ABSTRACT
This one-and-a-half-pound infant, who needs to stay in the intensive care unit for eleven months, rouses the powerful forces of nature, medical technology, and devoted humans to keep her alive. This story begins with the power of hands: the skillful hands of the doctors and nurses that tend to the premature infant to keep her alive; the devoted hands of the adoptive mother who sews the many costumes Brite wears to express herself; the hands of both mother and daughter communicating in sign language due to the breathing tube in Brite’s throat that blocks her speech for the first four years of her life. This is a story about the power of costumes: the Cowardly Lion costume that four-year-old Brite chooses to wear on her way to the hospital for surgery and the Dorothy costume on her way home … There’s no place like home…; The Peter Pan, Jack in the Beanstalk, Simba costumes that Brite wears to express the boy in her for her starring male roles in the Theatre Adventure Program; the fierce Knight and Warrior Cat costumes Brite wears to fight for her life in the Knights and Ninjas and Warrior Cat Camps in my Mythic Play programs.
This is a story about the powerlessness of bodies: the powerlessness of the premature baby to stop the doctor from cutting a hole in her throat for a breathing tube and a hole in her stomach for a feeding tube; the powerlessness of the biological girl’s body over the boy that lives in her, and, the powerlessness of the teenage female body to stop Brite from becoming a transgender boy.
