Free Normal Gets You Nowhere by Kelly Cutrone

impressions, but I’m not the one to speak to those.) Before our tour, we were ushered into a screening room to watch a documentary about Eleanor’s life.
    This is when it all started to come together. As the film rolled, it hit me that Eleanor Roosevelt was a feminine force of superhigh consciousness and compassion, the counterpart to her husband’s famous political consciousness and ambitions. Although most other First Ladies in history have sat behind their husbands, Eleanor and Franklin were really something (in addition to being cousins). In fact, to me they were a great example of Shiva Shakti, or the tantric balance of masculine and feminine dimensions collaborating to create tremendous life energy and transcendental awareness. I began to firmly believe that Amma and The Mother sent me to Val-Kill for a reason. They wanted me to meet their sister Eleanor.
    One of my first symbiotic touch points with Eleanor was the opening scene of the documentary, when she stated that every powerful woman needs a home in the country to retreat to, a beautiful cottage where she can hear the sound of a brook. I knew this all too well, as I too have a beautiful cottage where I can hear the sound of a very cold spring. (Once you make some money, I highly recommend that you also buy or at least rent a country home where you can shower off the city each weekend; I think I’d be in jail by now if I didn’t have one.) Actually, my home was just twelve miles from Eleanor’s! And we had way more in common than that; like many powerful women in her time and ours, her sexuality was called into question. To be honest, I don’t really know who she slept with, and I don’t care. After learning more about her life, God bless her if she had time to sleep with anyone!
    Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman ahead of her time. The First Lady is at least expected to live at the White House, which Eleanor couldn’t be bothered with. She didn’t give a fuck about sleeping with her husband; she had better things to do! It got to the point that it was actually news when she showed up. This was probably because, despite the fact that she bore President Roosevelt six children, her husband maintained a lover throughout their marriage—who also happened to be her best friend. But Eleanor was beyond all that. She and Franklin were actually a very modern couple by the time they hit the White House. I mean, they had a handful of kids, he was banging her best friend, and somehow they still found a way to work together for four terms! Even when they were no longer intimate, they remained close, with Eleanor functioning as Franklin’s social conscience and generally keeping him in check. While he ran the country, she lived at Val-Kill, holding frequent press conferences on the issues of the day and writing a daily syndicated newspaper column called “My Day,” which she used often to disagree with the president. She’d write the column every night at midnight from her room, no matter where she was.
    In it, she revealed the consciousness of the true Universal Mother, full of clarity and compassion. Not only did she urge women to get out of the house and go to work; she fought for other groups too. The New Yorker penned a cartoon of the First Lady descending into coal mines to check on how the coal miners were doing. She’d call up her husband and say things like, “Franklin, it’s unconscionable you’re allowing lynching!” He’d say, “Why?” And she’d say, “Because, Franklin, it’s not nice!” At one point he said to her, “Lady, this is a free country. Say what you think . . . Anyway, the whole world knows I can’t control you.” 1 To me, this sounds like an understatement, but a generous move by the president nonetheless.
    I know no one’s taking a vote, but to me Eleanor needs to be at the top of the list of First Ladies throughout history, and in fact of Americans as a whole. I want to hear her mentioned alongside George Washington and