"Hell yeah!" (Alison Blaire AKA Dazzler)

"Hell yeah!"

As I start writing this piece, I'm thinking about remixes.  I'm thinking about how one sound leads to another, how the music disguises deep connections over time.  I'm thinking about the paths that lead us to the people we become.  I'm thinking about how all the little experiences in our young lives come together in our heads, how they change us, how they influence us.

For a trans child, this can be an especially important issue - especially given how so many people opposed to the notion of trans kids even existing try to pin the "blame" on every environmental factor they can come up with rather than, you know, cope.

The road that led me to the subject of this blog is one I've never really stopped to think about until today, when I started writing this piece.  In this case, it actually begins in the year 1978, before the comic book adventures of Alison Blaire, aka Dazzler, were even being published by Marvel.

As regular readers of this blog may calculate, I was six years old in that year, and even then I was a huge fan of adventurous women in fiction.  But I hadn't really discovered comics yet.  For big, epic adventures I turned to television and movies.  I've discussed some of them, but I left out a big source of inspiration for me in the original article Adventure Awaits.

 

It wasn't a deliberate omission.  There are only so many characters I can focus on in a general introductory article, and for the sake of brevity I left out the vast cadre of inspirational female characters in the various Walt Disney live-action adventure movies I loved as a young transgirl.

 

Now, I was too young to understand the idea of studios, but there was something distinctive about the way the live-action Disney adventures were filmed that made them instantly recognizable to me even if I didn't at the time directly connect to the Disney name.  All I knew was that Disney made the princess cartoons (but that's another article) and I loved those. 

My favorite of these live-action adventure movies was ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN.

Kim Richards' Tina was the kind of girl I wanted to have as a friend - she was brave, adventurous and had an unsinkable scientific kind of curiosity about the world and her own mysterious past; the fact that she had an awesome Star Case, a winking cat, could see the future and could connect with the minds of animals was all just so many bonus points.

The fact that I had a monstrous crush at the time on her brother Tony (Ike Eisenmann) certainly didn't hurt matters.  But, like the Disney princesses, Tia Malone's going to get her own article at one point or another.

What's important to know about these two characters for the sake of this discussion is that I would watch this movie every chance I could get. 

This was actually quite often, even in the years before VCRs, because the local Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, New York had a film projector and several children's movies that they would show on weekends for a nominal fee.   Parents and kids would gather in a big empty room that looked more like a cafeteria than any part of a modern library and we'd sit on gym mats and folding chairs and watch movies like ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN, THE BAD NEWS BEARS or THE NORTH AVENUE IRREGULARS.

Of course, as can be seen in the picture above of the Crandall Public Library today, the place is a little more upscale; it practically looks like a movie theater now, in my opinion.  Guess all those $1.00 theater tickets paid off in the long run.

Of course, the reality is that the admission price was more like $2.00, because the kids were almost always accompanied by an adult.  In my case, it was often my babysitter who took me - the eldest teenage daughter of a family that lived across the street from my grandparents' house.

Her name was Sarah, and I adored her.  She was incredibly laid-back and mellow; whenever I see Janice from THE MUPPET SHOW I'm reminded of her.  She never seemed to be bothered by anything, even when I misbehaved.  As a bit of a hellion as a child, I appreciated that.  It wasn't that I didn't get in trouble - it's that she remained unperturbed by whatever happened, and I tremendously respected that.  Also, like Janice the Muppet, she had long blonde hair that made me very jealous.  Of course, had my hair been long and beautiful I would've preferred it back then to be chestnut brown.  I hated my wavy, wild red hair at that age and was forever trying to make it more like the hairstyles I saw everywhere.  When you're a six-year-old transgirl, you actually do spend time thinking of things like what kind of amazing hair you'd most like to have based on the people around you and in movies and on TV.

Sarah tended to be the one who took me to the movies at the library a lot of the time, because she tended to babysit me on the weekends when the films were shown there.  One weekend, we were planning on going to see a "film" that, in hindsight, was very likely just a collection of a bunch of animated shorts strung together, when an advertisement came on the television and changed the course of my life in the weirdest way.

Crazily, I found this on YouTube.  It's the exact, actual advertisement that flashed across the TV - and made my brain totally explode.  I've never actually seen the film, for reasons I'll explain later - but to the six-year-old me that looked like the greatest cinematic adventure of all time.  Lava, ice, floods, earthquakes, avalanches - all in one movie! 

How could any other film possibly measure up to that?

"Sarah!" I remember crying out as I leapt up from the couch, stumbling in footy-pajamas as I scrambled to the chair in the other room where she was relaxedly engrossed in a paperback novel.

