Bette Dangerous, And Other Women Who March

On January 23, 2017, I wrote the post below in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, after having marched with hundreds of thousands of people who flew in from all over the world.

I am revisiting my archives. They exist like time capsules of pain, defiance, hope. I am leaving them raw as I wrote them, a mother struggling to sway the wind with her words, trying to fight fascism with her pen.

You can read my original Bette Dangerous post here at my Maewestside Tumblr. 🤍

Here it as written on January 23, 2017:

BETTE DANGEROUS: And Other Women Who March... by heidi siegmund cuda, aka maewestswide

I’ll never forget the day Anna Nicole Smith gave up the ghost. It was February sweeps of 2007, and for #BIGNEW$ it was manna from heaven. The lovely trainwreck that was Ms. Smith was milked 24/7, with wall to wall coverage in all her boosomy glory. She was such a dish that the syndicated boy$ and girl$ trotted out her remains all the way through the holidays.

Beautiful trainwrecks are always ratings juggernauts, and they gave her facetime day after day to ensure hefty end of year bonuse$. Any time ratings sag, they go for the low-hanging fruit: jon benet (tragically, still dead); the kkk (tragically, still there); and casting shade on Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a full-time industry of the modern #gop. Even today, there’s some obscure twerp in bumf*&k who only gets ample FaceTime on #BIGNEW$ because he continues ye ol’ black widow routine on #HRC. A gag that started in an op/ed piece titled “Blizzard of Lies,” when a Nixon speechwriter got his facts wrong in the New York Times in ‘96, and no one called him out. 

Let me be clear when I say I have no respect for the modern #gop, because my #gop mentors wouldn’t suck up to the pageant queen. They would be strategically figgering out how to stabilize the union so their wives would sleep with them again. Or husbands.

They would have walked beside John Kerry and his dog at the Women’s March on Washington.

By the by, I am making a short film on the March, because when you have love in your heart, you don’t need much else. I was able to document the Women’s March on Washington because my mentors felt there might be some value in sending a news veteran there not currently shackled by a corporation. They supported a purveyor of truth in the eye of the Love Hurricane that didn’t have a foodchain attached to it. 

Voila. 

As I was seated on the plane with all the other pink-hatted enthusiasts, I was besieged with text messages warning me about danger from across the various ponds from those still tuning into FEAR TV. I gleaned from what I was reading that some thought we were marching with the baby killers and castrators. Whatevs. I haven’t watched a moving screen with a multitude of dizzying banners willingly since I exited stage right. Seated next to me was director/activist Dave Ambrose, who slipped me a dvd copy of the Greg Palast expose, “The Best Money Democracy Can Buy.” (I promised to watch it on my mini DVD player after I finished my study of Bette Davis in 1935′s “Dangerous,” where she performs Shakespeare ‘drunk,’ thus winning her first Oscar.)

Thanks to the generous support of some badass punk rockers, reformers, artists, and activists, a girl like I was able to be on that plane and present at The Revolution on behalf of #freepress. 

I was blessed to be teamed with a Veteran of the Fourth Estate as my running mate, producer/videographer Doug Ross. With a modified rig and a gopro strapped to my chest, it was veni, vidi, vici baby. We came, we saw and we conquered corporate controlled media.

#Freepress is slicing through the pre$cripted narrative and gumming up the works with a surgical precision that could only come with decades of #BIGNEW$ expertise and the kindness of strangers who repurpose my work on twitter. 

No small feat when you consider the enormity of the money chain we’re disrupting. Each initial headline I read by #BIGNEW$ about the March confirmed that they’d missed the point entirely. A real revolution was taking place, while they were still showing reruns of the pageant guy carny. It was just as well. 

The entire world united in love to show solidarity to those marginalized by the Billionaire Boys Club that scripts the #BIGNEW$ narratives, so it would make sense they didn’t get the memo. (As people argue one station is better than another, I remind them when a half dozen multinationals own most of the media, and billionaires own the rest, whose truth are you getting? )

As I flew into DC on the second plane I’d hitched to get to the March around midnight Friday (I didn’t care to make any appearances during the day on Friday. You could catch a carny act like that any night for a five spot and a pulse), unfortunately a moving TV image caught my eye. 

Because I suffer from Post Traumatic New$ Syndrome, I can’t watch tv but as I deplaned late Friday, I was assaulted by a headline in the airport, which referred to the Slovene as our first lady. Waterworks ensued, and I went into a brief emotional tailspin, but recovered almost as quickly, as I saw a fellow marcher in a full body catsuit and platform combat boots.

As my crew and I met up the next morning to stroll among the million women who marched, we also danced and shimmied with the men who love women, and elderly men, and babies in strollers, and women who flew in from Sweden and Australia and Ann Arbor. 

Yes, a salty 100-year-old gal from Ann Arbor offered #freepress this sage advice: Ms. Mary Parker says women have come very far (she should know, she made her appearance here on earth three years before voting was legal for women). But she admonished, we still have very far to go and the way to get there is through hard work. 

Ms. Parker herself is no longer able to walk. So she rolled.

As I enveloped my soul in that sea of unbridled love, intentionally interviewing women of a certain age for their wisdom, we spotted two little women from New York. They were standing on a wall, with a captivated crowd, singing: “When I say ‘girl,’ you say ‘power.’ Girl! Power!” I watched them go through it a few times till they’d exhausted themselves. And even though you’re not supposed to stage in the field, the spirit of Bette Davis knocked me out of the director’s seat and in her Yankee voice, I heard myself saying, “Okay girls, now once more from the diaphragm!” With the poise of two mini queens, they sucked in some air, and let it howl. Doug Ross got it on wax.

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Above, Mary Parker at the Women’s March, January 21, 2017.

Below, highlights from the film I made from my trip to DC, January 2017:

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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