The most extraordinary thing about a house of cards is that it’s anti-hierarchy. Democracy at its best. It’s not like poker or blackjack or gin where there’s a high card and a low card and a card you want and a card you discard. Everything is of equal value when you’re stacking them in a house of cards. Kings and Queens can be on the bottom or the top, supporting the weight of the low-numbered cards or balancing over them. A five can rest at a jaunty angle atop a ten, the fickle deuce can press intimately against its Queen with the same candor and innocence as it uses with the eight. And those Queens…oh those Queens. Those four little beauties. Funny how, even in a different card game, all of the queens are equal not only to each other, but often to the Kings and the Jacks. No clout. No magic. It’s nothing like chess. No backwards and forwards diagonal kicking the crap out of the other face cards’ perpendicular lines. The Queen is only as strong as the game she plays, as strong as the hand that moves her across a board or angles her in a stack or flips her onto a felt table. You love the Queen best not because she is all-powerful, but because she is nothing without you. Nothing without the power and precision of your ability to choose a path for her. To guide her. To cup her in your palm and make her your champion.
a house of cards...the ultimate display of gender and socioeconomic equality.
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