Previously: Catching up with the Riot Grrrl movement after transitioning. 

A few months ago I was on the phone with Kathleen Hanna, describing to her my biggest life regret. I say that with scripted nonchalance; my inner teenager is still totally freaking out. In September, Hanna released a new album with her resurrected one-time side-project, The Julie Ruin, and I’d been assigned a Q+A with her for a magazine. She is warm and chatty and prone to cackling uproariously, which is what she did when I launched, with appropriate apologies, into an abridged version of this story.

In the fall of 1994, Hanna’s band Bikini Kill came to play at an unlikely little punk rock club sandwiched between a sports bar and a musclehead gym in a distressed strip mall outside my depressed hometown. What the place lacked in locational charm it made up for in geography. Pitted in the no-man’s land of northeastern Connecticut, it was a pit stop between Boston and New York, so bands were always passing through. That night, the line stretched out the entrance—which was, because this was a punk rock club, the back door—around a bunch of dumpsters, and into the parking lot. I stood in it with my boyfriend and a bunch of our boy friends. I was wearing a gigantic skateboard T-shirt, which I figured sufficed for a signifier that I was where I belonged: in the parking lot, among the dumpsters, and the punks and the boys. I was 15.

It’s possible I was jumping up and down or something, out of 15-year-old-ness and sheer excitement. I had read about Bikini Kill in magazines, and procured one of their 7-inches at Borders. In any case, my friends and I were being loud and silly, which caused an older girl in baby barrettes standing behind us to sigh dramatically. “The first thing they should have done,” she said to her boyfriend, “is make this an over-21 show.”

The un-rightness and unrighteousness of this statement seared me. We owned this parking lot, in our skateboard shirts! Just as we owned the cruddy student parking lot at the high school, the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot where we consumed copious amounts of iced coffee, the Wal-mart parking lot where hung out for absolutely no discernable reason, and just about every other parking lot in town. Parking lots were our place. And your place, in so many ways, was who you were.

Moreover, I thought right then, 15 was the BEST age. I wrote about this later, in angry handwriting, in a zine I made and distributed to a dozen confused classmates. “At 21, that’s it! It’s all over!” At 15, puberty was behind us and the future was ahead of us. Old age, meaning 30, was literally a lifetime away. Everything was possible.

Except, of course, what was impossible, which actually, when it came down to it, was quite a lot. For starters: I had a curfew.

Bikini Kill was headlining the show, of course. The other acts were semi-local ska-punk bands I dutifully adored but had seen a half-dozen times already. And as the night wore on, full of leisurely lags between sets, I grew increasingly anxious that I would have to go home before they took the stage. “If I could just see one song,” I thought. And, as it got later, “I guess I’ll just see them next time.” I did not realize how fragile an ecosystem a thriving punk scene in a remote small town was. I thought it was something that would always be around. I thought that was how the world worked. It wasn’t.

I would not figure that out until later, but something concrete did crystallize for me that night, in one of those cinematic moments where a couple seconds parses themselves out endlessly. Across the room, a girl was sitting on a stool by the merch table. She was wearing a tight gray grandpa sweater with the neck cut off and thick eyeliner, and when I met her gaze she half-smiled at me. In that instant, I wanted to melt into the floor in my knee-length skateboard shirt. I wanted my boyfriend and our dude friends to melt into the floor too. I wanted to rise anew and become someone like her, and be from where she was from.

It might be my memory, shading this moment with the context of the intervening decades of feminist textual analysis, but the way it seems to me now is that this was the moment that I realized that the club itself had somehow transformed into a different place than it usually was. On other nights, at other shows, it was the portal to a special place that I, tagging along with the boys, was permitted to visit. That night, inhabited by awesome, intimidating, otherworldly girls, it was a place where, hypothetically, I could actually live.

And yet, I didn’t. I went home on time and went to bed, and did not see Bikini Kill. The raw disappointment would gradually melt into a firm little knot of real regret, which would later—probably in college, after too much Carlos Rossi—crystallize into a permanent signpost in my life story. Even later, I would start to say that the things I learned when I did not see Bikini Kill became the pillars of the person I am, or try to be, anyway: someone who doesn’t anticipate a second chance, who breaks the rules when it’s worth it. In retrospect, the effects were immediate: I very quickly cut the necks off my grandpa sweaters and significantly amped up my eyeliner application.

