Chapter 19 | "32 Flavors” by Ani DiFranco

Squint your eyes and look closer

I'm not between you and your ambition

I am a poster girl with no poster

I am thirty-two flavors and then some

It makes me feel old to say it, but I can, so I will: Around the turn of the century (and millennium), I was working as the assistant to the program director at my college’s radio station, WUMB 91.9 FM. My boss, Brian Quinn, was the program director then. He was a super nice guy who typically started off each of my shifts with an invitation to “Sit down, take a break” and we’d catch up on whatever topics happened to be top of mind. Given the setting, music was a frequent point of discussion.

It was during one of those discussions where I learned that WUMB had been instrumental in launching and sustaining quite a few folk music careers that had strong fanbases in the Boston area. The one that stands out most in my memory was The Indigo Girls; I loved “Closer to Fine” when I first heard it on MTV. Brian urged me to keep an eye on the box of claimable promotional CDs and grab anything I found there.

One of the perks of working at the radio station was that sometimes free CDs would be up for grabs because promotional copies were sent out by PR people who didn’t bother to research the format of the station. Other times, those PR people didn’t pay close attention to where they had already sent CDs and we wound up with duplicate copies, which would go in that same box. One day, sometime in 1997, I found a copy of Ani DiFranco’s Living in Clip sitting in the box, which we already had in the rotation.

I snagged it immediately.

When I was looking for the perfect song for Chapter 19, I wanted something that spoke to what was going on not through Autumn’s perspective, but her mother’s. As I said in a previous post, most songs should be interpreted as representing what’s going on in Autumn’s head, but not all of them do.

This is one of the exceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_pMYbleHpU

Autumn’s Playlist: Beyond Your Peripheral Vision

Do you remember when it first dawned on you that your teachers at school had families, children, and their own lives outside the walls of school, that they didn’t only exist during the time you spent with them? Or maybe you remember when a similar realization that your parents didn’t suddenly poof into existence at the moment of your birth, but had their own births, childhood, teenage, and even some adult years before you arrived on the scene.

Those realizations are epiphany-like in their gravity.

It’s not that you were stupid; it’s that your brain had not yet reached the age-appropriate developmental milestone to put those connections together. As we age, we gain capacity to think, reason and make choices at a more complex level than we once could.

If you’ve seen the Pixar movie, Inside Out, you may remember that Riley gets a more complicated control panel with an array of new buttons for the emotions to manipulate. She’s entering puberty, so she’s emotionally more complex than she was as a child.

Autumn is going through something similar—not puberty, but a developmental leap into seeing her mother as a full person, not just her parent.

That’s what Chapter 19 is really about.

Autumn isn’t a child anymore, and with the confessions and explanations she’s getting from her mother in this chapter, she’s being trusted with adult-level information that’s necessary for her to understand more about why her mother made some of the choices she did.

Squint your eyes and look closer

I'm not between you and your ambition

I am thirty-two flavors and then some

This new information brings with it major epiphanies that change not only how Autumn sees her mother, but how she sees herself.