"Yeah, Denny Mike?' she asked. 

And yes, now you know - D M stands for Dennis Michael.  I write it as Dee Emm Elms, my "writing and drawing name" I've had since I was a little kid.

"Sarah!  SARAH!" I remember gasping.  "There's this MOVIE in the theater, not at the library!  It's got lava and giant birds and ice caves and HAYLEY MILLS from PARENT TRAP!"

"PARENT TRAP?"  Sarah had taken me to PARENT TT TRAP at the library, but had either forgotten or was feigning ignorance.

"Yeah!  PARENT TRAP!  You remember!"  And then I proceeded to sing a bastardized version of this, playing air guitar.

To her credit - or perhaps detriment - I remember Sarah allowing me to "perform" most of the song - which I knew by heart even after having only seen the movie twice from library showings.

"Oh," Sarah said.  "Riiiiiiight, Hayley Mills.  PARENT TRAP."

"Instead of the library, can we go to the movies tonight and see this?"

I remember Sarah getting a sort of thoughtful, far-away look and then nodding, twice, slowly.  "Sure, Denny Mike.  Sure."

Sarah called my folks and confirmed the plans while I did living room cartwheels.

I'm not exaggerating.

Whenever I was moving to pass time I would do cartwheels in the big open space of the living room floor, which was "padded" by virtue of having a thick shaggy carpet of the sort that have been absent from all our lives since the 1970s.

My folks apparently said yes, and told her to take the ticket price out of the "babysitter fund" they'd left behind for her.

I got into my favorite outfit, which was a brown shirt with a collar that made it look to my imagination like I was wearing a big necklace, along with my favorite polyester trousers.

I was a fashion plate as much then as I am now, which is to say not at all.

You can see this outfit in Adventure Awaits in the World of Wheels photos.  Sarah drove me down to the local movie theater which was showing IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS.

I still remember how the overheads lights buzzed and glowed, casting a sort of "fuzz" over everything in the lobby, making everything look very indistinct and vague, like the lines that differentiated things were blurred somehow.  I've never seen a light like it since.  It made me a little nervous, and there were a ton of teenagers there at the theater, which surprised and scared me in and of itself.

At the time, I had no way of knowing that Sarah, despite seeming mellow and laid-back, was also a bit of a plotter.  And this was all part of a plan of hers.  The reason behind this plan also explained why so many teenagers were there at a theater showing IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS.

Because, also opening that same weekend, was this:

Sarah left me standing by the candy counter - knowing I wouldn't be going anywhere when offered the chance to pick out a box of sugar of my choosing (on my parents' dime, of course) and walked slowly over to the ticket booth.  I turned to watch her ask for tickets and then receive them, without any apparent conversation beyond simply paying and getting change.  She sauntered back to me.  "Awww," she said.  "Sorry, Denny Mike - but they sold out of all the tickets for CASTAWAYS.  So I got tickets to GREASE, instead."

I was crushed - not because I couldn't get to see IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS, but because I felt certain that Sarah was not only lying to me, but doing something she wanted to do and taking advantage of my parents to pay for it.  Even as a little kid, I recognized the duplicity.  Not to mention that even my six-year-old brain knew there was NO WAY all those teenagers were going to see the Disney film for which I'd seen the commercial.

I cried.  I complained.  I sulked.  Sarah remained calm and mellow, as she was wont to do.  Eventually, after I'd cried myself out in a miniature tantrum, she managed to get me into the theater.

And this is what I saw:

I've heard it said that when kids hear lyrics to songs and see abstract images, they tend to view them literally.  This was absolutely the case for me watching GREASE.

I didn't understand the idea of this being a campy retrospective of people's fond memories of the 1950s.  Instead, it was like some other world to me - a literal parallel universe full of superheroines wearing pink leather jackets, a universe filled with flying cars with magical powers fueled by human willpower and love.  It was a world of Australian princesses on the beach where everyone was some kind of archetype, where everyone had a song and you could learn how true their love was by how deeply they pined in their big number.

And I ate up every second of it, screaming inside with joy every time a new musical number started, every time people began dancing with the kinds of "moves" I'd never seen before because they came from another world - or, more accurately, another time. I'd never been exposed to 1950s culture and so to me, GREASE was set in contemporary time but in a universe where the image below was the norm instead of the dull, dishpan real world.  It was the definition of movie magic.

I apologized profusely to Sarah about my tantrum afterward and we happily discussed the film for hours.  Per Sarah's request, I did not tell my parents what we had actually seen, though I didn't lie and claim to have seen IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS.  My folks happily made that assumption on their own, and it was years before I told them any differently.  Having a "secret" event in my life filled me with feelings of tingly wickedness, a hand-wringing mwah-hah-hah sort of feeling.

