Technically, bumblebees cannot fly. Apparently their wings are too small to support their comparatively huge bodies.

Technically speaking, beautiful women cannot be intelligent or talented. Apparently, their brains are too small compared to their huge breasts.

But someone forgot to tell bumblebees, for fly they do.

Someone also forgot to tell Chrіstіnе Andеrsоn, for beautiful and brilliant is exactly what she is. And then some. She is a beauty-hater's worst nightmare: sun-nymph enchanting, wildly intelligent, and Mozart-talented, Christine is a writer, glamour model, speech and debate champion, music scholarship recipient, concert pianist, singer-songwriter and composer. And while she does not perform in the nude, apparently she has come darn close.

No one told her this just isn't done.

Christine is a child prodigy who has been granted by her fairy godmother her wish to be grown up. In her too-mature-for-her-age writing she bends and transcends time, moving effortlessly from childhood to blossomed womanhood and back again like a bumblebee, with words that shouldn't be able to fly, but do, impossibly well. Her striking beauty is captured with whimsy in photographs where she floats in mid-air, laughing, amused by her attractiveness, chased and admired by lesser mortals. But it is through her piano playing talent that it becomes clear that her wish to be a real woman was granted to her not by her fairy godmother, but by her fairy godfather, Wоlfgаng Amаdеυs Mozart. When she first sat at a piano this prodigy found she could 'just play'. She's been 'just playing' ever since. Can you hear Mozart laughing?

We encounter many children in our years on earth. Sadly, not many adults. Not real ones anyway. This is because adulthood comes neither from doing or believing just what you're told, nor blessings from fairies, nor from over constructed concepts. It comes when one realizes that one does not have to be a child at all, that one never did, never really was, and that the best thing about childhood were those moments when you felt powerful, beautiful, wise and free, in other words: grown-up.

At her best, Christine remembers these moments, in her writing, her music, and her pictures. This is what makes her an adult. And this is what makes her a child.

And this is what makes her important to women everywhere, although they may not know it. The treatment of women around the world these days is horrific. They are being butchered for their beauty and sexuality. In a piece I wrote about the abysmal treatment of women in fundamentalist Islamic countries, I said that the treatment of women in these countries will not improve until they are taught that female beauty and sexuality are not immoral and destructive. But who will teach them? We can't do it until we learn it ourselves. For as much as our society seems to adore female beauty, judging from the popularity of gorgeous women in advertising and the media, we still wink slyly at our own impropriety in doing so. We still think it's immoral.

Women are women's only hope. Beautiful women at that. And what's more: women who are beautiful and intelligent and talented. Women who are not afraid to demonstrate that their sexuality is one of their many talents, a tool for their own use and the pleasure of others as much as their intellect is, that their beauty does not threaten anyone, any more than their intelligence or musical talents do.

Such women are extremely rare, but not impossible. Chrіstіnе Andеrsоn is one.

Long before I'd heard of Christine, I'd often wondered what the people who think female beauty and sexuality harms children and degrades civilization would think of a woman who plays concerts of the most divine classical music for the edification of all, in the nude. Would they learn to embrace her beauty as a compliment to her music, equally divine and inspiring? Or would they decide to condemn the lady as immoral in spite of her uplifting music and physical gifts, hating her beauty enough to deny themselves the pleasure and benefits of her music and her genius.

Chrіstіnе Andеrsоn is forcing an answer to this question. To declare her immoral or superficial, beauty haters will have to reject her mind, her writing, her music, and her prodigious accomplishments. But it's the reaction to Christine, and women like her, from those of us in this part of the world that will ultimately determine the fate of all the women in the rest of it.

It's an uphill battle. Those who hate beauty hate it more than anything. They hate it more than anything else they hate, and they even hate it more than anything they love. They are creatures twisted beyond all human recognition by their loathing for female beauty and the values it represents.

Yet one gets the feeling that such a beauty and talent as Christine's will move through the world and her years on earth as gracefully and easily as she has moved from childhood to womanhood, and from Bach to rock, and from ball gown to corset.

We can't wait til this delightful daughter of happily delinquent talent grows up and saves the world.

We just hope no one tells her how.

Oops.

Vіsіt Chrіstіnе Anderson's remarkable website www.christineanderson.net

Feedback: dbell@bodyinmind.com