Lizzie Borden: Matchmaker

Robert and I still cannot agree on the date that we first met online.

I say it was Dec. 13, 2005. He says he has documented proof that it was Dec. 11 of the same year. So, for the time being, we compromise and say it was Dec. 12.

In any case, we both agree that we were brought together by Miss Lizzie Borden, famous as the O.J. Simpson of her times (July 19, 1860-June 1, 1927). Bless her heart, Miss Lizzie is the central figure in the axe murders of her father and stepmother, Andrew and Abby Borden, on Aug. 4, 1892. Like Mr. O.J., she was acquitted in the criminal courts, but is forever guilty in the majority of the minds that make up public opinion.

For some reason, I've always been fascinated by the story of Miss Lizzie. I think it may be partly due to overexposure to the 1964 Bette Davis movie, "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte," which caught my fancy when I was about 13 or 14. "Charlotte" takes the basic premise of the Lizzie Borden case --- an eccentric spinster, who may or may not have gotten away with a gruesome murder in her youth, lives out the remainder of her lonely life in the same community in which she gains notoriety. The main difference is that Davis' Charlotte is a Louisiana flapper from the 1920s, while Miss Lizzie was an 1890s Sunday School teacher in Fall River, Massachusetts.

In any case, "Charlotte" piqued my interest in the Lizzie Borden case and from my high school years on, I would periodically return to the story. The first book I remember reading about the Borden case was "A Private Disgrace" by Victoria Lincoln, who knew Miss Lizzie in her later years while Lincoln was a child growing up in Fall River. Lincoln's theory ("We all knew that Lizzie did it"), which is as good as any other that's been suggested, is that Miss Lizzie suffered from a form of epilepsy and killed her parents during some kind of seizure. Other writers have suggested that Lizzie, acting out of greed and/or an Electra complex, killed her stepmother out of jealousy and her father to keep him from finding out what she had done. (In the only film version directly based on the story, in which Elizabeth Montgomery played Lizzie, it was suggested that Lizzie avoided being covered by blood splatters by committing her crimes in the nude.) Still other theories contend that Lizzie was innocent and that someone else --- her mousy older sister, Emma; her Uncle John; a possible illegitimate son of Andrew's; or just some garden variety lunatic --- committed the crimes.

At this point, I hope the Borden case is NEVER solved. It's much more fun to speculate and make gallows humor about it. For years, when I have performed in coffeehouses and other venues, I've sung an old Chad Mitchell Trio song, "The Ballad of Lizzie Borden," (which the Trio lifted from the 1950s Broadway revue, "New Faces"), with hoedown-style piano accompaniment:

Now it wasn't done for pleasure

And it wasn't done for spite

And it wasn't done because the lady wasn't very bright

She'd always done the slightest thing that Mom and Papa bid

They said, "Lizzie, cut it out!"

And that's exactly what she did.

But back to Robert and me, and Dec. 12 (or whatever), 2005. Robert, divorced for several years and having broke up with a previous lover, was bummed out and depressed about life. I was living in North Carolina, unemployed and separated from my wife in what was a disintegrating marriage. Both of us had pretty much given up hope of ever finding happiness and so we turned, as many gay men do in such circumstances, to the Internet and the Gay.Com chatroom for Intellectuals, a place which should be subtitled: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

Amazingly, in the midst of arguments about politics, Liza Minnelli's marital woes, the merits of various kinds of junk food and the stuff that lonely men discuss in cyberspace, Robert and I found each other and went into a private chat. Within minutes, we discovered that we had grown up only 15 miles from each other in two wretched little communities in southeast Ohio; that I had worked with, not just one, but TWO of Robert's cousins, on both sides of his family; and that not only were we BOTH fans of the Lizzie Borden case (Robert uses it as a writing prompt for one of his developmental writing classes that he teaches at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College), but HE had actually visited the murder site --- which, amazingly, has been turned into the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, where you can not only sleep in the very room in which Abby was bludgeoned to death (the poor old fat thing was huffing away, making beds), but also eat the nasty last breakfast the family had (week-old mutton stew, cookies, coffee and bananas).

And when Robert sent me his first photo, he was wearing a Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast t-shirt, complete with Miss Lizzie's enigmatic face on it. Sigh ... how romantic.

We owe Miss Lizzie a lot. Not so much that we'd name our first daughter after her (both our ex-wives have the name "Elizabeth" as part of their names), but we might go and stay at her B&B for a honeymoon someday.