O2yl

I realized early no one who heard me would take me seriously

I decided to let my mind do the talking.
The abstract reflected in the real opened to me.
The shock of understanding was delirious and irresistible.
Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, I knew them all,
intimately
through the mail.
I would send coy letters with very little personal information,
filled with snippets of formulae I had devised
to be alluring, insightful, so none of them could resist me.
I was their unsung lover, muse who opened the secrets of the stars
and the factories that birthed them;
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

It was a total accident I got the part.
I kept moving West until I hit the Pacific Ocean
I was in L.A. and saw a handbill advertising
“thin actress with a voice that can break glass,
chalk squeaking on a blackboard,
a woman who will drive men mad”
I thought, I can do this — who would have known
I was made for the part?

(Ms. Oyl is arguably one of the greatest and oldest of cartoon history. She first walked onto the silver screen in 1919, ten years before her paramour Popeye. To have spoken with her, and recorded her innermost history was an honour. GG)