Philadelphia Weekly

Piece meal: Chess Bitch author Jennifer Shahade

don't think it's cool, but we don't always have to agree, right? My inspiration came in the form of an advance copy of Jennifer Shahade's Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport, a book about the surprisingly glamorous world of women's professional chess.

Shahade, a 24-year-old chess master from Philly, is a member of the American "Dream Team" and the U.S. Olympic Team. She was twice the American Women's Chess Champion, and has traveled all over the world to compete. She's never held a job; she makes her living playing tournaments, though in her spare time she teaches chess to underprivileged kids in New York. Like me, she has a degree in comparative literature. Unlike me, she once played an exhibition game of chess in an art gallery wearing a pageboy wig.

Her book, which I expected to be a first-person memoir, is much richer than a narrative account. It's a thorough history of women in the game, from the fascinating Garbo-like Sonja Graf, born in 1908, to outspoken party girl Antoaneta Stefanova, born in 1979. The women Shahade writes about are, for the most part, interesting, dynamic and attractive, which gives the lie to the stereotype that girls who play chess are nerdy and unappealing.

The issue of attractiveness dogs many of the top female players, who are objectified by their male peers and taken less seriously. Some of those women, it must be said, cultivate their sexuality--like Alexandra Kosteniuk, a Thora Birch look-alike who sells seductive photos of herself in a bikini on her website, and Maria Manakova, who poses nude in magazines and plays publicly in leather miniskirts.

Shahade doesn't condemn their behavior outright--her book is called Chess Bitch, after all, and her own press photo is intentionally pouty--but she's a headstrong feminist, and her writing is politically charged. She wrestles with the question of whether segregating the sexes in chess makes sense, and she challenges male professional players to clarify their position on women in the game.

In other words, she's got moxie.

I've always liked chess, but I hadn't played in a long time when I sat down to read Chess Bitch. Before I'd even finished the manuscript I marched over to the Franklin Mercantile Chess Club on 20th and Walnut and asked for lessons. The Merc, where little Jen used to play as child (her grandmaster dad's a member), is a decidedly unpretentious basement space, with players of all ages and races (though no women, as far as I can tell). Sometimes they're talking politics, sometimes they're arguing about rooks. Most times they're not saying anything, which makes the Merc quiet, warm and welcoming.

My teacher has a modified Fu Manchu mustache, which almost makes me feel like I'm in a modified Karate Kid. He doesn't call me grasshopper, but I sometimes feel I should be jogging through the Italian Market to get in shape for our twice-weekly meetings.

My teacher is very serious. I'm not allowed to do any outside reading or play a full game before the training is complete. (I cheated once and played an online game. He grudgingly accepted my apology.) If one of the very friendly men who play at the club interrupts my lesson with a joking remark, my teacher rebukes the person for the "disturbance." No fun and games at the game club, for God's sake!

There's no time for small talk either. For all I know my teacher lives in Altoona and spends his chess-free time growing giant pumpkins. Like a therapist, he's revealed nothing about himself. He's all business.

Soon, he says, I'll be ready for my big challenge: a game with a real chess player. So far I've just been a rank amateur--what real players call a "woodpusher." Now, though I might suck, I suck intelligently. I even know chess notation--algebraic and descriptive!

If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

When I told my real therapist I was taking chess lessons, he accused me of doing so merely for column fodder. (Ahem.) I sulked and disagreed. The reason I mentioned the lessons to begin with, I told him, is that since I've started, it's the only time I feel happy, and that's a problem.

I asked for more drugs, and though he approved a slight bump in the antipsychotic and the antianxiety pill, he was basically unsympathetic to my pharmaceutical desires. Which is what makes him a great psychiatrist: He's reluctant to push the meds. He wants to know what's really going on.

But I don't know what's really going on. I guess I'm depressed. The other night I got in the car to drive somewhere and found myself unable to move. I sat there for half an hour, hardly breathing. Later I thought, "What a waste of time."

The past two days I've hardly been able to make it into work, but I did manage to make it to my chess lesson. I told my teacher I was "under the weather," and he said, "You takin' the C?" Yes, I told him, truthfully. But vitamin C doesn't cure all ills, least of all brain funk.

In the middle of our last lesson--in the middle of my happy time--a guy burst into the room and said, "Mariano's at the top of City Hall, and he's gonna jump." My teacher and I looked at each other for a minute, each calculating the possibilities--just as we'd calculate the possibilities of each move on the chessboard.