That club closed soon after, and then the only shows to go to were hardcore shows at divey sailor bars, full of tough dudes circle-pitting. This was a place where girls were referred to, with a certain amount of disarming affection, as “coat racks.” This was because, when one lacked the impetus to throw oneself into the middle of a cluster of sweaty dudes floor-punching, one found herself standing to the side, holding the coats. But I kept going in the hopes of finding again an entry to that other place I’d seen. I knew it was out there because somebody had opened the door, briefly, and let me look in.

A couple decades casually passed, and then, one night last spring, I stood in a line that wrapped around the block outside a theater in Seattle. I was with an old girl friend and the boys we’d married, waiting to see a screening of The Punk Singer, Brooklyn filmmaker Sini Anderson’s new documentary about Hanna. The crowd buzzed with decidedly adult excitement; no one was jumping.

Aside from participating in the making of the documentary, Hanna’s also recently donated her archives to NYU’s Fales Library, selections of which have just been published in a book: Lisa Darms’s The Riot Grrrl Collection.

“Shit happens in 20-year waves, for whatever reason,” is how Hanna put it to me on the phone. She recalled, in the ‘90s, finding inspiration in Daring to Be Bad and Against Our Will and other feminist texts from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and said that part of the reason she wanted to make riot grrrl’s successes and failures available for public examination was to add to that canon.

It’s also personally cathartic. “In order for me to move on I felt like I needed to wrap up the past,” she said, tearing up a little. “I needed to say goodbye. Not goodbye to the anger, or to the fact that I care deeply about ending violence against women, but to say goodbye to the 25-year-old who wrote the Riot Grrrl Manifesto.”

I get it. I think a lot about the 15-year-old who was inspired by Kathleen Hanna to write her own (rather less effective) manifesto, and how awesome she was and how simultaneously ridiculous. Of course it’s not “all over” at 21! At 21, it’s still just barely beginning, and in fact, the older I get the more I suspect that “it” (whatever the heck “it” is) is perpetually beginning. It’s not just punk clubs in small towns that are fragile ecosystems. All the worlds we inhabit are malleable places, made and destroyed and made again.

More complicated still is that where any kind of adulthood or even sort-of-adulthood is concerned, the world is not so much a world as a multitude of worlds, one of which, famously, is illness. This is the particular one that Hanna has been inhabiting these last few years, suffering from long-undiagnosed Lyme Disease.

“I can’t even describe how awful it is,” she told me. “When you’re going through that and then you have a good week, you really, really appreciate it. There’s a feeling of no more fucking around. I’m going to be as creative as I possibly can be.” In The Punk Singer, Hanna, who has made an art manipulating her own vulnerabilities, making them into her sources of power, wears the physical and psychic pain of it the same way she used to wear scandalizing outfits. There’s a part where she’s in her house, filming herself in the throes of spasm. She’s in a place some of us haven’t been—not yet, anyway —and she is opening the door so that we can see in.

“What is my life story?” she asks, at the end of the film. “I have no fucking idea.” One of them, anyway, is that she made a place in our culture where girls like me tell ours. We unfurl our narratives, we curate our archives, we open up for examination and analysis not just the things we are proud of but the things we regret or would, at one time, have found shameful.

There’s a side effect to this. Little of the physical memorabilia we thought for so long was so precious and ephemeral is actually lost. And so recently, finally, I stumbled across this crappy video of that unlikely place on that unlikely night so long ago that changed my life:

In it, Hanna sings Bikini Kill’s “Sugar” to a bunch of people, mostly dudes in T-shirts. Her hand is alternately on her hip and in her ear, like she’s having trouble hearing, and though she sings her heart out— “I won’t play girl to your boy no more”—she seems kind of annoyed. It’s weird, all of a sudden seeing something, grainy but real, that supersedes a thing that’s existed for decades only in your imagination.

Ultimately, it corroborates Hanna’s own distinct memory of the night: “That show totally sucked.”

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]