Towering Rage & Scathing Wit
The chocolate & peanut butter of our times
I (Karen) want to give a special shout-out to Penny Pearce of The Penny Magic Show, who performed her absolutely perfect-for-this-very-moment song “The Shrink (“Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?)” on a Santa Monica, CA cable access show in 1983, per Vintage Annals Archive. Beware, it is very shrill and screamy and of extremely poor quality, and it is currently my favorite song. Step aside, “Espresso” and “HOT TO GO!,” there’s a new song of the summer. This stunning performance is what my brain feels like at all times at this point. Would anyone like to start a Penny Magic Show cover band with me? The energy! The face! The hair! The outfits! The making something fun and angry with friends! The line “By the time you’re well?!?! You’ll be 80!!!!” Listen, I don’t know if I will, but it sure feels that way and 80 honestly seems a little young. Is Penny 80 by now? Is she well? I hope so!
(“Why Do You Think You Are Nuts” was a bit of an internet sensation, um, 17 years ago and I apparently missed it entirely. It was featured on a favorite of mine from the days of yore, WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, all the way back in 2007. There’s a faux ‘40s rendition by The Apple Sisters from 15 years ago — I hate a winky-wink “this is so kooky” cover, but I’m a cranky jerk and maybe you aren’t. Sharon Needles covered it in 2013 on her album PG-13 and did her own fun faux-cable access video.
This Song Cast page from 2008 teases a comeback album with additional songs “I Am A Catalyst” and “You Could Blow Up The World Or…” which also sound like they might be a perfect soundtrack for life here in 2024, but I don’t think this ever came to be, which is very sad indeed.
Penny and Company reminds me a little bit of Lucille Caldado and her original song “Hairdresser.” I first learned about her thanks to Stairway To Stardom videos ordered from some mail order service in the late ‘90s and I keep a copy of her obituary on my phone because it makes me so happy that she was so loved. This is the sort of energy and spirit that I try to bring to karaoke. I love to sing and I’m not a very good singer but you know what, I give it my all and I try to be entertaining and sincere and serve as an example to other people who want to take a moment to express themselves via the power of song. Hulk Hogan just ripped open his shirt at the Republican National Convention. “That last sweaty piece of cheese on a pool party platter” is running for vice president. Why do you think you are nuts indeed?!?! At the very least, we can scream about it with our friends and look amazing while doing so.
A Deeply Mocking and Derisive Round-Up Of Jance Dance Vance Content
(or as he would probably love to be known, Jance Dance Revolution)
So Fascist Old Man à L’Orange has selected his running mate for the upcoming presidential election: Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio (aka “That last sweaty piece of cheese on a pool party platter”). That is indeed a thing that happened, and it’s as predictable as it is gross: the senator in question is the picture of early middle-aged good health, is decent at being on TV, and has written a bestselling memoir. He ticks more significant boxes on the policy front (sure, if we want to be generous, let’s call it policy), being vociferously anti-abortion, anti-no-fault divorce, anti-birth control, homophobic, queerphobic, and racist across the board. By his lights, if you are not a presumably straight, presumably cisgender white Christian man, you may not even be entitled to the status of human, let alone claim full citizenship.
Here at The Bossy Aerie, all three of us Two Bossy Dames know that what men like this fear most is the ridicule of women, and we’re delighted to provide a plate-filling serving of exactly that. Under the fearless, mercilessly satirical leadership of Dame Margaret, we ventured into the great fields of Twitter (the only entity we will ever intentionally deadname) to harvest and present to you the best, wittiest, funniest, silliest, most unrelentingly mocking content about this absolute unit of evil doofiness. This is around half of what we’ve posted so far; even more is available on Instagram, should you prefer; we encourage you all to share it as widely as you like!
In view of Jance Dance’s misbegotten literary and personal history-burnishing ambitions, we also have a small roundup of counterprogramming to share.
If you do nothing else regarding the dangerous toolbag currently attempting to steal Appalachian valor while lavishly evacuating his bowels on actual residents of that region, read Neema Avashia’s op-ed in The Guardian. Ms. Avashia grew up in West Virginia, and now lives in Boston. Her piece succinctly boils down a key element of the dishonesty of Vance’s claim to the region:
People like me and my family – immigrants who neighbor and labor alongside white working-class Appalachians – don’t exist in Vance’s narrative. Black folks don’t exist in his narrative. Queer folks don’t exist in his narrative. And in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.
I also really admire Alyssa Quart’s piece for LitHub, “J.D. Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession With Bootstrap Narratives”, which reminds us that this American myth is dominated by outright falsehoods by people who reaped the benefits of hidden familial wealth and by people who, like Vance, are brimming with “a bitter disdain for those he grew up among and the poor in general” holding up an entire region of this country for ridicule as “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”
If Books Could Kill brought back their episode dissecting Hillbilly Elegy from a few years ago, with a new introduction. It’s a great conversation between hosts Peter Shamsiri and Michael Hobbes, and is a pretty quick listen. (You may recall Michael Hobbes as Sarah Marshall’s former cohost on Certified Dames Favorite podcast You’re Wrong About, too!)
Longform reads more worth your while than Vance’s execrable nonsense include any of these recommendations from Book Riot – it’s worth noting that the subject is of such keen interest and the output of the region is so vast and so good that they created a tag to make it easy to find their entire archive on it. I’ve particularly loved Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (I read this now-classic when it first was published and should revisit it).