert is someone who recharges their batteries in quiet repose. We make up only one-third of the world’s population. Extroverts are a bigger and noisier bunch. Their rest period includes excitement and other people.

Sweet Susan is a true introvert who has learned extrovert skills. She learned to blend in with the majority at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when her parents said it was a bad idea to go to Martin Luther King’s ‘I’ve Got A Dream’ rally in Washington. So, of course, she got a bus with other students and made the overnight trip to D.C.

Ever since that liberating experience, Susan has enthusiastically expressed her First Amendment rights at every opportunity. She was at the Kent State rally against to Viet Nam War, fortunately nowhere near the tragedy of Ohio National Guardsmen firing on students.

In recent years, Susan’s political activism has become less strenuous. This yard sign shows our opposition to Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families at the Mexican border. Most of our neighbors are Republicans; they were not amused.

Susan’s current battle against the forces of evil is the ballot initiative campaign to constitutionally protect a woman’s right to an abortion. We go to the Planned Parenthood building every Tuesday and Thursday morning to review petitions to have an amendment put on the ballot in the next general election. It’s going well. We’re optimistic about obtaining the required 875,000 valid petitions, plus another 250,000 as a cushion in case some signatures or addresses don’t jibe with the voter registration roles.

Anyone who has seen Susan ‘work the room’ at Peach’s, a local restaurant where everybody knows our name, will say,

“Introvert? Yeah, right!”

That’s her way of keeping her extrovert skills sharp. She approaches a table with a cute baby and works her way up to the grandparents, the restaurant’s principal clientele.

A less proactive way to pass among those annoying extroverts is the costume party. Following are a few examples:

“Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street’ is a legend about a barber whose shop was above a bakery that made the best meat pies in London. Sounds ho-hum, right, until you hear where the pastry shop got its meat. From Sweeney, who, while shaving a patron with a straight razor, sliced his throat and dropped chunks of the body down a chute.

And there are introverts among the indigenous people of Australia. Susan was visiting Aunt Laurie, who introduced her to an aboriginal artist. He said just a bit of face paint would help her disguise her true nature in the wild.

Susan was given the nickname Butterfly Girl because she has many interests and ‘flits from flower to flower.’ We got this picture at a nature preserve in north Florida where monarch butterflies stop to rest before crossing the Gulf of Mexico during the Fall migration. As a fundraiser, a photographer strapped wings on a subject and took these pictures. The cost? $1.00. One of my favorite pictures of Sweet Susan Downing only cost a buck! Amazing.

It’s not really a costume, but Susan is successfully hiding her introverted nature.

Patrick/Poppa /Whatever

28 July 2023