But another feeling lasted longer than that - and that was my adulation of Olivia Newton-John.  Sandy represented so much of what my immature dreams at that age thought of as a princess.  Like I said, GREASE was set in another world to me - and in that world, princesses looked and acted more like Sandy than Cinderella.  And I was cool with that.

Over my bed that year, across the ceiling, I had a poster of Olivia Newton-John wearing a leather jacket.  I tried to find it on Google so I could post it here, but I couldn't locate it.  If anyone out there reading this is able to find a picture of it, feel free to email me.  But Olivia was like a daily, angelic presence in my life, inspiring me when I woke up and wishing me well as I fell asleep.  Of course, my parents thought I had this huge crush on her.  As per the usual, they mistook my wanting to be someone for wanting to date someone.

GREASE was also my gateway into the world of musicals.  I asked around at the library and borrowed some recordings and discovered that GREASE, as a musical, really wasn't that great compared to so many classic pieces.  It didn't change how I felt about that glorious parallel universe at the time, of course.  As an adult, I see that GREASE is a very problematic piece, but I'd be lying if I pretended that these events didn't happen.  And, so, as a result, I owe a debt to GREASE and to Sarah for bringing me into the world of musicals.

So, knowing all that I've told you up to this point, it's probably not  much of a surprise for me to say that how excited I was about ... this ... after seeing a preview:

With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that despite my enthusiasm over a new Olivia Newton-John musical, there was nevertheless an undercurrent of concern in my young 8-year-old brain when I saw this advertisement.  On the one hand, it looked like another journey into a different world with Olivia Newton-John, this time full of laser zaps and magical teleporting people and big dance numbers with the dancers on roller-skates.  But as much as that seemed to fit the mold of the alternate-universe of GREASE, there was still something that felt quite wrong about everything I was seeing, that felt like there was something disastrous lurking behind what I was seeing.  In short, I could smell a flop even as a kid - and so could most of America, who avoided the film while buying the soundtrack.

Sadly, I bought the soundtrack AND saw the movie.

Literally EVERYTHING about the movie felt wrong to me.  It felt like everything they did was a mistake.  Where I wanted to see a story about Olivia Newton-John flying around through space shooting light lasers out of her hair, instead I was treated to basically the exact opposite of what I consider a handsome man sitting around moping about love and art while trying to open a roller-skating rink.

Now, don't get me wrong - I LOVED roller-skating and did it every chance I could get.  I think I've spent more hours rolling in a circle listening to "She-Bop" than Cyndi Lauper probably has at this point.

But I was still incredibly disappointed in what I'd experienced.  I wanted all the laser beams and futuristic romance that the trailer had promised, but in a way that didn't make me feel embarrassed to be in the theater the way I felt while watching XANADU.  Sadly, though, such options didn't seem possible in the world of movies or television.  Walking out of that theater, I felt like the Summer of XANADU was the Summer of Disappointment.  I was in a perpetually mopey state, and felt certain that no amount of glitter or sparkle could fix it.

But, I was wrong.

Not too long after the XANADU fiasco, my family moved to Oregon.  There are whole other stories to tell about that move, but this is the part that's relevant to this blog entry and the idea of confluence.  I should probably point out that the move did not, in fact, have anything to do with XANADU, but Chaos Theory says everything is connected, and I still believe to this day to a degree that XANADU caused all kinds of unpleasant aftershocks in all our lives.

To say I was unhappy about the move is an understatement.  But one thing I liked about my new house in Oregon was that there was a 7-Eleven down the street.  We didn't have 7-Eleven on the East Coast.  They're seen by so many people to be a bit of a blight, but to me it was like a bastion of amazingness to have such a place right near by my house, within biking distance, for three VERY important reasons.

1. They had candy bars.
2. They had video games.
3. They had comic books.

Now, at that time, where I used to live, none of these things were as easy to find as you might think.  The local grocery store near my old house had a very limited supply of candy.  There were a few video games here and there at grocery stores, but usually only ASTEROIDS.  

And comic books?  Well, if you were REALLY lucky there'd be a garage sale where you could get some, and there were the aforementioned basement comics at my grandparents' house and the odd comic at a magazine rack at the local hospital, which weirdly-to-me-at-the-time stocked more comics than most other places.  I get now that they were meant to be purchased to  comfort sick or bored kids, but even understanding that doesn't change the fact that I didn't especially want to go to the hospital to get comic books off the magazine rack.  

