I was just sipping my latte and trying not to look older than dirt in an arty-farty espresso shop, when a heated debate broke out between a pro-sexuality feminist dancer and a farm-raised feminist (Read: Her feminist ideas planted and raised in conforming rows). The dancer, who's actually a friend of mine who holds a B.A and dances part-time at a local club, and the anti-porn feminist both looked like standard issue, 20-something females: short hair, piercings, baggy '70s retro clothing and clunky round-toed shoes...........................................
So I'm sipping their barbs:
"You're playing into and promoting the male paradigm that keeps women oppressed."
"No. I'm proud of my body and I'm not willing to settle for the corporate oppression that only pays me $6.50 an hour." And I'm grunting in agreement with my friend's points but staying out of the fray because they both think my walnut sized brain (really, just a cerebral cortex with a head of a pin left over for singular thoughts: hamburger, pussy, cars, fight, game, TV, dollar, beer, more beer) can't handle the diametrically opposed viewpoints of the dancer and the dilettante. But in actuality, as their argument raged on, there was a mad scientist in me who's thinking: You know, they look and act so much alike, why not splice them together into some kind of hybrid clone?
Dolly be damned. The mad doctor wants to clone the sheep with the wolf, the Einstein with the Marilyn Monroe and the Gloria Steinhem with the Larry Flynt... just to watch them trapped together inside the same body and brain.
To hell with replication; a whole basketball team made-up of Michael Jordans, or an entire Fox TV line-up of nothing but Melrose Place. I want fusion, not fission and division and identical twins. Who wants 20 Anna Nicole Smiths? There wouldn't be enough aging tycoons left who wanna leave all their money to Sweet Charity. I want to create the hybrid clone fusion of Anna Nicole Smith and, say, Woody Allen! Imagine that maniacal creation out on the stuttering hunt for an aging tycoon with an adopted daughter she could... play with. And then our Woody Anna would make a movie -- twisted, darkly humorous, undertones of Macbeth -- about killing her husband so she and her step-daughter could inherit his fortune together, casting herself in the lead, of course.
So I went deeper into the moldy recesses of my caffeinated brain to focus on the objective: How to splice together the genes of the anti-porn feminist with the erudite dancer? (The flared faux '70s jeans with the skimpy, holey, barely-covers-the-butt, cut-off jeans.)
All in the interest of advancement of science. And I discovered, Yes!.. using the same technology as a bunch of Scotsmen, who found one sheep they likes sooo much, they decided to make a hundred of her (instead of sharing her), that we, dear reader, will go one step beyond. Then we will stand back and let it happen. How else can the village idiots hope to understand the divergent viewpoints of the dancer and the dilettante?
Besides, haven't you always wanted to see a feminist at a microbrew-vegan-Birkenstock party (women: if you don't have birth control, just wear Birkies -- the surest form of contraception known to mankind) suddenly stand up and scream, "I wanna get naked now! So, line up those dollars boyz."
As we proceed with our mad, hybrid clone experiment, it's important to name her... She-Ra. "Go She-Ra. Go She-Ra. Give us some feminist rhetoric with that bump and grind."
She-Ra bends over to display her deepest, darkest African bush... She's a dancer who wants to show it, but a feminist who wants to grow it. The audience is aghast. Hirsute lovers are wetting their pants. Others are throwing disposable razors at her. She-Ra picks one up in perfect pirouette -- remember, folks, she's an artist -- and exclaims, holding the yellow and white Bic high over her defiant head, "This is a symbol of male oppression!"
She-Ra drops it and crushes it under her six inch, platform Birkenstocks, accented with wooly anklets. The former cop-cum-boot fetishist, Jimmy Doyle, picks his jaw and dick up off the floor. Tips She-Ra a 20. She-Ra snatches up the 20, "And this will go to Greenpeace," She-Ra proclaims.
Jimmy sheepishly asks if She-Ra has any square toed, clunky heel, zip-up '70s boots to wear stomping around at protest marches.
"Why little Jimmy," She-Ra hisses, "Do you want me to walk on your walnut sized brain in my scuffed-up Patty Hearst boots?"
"Yes, pahlease," Jimmy sputters.
"You swine!" She-Ra bellows. "I have an IQ of 162 and a waist of 22. Why should I, She-Ra, do anything for a tadpole like you?"
Song's over. She-Ra collects $213 in the triumph of beauty, brains and Birkenstocks, thus proving strippers can count and dance at the same time. And that politics, be it sexual or feminist, right or left, will always make you rich (and jaded), if you're a good fund-raiser.
Meanwhile, her creator and agent is figuring out his percentage on a calculator, when a drunken villager, named Phil, sets a garbage can on fire. In seconds, the rundown strip club on Broadway is engulfed in flames. She-Ra, who is accustomed to the fiery rhetoric of debate, is fascinated, not fearful of the flames. Her desire for the fire costs She-Ra her life, leaving the village idiots to wander off into the night. And Dr. Rex-n-Breathes must go back to the drawing board; and he's thinking,
"What if I crossed Mr. Rogers with Courtney Love... 'Let's take a trip around the neighborhood, kids... Over here, we have all the drug dealers where I used to buy my little helpers; but now that I'm a star, I just get doctors to write me prescriptions. So, we don't have to go to that neighborhood any more. And over here, we have the plastic surgeons' neighborhood. Remember, kids, the surgeon is your friend because only he can change the ugly duckling into one of the beautiful people, handing out Oscars at the Academy Awards. Oh, and over here is a sad place where my friend, Kurt, died. Remember, boys and girls, heroin doesn't kill people; shotguns kill people.'"