If I gave myself the assignment of writing a tag line for my autobiography in tabloid style, ‘I Slept with Labor Secretary Chao and Lived with Oprah’ would definitely be in the running, along with, potentially, ‘I Shared a Bed with Kate Clinton’ or ‘I Went Joyriding with Gwendolyn Brooks.’ Sure, for pure sensationalism, I could say something like ‘I Had Laura Bush’s Love Child,’ but in the first place, eeww, and in the second place, the trick with tabloid writing is that there needs to be at least a kernel of truth somewhere in the phrasing. Kate Clinton and I did, in fact, for instance, share a bed: we sat on a dorm-room bed together, along with the woman who is now my partner, while waiting for Kate’s show to start at Northern Illinois University, and I once gave Gwendolyn Brooks a ride from her house to Women and Children First Bookstore—and it was a joy for me. It’s less titillating, to be sure, once I’ve filled in the details behind my tabloid lines, but adding those elements of truth will, I hope, keep me from getting my Gap Easy Fits sued off!

Now, up until the morning of this writing, I wasn’t absolutely sure I actually had slept with the Elaine Chao who is U.S. Secretary of Labor in W’s cabinet. But ever since she was named to that position, I started wondering whether she was the same Elaine I’d known when I was 16. And the more time that passed, the more obsessed I became with finding out: I searched for information on the Internet, I wrote to Laura Flanders, author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, and I laid out the facts, as best I could, to everyone who would listen. I started haunting the Department of Labor Web site, looking at Chao’s photo to see whether I might recognize the young woman I knew 30-plus years ago, but I couldn’t be sure.

At last, I decided just to jump right in: I e-mailed the Department of Labor’s historian for the facts—just the facts. I doubted I’d get a reply, but what did I have to lose? Then lo and behold, an e-mail arrived: the woman who now oversees my wages and benefits and all aspects of my work life and who probably regularly sits at the same table with John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld is the same woman who once slept in the twin bed across from mine in our dorm room at the University of Bridgeport Pre-College Science Center. We didn’t have a lot in common then, and I suspect we don’t now, given that she is in Bush’s cabinet and all and is married to a senator from Kentucky while I am not allowed to marry the woman I love and the closest I get to being a Republican is putting Log Cabin syrup on my pancakes. Yet for some reason, it was important for me to know.

And Oprah? I still can’t be certain of the truth of our intersecting domestic situations, but I can tell you that we are the same age (only a couple weeks apart, actually)and both lived in housing projects in Milwaukee at the same time. I’ve written a note to the ‘Oprah’ show to ask whether she might not have lived at Parklawn, in the early 1960s, or gone to Congress Street School, but so far no reply. True, I don’t remember an Oprah Winfrey in Miss Armstrong’s class the way I remember Elaine Chao at Bodine Hall in Connecticut. But then again, I don’t remember the names of any of the students at that grade school, so one of them could just as well be an Oprah Winfrey as an Ellen Johnson!

Of course, despite the thrill of close encounters with the famous, there are some drawbacks. For instance, I now know that if I play the Kevin Bacon game, substituting Bush for Bacon, I am only one away from Bush! How horrifying is that? The up side, though, is that I’m also only four away from Kevin Bacon. Other drawbacks? That might depend on Elaine Chao’s sense of humor, if she sees this—and how many degrees of separation she is from the IRS.

© 2004 by Yvonne Zipter.

Yvonne Zipter can be reached via e-mail at yz@press.uchicago.edu or via her Web site, www.yvonnezipter.com.