And we won't talk about the local pancake restaurant that was had its own magazine rack filled with Christian comics about how horrible it was to do anything that weird super-villain floating in the clouds disliked.  Those were just bizarre.

But the comics at 7-Eleven?  That was a different story.

They had row upon row of comics, proudly displayed on something I've since learned is called a "spinner rack."  I looked for a picture to add to this article but couldn't find one that wasn't in someone's private office or covered in rust.  Suffice to say, I loved that rack and the huge variety of comics it afforded, and I'd beg my parents for enough cash for a Dr. Pepper Slurpee, a Whatchamacallit candy bar and a comic book.  

And so it was that I came to discover the world of the X-MEN - and to be sure, the powerfully-inspirational women of that super team will each in turn get their own article.  But the reality is that it wasn't Rogue or Storm or any of those women who got me to spend my parents' pocket change on my first issue of UNCANNY X-MEN.  It was Dazzler.

That issue pictured above, #130, was my very first X-MEN comic. And I absolutely loved it.  I read it the moment I got home, and then read it again immediately afterward.  And then I read it again after that.  I didn't touch my Slurpee.  I didn't touch my candy bar.  I just lay on my stomach on my bed and read it.

There, on the page, fulfilled, was the goddess I had dreamed about seeing in XANADU - the one I had been denied.  She was that roller-skating superhero who shot lasers and saved the world for romance and adventure in my imagination.  And she was amazing to me, the perfect hero to represent me, to be a character I could have adventures with in the way boys my age loved Spider-Man.  I loved her costume.  I loved her powers.  I loved absolutely everything there was to love about her.  But, ultimately, there was only that one issue.  And by the time I'd read that one comic enough that the pages came apart and the cover was lost and I had to reread it in loose-leaf format, even my parents realized there was something special about it, at least to me.

Since I was aware comics came out, for the most part, once a month, I begged my parents to give me enough cash to go back to the 7-Eleven and get the next issue of Dazzler's Adventures with the X-Men.  

Alas, it was not to be.

Alas, it was not to be.

I enjoyed that issue, since I had come to like the X-MEN from the previous one, but it was hardly the same without Dazzler's amazing awesomeness.  So, I kept begging my parents to buy X-MEN in the hopes she'd come back.  But she didn't.

So I sulked.

One day, while sulking, I was talking to my father and explaining to him I wish I had more comics with a member of the X-MEN called Dazzler.  I don't think he knew - or even knows now, probably - that I was talking about a disco-dancing, roller-skate-wearing laser-light-show diva with blue butterfly make-up, and he probably thought Dazzler was some space pirate who resembled Han Solo or something, but that didn't matter.  

What mattered was that he revealed to me that during his trips to and from his new workplace in the city of Portland, he had come across a comic book store.

Portland suddenly seemed like a magical place of wonder.

"A ... comic ... book ... STORE?" I gasped.

"Yeah," said my dad.

I remember just staring at him for a long moment, and then asking quietly, "Can I go?"

"We can go," my dad said, "but you're going to want to buy a lot of stuff, so I want you to go there when you've earned some money."

Well, those who have read my previous blog posts know how that went.  I got some odd jobs and gathered together the funds to sufficiently satisfy my dad that I'd made enough money that I wouldn't be asking him to foot the bill for comics.

So we went to my first ever comic book store.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the trip, mostly because it was a very negative experience and the shop owner was an incredibly unpleasant man who thought I was more of an annoyance for asking questions about comics than he wanted to waste time with.  I will say this:  if you're a comic shop owner, please don't just say to first-time visitors to your store who ask if you have comics with Dazzler, "Look for yourself, kid."  

They might not want to come back, and you might lose thousands of dollars or revenue and go out of business and get replaced by a coffee shop.

Anyway, despite the lack of assistance, I came away with a slew of comics, spending every dime I'd earned.  Here's what I got.

This ...

... and this ...

... and this ...

... but, most importantly, I also found THIS.

She had her own series.  My goddess of comics had her own series.  And not even the likes of Spider-Man or Iron Man or Nightcawler could measure up to her splendor, as the cover showed.  That cover spoke to me on a level that probably the artist never understood nor intended.  It said to me that here was a woman who was so strong, so confident that she can skate past the most well-known heroes of comics, and do it with a lightshow while singing.

Now, I understand from what I've read that Dazzler was originally designed to be a super-heroine called The Disco Queen as a tie-in with Casablanca Records,  and that her origins were rather crassly commercial and were designed to be a movie/music/comics multimedia franchise-starter.  I didn't know that then and I don't care about it now.  It doesn't matter to me.  I mention it only to point out that even the most crassly-commercial efforts can be of striking importance in someone's life.  

