A Matter Of Taste

Today as I was driving home from grocery shopping "Uptown Girl" came on the radio so I started rocking out to it for MaryJane's benefit because she just loves it when I act the fool, especially if there's lip-synching involved. After The Boss was finished yearning we were fortunate enough to get Jagger hollering about how his whole world was black and his ranting got me to thinking about my taste in pop culture. For some unfathomable reason, I have always been attracted to stuff that is more than a little off the beaten track and while that predilection has resulted in a few great suprises that the rest of my peers had to wait a few years to discover, it hasn't done me any favors in the "fittin' in" department. My very first little-girl crush was, of all people, John Belushi. His death devastated me and worse, I was too young to understand why he died. When I should have been yearning with The Boss along with my peers, my sister and I were putting my father's old Beatle records on the player and revving it up to 78 rmp so The Beatles sounded like The Chipmunks. When I was a very young adolescent, my friends and I bought tickets to some G-rated Disneyfest so we could sneak into the first Evil Dead movie. My friends hated it--they were used to Alien-style horror--but I loved every stupid second and made a mental note to check out any future Sam Raimi flicks, plus I developed a huge not-so-little-girl crush on Bruce Campbell. During my brief stay at public high school I had the clueless balls to sign up for and participate in a stand-up comedy competition. My peers had very appropriately stolen style and material from folks like Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal while I was so besotted by Irish comedian Dave Allen that I stood on a high-school stage and tried to tell "guy walks into a bar" jokes. And people thought Carrie White's prom was a bloodbath. Speaking of good old Carrie, I was begging for Stephen King novels when I was eleven because I had stolen my mother's copy of The Shining when I was seven and chilled and thrilled all through many a night, but that's the only King book my mother had. In the mid-'80's I was harassing the local video store for Jackie Chan flicks and even-then-hard-to-find Eraserhead. The Vietnamese owner was more than happy to stock them, but getting my mother to rent them for me was another story. I might be one of the first fourteen people in the country to know who Ren and Stimpy were because I begged my mother to drive me to an animation festival at the artsy-fartsy nobody-goes-there-but-potheads theater downtown that featured the very first Ren and Stimpy cartoon ever made. I think it was five or six years before I saw Ren or Stimpy again. In Catholic boarding school my friends all read French Vogue and Cosmo magazines. I read Fangoria and CineFex magazines. I had to get those magazines at a comic book store, which brought me into contact with Peter Bagge's "Hate" series and the early work of Alan Moore. I was informing my "Gotta Have Faith"-loving friends that George Michael was gay. I didn't even have the sense to become a Goth Chick--at least that was a recognizable stereotype and one adopted by thousands of fat, self-hating girls all over the country at that time and ever since. Even now, you won't catch me knowing what happened on "Desperate Housewives". I didn't really get into "Seinfeld" until it started to come out on DVD. I still love "I Love Lucy". My sister Molly had to tell me what the "Numa Numa" song was. Mythbuster Adam Savage is the only man I'd leave my husband for (sorry, Bruce).