I will send a pack of frogs to destroy you.
Frances - "that's my kind of frog"
What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.
If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.
“Because life is better when we leap together.”
— Kermit the Frog
Portland’s Protest Frog
“There was this guy in Portland dressed in an inflatable frog costume,” Frances says as her eyes fill with sparkles. “He was taunting ICE by wiggling his pelvis at them, pushing the line.”
Then her tone darkens and her eyes sharpen, “They grabbed him, held him down as they opened his air hole, and sprayed pepper spray inside his suit. And then, they kicked him while he was down.”
She pauses.
“He showed up the next day and did the same thing.”
Another pause.
“And I was like— that’s my kind of frog.”
Minnesota’s Protest Frog
Now, you have to understand what this means for a Minnesotan. Generally, as a culture, Minnesotans don’t wiggle our pelvises at anyone. We aren’t as open and flamboyant as our Portland friends. We don’t judge them for it, but we also don’t feel comfortable doing it ourselves. Remember, we are a people who apologize for taking up space when someone else steps bumps into us. “Ope, let me just sneak right past ya” is how we move through the world.
And here’s Frances, a woman in her fifties with a list of chronic conditions she doesn’t like to talk about, inspired to be a frog who felt the temperature rising and jumped out before being boiled alive.
She’d been attending protests by herself for nearly ten months, keeping a flip-chart of protest signs in her car. A stack, six or eight pages thick, bound together, each one added as the news cycle changes.
“I try to make them useful for pedestrians and drivers,” she says. “Simple message on one side. But then on the back, breaking news — stuff people can read if they’re stuck at a stoplight.”
One of her signs is frog-themed, a Bible verse: I will send a pack of frogs to destroy you.
But then, around Halloween time, she got her own inflatable frog costume.
The frog changed things.
People want selfies with the frog.
And people don’t talk to the frog.
“I can wander around and just... witness.”
The frog is a sort of permission slip for Frances to see things and do things she wouldn’t normally see or do. But it also gives permission to children to point and squeal, and for their sensible and practical grown-ups to laugh and be ridiculous.
The frog breaks the wall of Minnesota Nice by saying, “We’re allowed to feel things in public.”
“It’s like being a mascot,” Frances says. “Some people don’t even know the story of the Portland frog. They just know there are frogs now. These protests are a very low-rent Disney World.”
And then, the frog costume gets her an exclusive pass to a special club of frogs!
At a family-friendly protest in Burnsville, one of those sprawling suburbs where the parking lots are vast and the minivans are plenty, there were four frogs. They divided up along a long stretch of sidewalk, evenly spaced, sentinels of absurdity waving at passing traffic. Parents slowed down to point them out to their kids in the backseat. Teenagers rolled down windows to take videos. For a few blocks of suburban Minnesota, the resistance looked like a very strange parade.
Protest Frog Love
“We do this thing,” Frances says, already laughing. “The slow romantic run. Slow motion. Like, I finally found you — leaping toward the other frog.”
Picture it: two inflatable frogs, arms outstretched, running in exaggerated slow motion, with the Chariots of Fire theme-song playing in the background. The dramatic yearning of a rom-com climax, they collide in a hug on a suburban sidewalk flanked by protestors with signs. .
“And then they start doing it too,” Frances says. “The people watching. They start doing the slow-motion run toward each other.”
This is what Minnesota looks like when we finally let go. Who knew that a costume and a flip-chart of protest signs could puncture a hole in rage so that the joy can squeal out?
Even when, and especially when everything else feels like it’s falling apart.
This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.
It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.
If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.
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I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