I didn't see the behind-the-scenes issues.  I didn't see the character as a marketing decision or an attempt to sell this or that kind of media.  I saw her only in terms of her being so specifically symbolic of what I craved for an inspirational hero that she was like a beacon of light and power to me.  

It didn't hurt that, in an effort to promote the character, they put her up against so many of the heavy-hitting villains of the Marvel Universe.  DAZZLER was my gateway to the X-MEN, sure, but she also paved a way toward interest in other characters, like the FANTASTIC FOUR and the SILVER SURFER.

But, through it all, Dazzler was my reason for reading those adventures.  She inspired me, as I said, like a beacon of light.  Her powers perfectly represented, to me, the embodiment of the power of self-expression.  To me, it wasn't just light she was emitting - it was the essence of herself, her song made manifest.  Since comics are a medium of silence, where the sounds come from one's own imagination, Dazzler's songs existed to me, in my head.  And they weren't crass pop songs.  I imagined her having the most beautiful voice imaginable to me, because only such a voice could create the powerful light she used.  I didn't see pop-song lyrics they'd throw in for her "musical" numbers in the comics.  I saw Alison's own deep-seated feelings - and, often, mine, simplistic as they were, complex as they were, reflected there.

DAZZLER was a confluence of media - a music company working with a comic company trying to make concerts and movies or tv shows.  It was an early example of the kind of "cross-promotion" or "synergy" in creating franchises that is now common today.  

That it didn't work and only resulted in a comic in that incarnation of the character isn't important to me, and shouldn't be important to anyone in my opinion.  The disco-influenced origins of the character are often seen as a reason to dislike the character without giving her a chance.  

I'm, likewise, a confluence of all the good and bad things that happened to me.  I'm a product of a trans childhood.  I'm a product of moving often as a kid.  I'm a product of the music I've heard.  I'm a product of the movies and shows I've watched.  I'm a product of knowing a laid-back pre-hipster flower-girl wannabe babysitter who talked smooth. I'm a product of THE PARENT TRAP, THE BAD NEWS BEARS, THE NORTH AVENUE IRREGULARS, GREASE and XANADU. I'm a product of Dr. Pepper and Whatchamacallit.  I'm a product of New York and Oregon and Georgia and a bunch of other places.  I'm a product of being tricked out of seeing the movie I wanted to see. I'm the product of mean people not wanting to bother to help a kid.  I'm the product of a helpful but misguided dad, and a doting mom who was just clueless.  I'm the product of Dorothy Hammill's haircut.  Everything I am now comes out of the back-issue adventures of my past, and so as I write this and reflect on all this, I'm feeling a distinct lack of regret.  

Here's why - even though I'm a product of all those things, I don't let them define me.  I recognize the influence, but I refuse to call myself a victim of this or having suffered that in a way that defines who I am.  I may be a product of all those things, but I'm NONE of those things.  I'm me.  I'm Dee Emm Elms.  I'm Dennis Elms.  I'm Denny Mike.  I'm all of those things, but when I write my own signature, I write it Dee Emm Elms because, ultimately, I define myself even though all those experiences helped get me to where I am today.  

In a sense, it's the same with Dazzler.  I do think those dark clouds of negativity about the commercial creation of the character have, indeed, kept her from becoming the star of the comics universe she could have been, it's true.  But Dazzler has a tendency to shine on, even with dark clouds around her.

She survives, and her glow endures.  It's blocked by darkness time and time again, but she returns again and again, showing up even now in X-TREME X-MEN.  Can we say the same thing about many other "non-headliner" mutant characters, that they've remained in the universal subconscious of comics readers to the point where the writers return to them over and over again despite their lack of headliner status?

But none of that is what truly matters to me about Dazzler.

What matters to me is how she inspired me, the idea of a woman whose song could become visible to everyone and had a physical, tangible power.   The power of her song, her expression, could hold back the Heralds of Galactus.  It could defeat Doctor Doom.  It could slay dragons.

And if her song could do all that, what could mine someday do?  hat's the power of Dazzler to me.  Always has been.  

Do I think it will continue to be, though?  Do I think Alison Blaire will keep inspiring me and sticking around at the fringes of the Marvel universe like she has for decades?  Do I think she'll probably never be a front-running player, but will always be there, a dependable X-WOman (yeah, Marvel, you need to rename that comic) and an endlessly entertaining )?  

And do I think that she'll be around someday in the future to help inspire some transgirl to glow with her own visible song?

Oh, hell yeah.