Friday Goulash (Sunday Edition) 10-10-10

Simply overcome.

Once upon the 1980’s, a divorced working mother in the midwest performed the same ritual every Friday: she would collect all the dinner leftovers of the week and toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and a mysterious thickening agent.  She would refer to this concoction as  “Goulash.” “Friday Goulash” is a tribute to this woman and her potful of weariness. It’s in her spirit that I serve up a week’s worth of tidbits slow-cooked to dry-yet-strangely-sticky perfection.  In the words of  oatmeal militant Wilford Brimley: “It’s the right thing to do, tasty way to do it!”

Nobody’s Perfect, Superman

Attack of the Misplaced Genitalia!

The gays have long enjoyed a playful relationship with gender.  And why not?  Since many of us have already disregarded rules like “That’s an exit, not an entrance”, “No spitting tobacco juice on the sidewalk”, “The booty dance is not for white people”, and “Go to church!”, it’s not hard to understand how the social mores that rigidify and categorize human experience wouldn’t be much to our liking, either.  Gender rebels abound in the gay world, in fact.  Witness drag maven RuPaul and her Drag Race dynasty, a reality show that takes boys and turns them into men who will kick your ass if you have a problem with them looking like fabulous flamingo women.  Witness the mullet, a manishly short in the front, lady-long in the back hairstyle popular amongst rural lesbians that says “I fix trucks real good, hoss.”

Red Sonja and the Allure of Female Badassery

Any feminist can tell you who set off the flash point on the fuse of their worldview.  Some women will point to Gloria Steinem as their matriarch, or point to a quote from Bella Abzug, or a passage from Gertrude Stein or she might even reference some crack (word choice: deliberate) made by Madonna at some point, fer chrissake.  Me, I bow to the mighty, mighty Red Sonja. Red Sonja: “She-Devil With A Sword.”  Red Sonja: “The Warrior Woman of Hyrkania.”  Red Sonja: the Ultimate Badass.  Red Sonja came to me, folded delicately within the staple-bound pulpy leaves of “Savage Sword of Conan” #78.  Her story was one of brutality and transcendence.  As I am primarily a humorist (and therefore a secretly sensitive pillow-biter of a pussocrat), I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to discuss how she was horrendously robbed of both her family and her innocence by a gang of mercenaries.  But as the horror that was inflicted upon Sonja is pivotal to Red Sonja’s story, and bearing in mind there’s no laughing in feminism–clunk, there it is.  Sonja’s prayer for vengeance is answered by an androgynous representative from the League of Made-Up Sword And Sorcery Gods who offers Sonja invincibility in exchange for her chastity.  The only man who can have her is the one who bests her in swordplay. I was 14 years old when I discovered Red Sonja.  I’d grown up in a cultural climate in which women with aviator glasses and long straight hair burned bras on the news, so aside from a vague inkling that I’d been born into the losing team, (and the fact I hadn’t even developed a reason to own a bra, let alone burn one) I wasn’t much of a feminist at the time.  There was something about Sonja, though, encrypted within the contradicting combination of her voluptuous curves and deadly sword, trembled the sort of seismic shock to the consciousness that precipitates a quaking awakening.