There is a girl out on the sea   Floating on a pink surfboard   With a picnic lunch and parasol   Sitting there like a typical girl      You don't know me but I've been watching you all day   I thought that by ignoring you, perhaps, you'd go away   I thought it was just too much sun as I faced out across the bay   Hearing all these voices telling me how to spend my day      Then I turned around and I saw you standing there   Talking all this time, talking like you care   It's been ten years and you haven't gone away   So I'm finally speaking up, it's time to have my say      First of all, my name isn't Mimi   It's Ruth, Ruth Mimadoni Castradicus Phaterpithecus Triumvatini   And I come from a family of ten children   A tomboy, the youngest, I learned to fight before I learned to walk      To fight for my place in a space without grace   All cannons open by the age of two   By six I ruled the schoolyard, by fourteen, I ruled the shopping malls   Loud, active, restless, arrogant, aggressive and strong      I couldn't understand these flimsy things called teenage girls   They scattered before me like ineffective dolls   So I bullied them even more in my consternation   Trying to make them break out, trying to beat them into consciousness      And then one day, I was working on this little bit of a thing   Trying to whip her into three dimensions   She was shaking and looking confused   Way beyond her ken      I was just about to give her one last kick   When all of a sudden, she got real silent, I mean, real silent   And from somewhere faraway, someone called my name   Ruth Mimadoni Castradicus Phaterpithecus Triumvatini      And a pink surfboard was handed to me   And a voice said, "Her name will be Mimi"   And they gently urged me forward to the edge of the water   And we moved out onto the sea, Mimi and me      And the language between us was wordless and hung in the air   And I spent a lot of time thinking about chains   That bound the others but not me   And then I started to feel so trapped by feeling, oh, so free      And some days I hated the pink, I hated the pink   Pink for weakness and girls and little posies   Pink for subjugation, oppression, asexuality, moral shrivenness   Ignorance and painted toesies      And yet, it's pink that is my friend out here   Out on the sea that I'm learning to fear   Pink that's showing me the way   Learning how to not have my say   To hear what you might have to say      Stand up, Mimi, stand up   And so you're saying 'stand up' to a natural athlete   It's much harder for me   To sit here feeling, oh, so incomplete      Something strange occurred   On the local beach that day   One girl paddled out to sea   The other slowly walked away