While I was listening to all the news coverage of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, I began idly googling the Kennedy family and was drawn to the women, especially Rosemary Kennedy.
She was different, troubled, but most likely not retarded as has been printed repeatedly. Some reports speculated that she probably had an average intelligence, but compared to the future president and his competitive siblings she just seemed retarded. She may have had learning disabilities. Some speculated that she suffered from mental illness exacerbated by her inability to meet the exceedingly high standards of her birth family and the Catholic Church of the period. Rosemary Kennedy was prone to emotional outbursts and seemed to like the attention of men. Maybe she expressed anger at the double standard when the men in her family were encouraged to sow their wild oats, while the women had to avoid “the thing the priest says not to do”. In another culture, in another time, in a different family, she might have been happy and successful. (Or not, as in the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass”.)
I think of the Clowns Ex Machina work we do with Kendall, in our all women troupe, riffing off cultural images and expectations. Some of my most successful improvisations in the studio have at their core attempts to maintain some physical manifestation of a feminine ideal. The failure brings simultaneous laughter and tears because when a clown does it the absurdity is obvious. When it happens in real life.
Well…
Rosemary Kennedy was given a lobotomy.
There is a photograph of a pretty bright-eyed young woman, Rosemary sharing a laugh with her little sister Jean, a freckle-faced girl with braces on her teeth who looked into the eyes of her older sister with obvious admiration. It was taken about a year before the lobotomy left 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy completely incapacitated. Jean would have been about 13 when that happened. Jean is described in the press as the shyest and most guarded of the children of Joseph P. Kennedy. In 1974, Jean Kennedy Smith founded Very Special Arts, a non-profit organization that promotes the artistic talents of mentally and physically challenged children and is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.