My Autobiography of Cynthia MacAdams:
I have a big mouth and tell people what I think and they don’t like it. Wild in the Streets, I’m in it.
I’m in the Bowery taking photos of everything and everyone disappearing, the punks and all my beautiful Stuyvesant buildings, the walk ups. I drink coffee all morning with Kate Millet and I pose nude for her and she draws my body. We drink Côtes du Rhône, smoke a joint, sit around a fireplace in Kate’s loft with Gloria Steinem, Marisol Escobar.
I have a way with light. I have my darkroom up on the third floor: Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Judy Chicago.
So I’m a woman in this lifetime, but “I’m not tits.” People want to shut me up. The farm girls at South Dakota State thought I was a witch, because I played one in The Crucible and they thought I really was one. I decided I better get out of there.
I bet my mother would have sent me in for shock treatment, if she’d thought of it. I was born a feminist. I was born at war with men. Men are a corporate entity. My mother left everything to my brother. Everyone wanted to shut me up.
L.A. is so damn silly [sound of champagne bottle cork popping] but I have no regrets: “I think we’re fools when we stop going with the wind, because the wind is a great guide.”
[Sourced from interviews in W Magazine and Veteran Feminists of America]
-Morgan English