Memoirs of a Modern She-Noodle
Wynn Frolley

About the Author

Wynn Frolley is the fictitious author of this fictitious memoir. She grew up in a time completely different from what came before and the now which came tumbling after. She survived TV programs named Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, as well as the sex advice column in her own father’s hidden Playboys. She saw the best minds of her older sisters’ generation start magazines like Ms., write books titled Our Bodies/Ourselves, burn bras outside the Miss America Pageant, march on Washington for the Equal Rights Amendment, and, in general, make a ruckus while still enjoying life on their own terms, unfettered by previous conventions or regrets.

Born and educated on the East Coast (she grew up on Fire Island and graduated from Bard), Frolley moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s for a brief affair with graduate school. Her life in L.A. was a cacophonous ride through crazy, hazy, sexy days let loose upon the world, by the post-1960s Lovelove-love-is-all-there-is zeitgeist.

She confesses to having studied rhetoric in a serious way once. Even now, she dreams in figures of speech. She suggests that the main problems between humans and their incapacity to really understand each other comes down to differences in their rhetorical styles and choices of literary devices. Making love without talking, she says, is one possible tool to overcome both the problems and the differences.

excerpts from the preface

"I’m not sure you’d know this about me if we bumped into each other at the grocery store, bending over the frozen macaroni and cheese or wheeling kids in shopping carts up and down the aisles foraging for milk and toilet paper, but truth be known––I was a She-Noodle, back when everybody had sex and they loved it and they loved each other (or they didn’t love each other, but they still loved the sex)! Those of us girls who went that free love way, together or alone; I call us all “She-noodles” because what better name to conjure steamy days and warm, buttery nights that melted our hearts and between our thighs and taught us all to fly?"

"It was an entirely different time from now—we modern She-noodles flourished out of the shadow of the Victorian closet, both at home and abroad, sunbathing bare-breasted on beaches worldwide. A lot of us had taken the bulls by the horns and other bodily parts and declared ourselves sexual beings, in contrast to our mothers, who were told and so told us, “Good girls don’t like it,” and, “You only do it for the man,” or, “It’s the messy but necessary business of making babies.” Some of us, a lot of us, found out it was more than that - plenty more than that - and so good, in fact, that “the first time with your one and only” would never be enough. So, we took our clothes off and went skinny-dipping in the possibilities, threw our bras to the wind, and had our own excessive adventures on the road to Wisdom."

"The tales scribed here are figments of a She-noodle’s imagination, based on times and places that have gone the way of Schwab’s Lunch counter and the Brown Derby, as well as body-painting parties and tie-dyed bell-bottoms. No matter, they are some of what makes a life, captured in a time between time, in the mid-1970s, Los Angeles, beginning and ending, overlapping in a Yeatsian gyre, the spiral that connects the points between the past, the present, the future—all at once. The real point is, whatever you do from here on out—stop and smell the roses! And try to get it while you can, because believe you me, nothing lasts—just ask Ozymandias!"