Mutter Christmas, Emma Green

I thanked Jaime's mom for coming with us to the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities. Everyone else in the house had said, "No."

She guessed that since she'd been to every other museum in Philadelphia and likes to walk for at least an hour each day, it wouldn't kill her. However, she did, for the first time since I met her, agree to let us pay for her ticket.

Three adult admissions cost us $60. I would have paid $600, but still I stared at my mother-in-law willing her to lie about her age by just one year, so we could get the senior discount. She pretended to not see me.

The Soap Lady was just inside the first gallery. Postmortem bacteria had turned the fatty tissues of her body into a wax like substance that covered and preserved her corpse. I wondered if it bothered her that she was on display for something she did not choose or probably even understand, but then I remembered that there is no consciousness after death, and that must be very comforting to the person who locks up at night.

Next was a floor to ceiling display of skulls with tags that said things like:
"Woman. 18 years old. Executed for murdering her child."
"Male child. 12 years old. Tuberculosis. Gypsy."
"Soldier. 23 years old. Killed in fight at brothel. Catholic."
"Man. 44 years old. Idiot."

It was really something.

Downstairs, we saw part of a colon that has expanded to the size of a car tire. The poor man in the photo looked miserable, but the placard told us he wasn't constipated.

The American Giant's skeleton towered over Jaime, so for a quick second, I was attracted to it. Beside him, Mary Ashberry, a dwarf, stood with the crushed skull of her infant at her feet. Doctors had tried to save them by removing the baby with forceps but both died from the traumatic birth.

There was also an average-sized skeleton in the case that no one cared about.

Jars upon jars of diseased parts and deformed fetuses lined the walls interrupted every so often by wax representations of boils, tumors and rashes.

It was all incredible, but for me, the holiest of grails was the cast made of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined twins from Siam. Their liver and band of tissue that connected them at their sternums was preserved in formaldehyde underneath.

I was admiring these childhood idols of mine next to a kid and his mother.

She looked over at him and said, "This is what will happen to you if you smoke," then she made direct eye contact with me daring me to contradict her.

I thought, "You could have said that about LiTerAlLy anything else in this entire museum, and it would have been more believable."

But the kid just said, "Another person will get stuck to me? Cool." Kid's already acquainted with the ganja.

Having fully maintained our appetites somehow, we left to pick up lunch for the family.

When we got home, my sister-in-law asked me how it was. I told her it was life-affirming, but probably not everyone would agree. She still thought she should go sometime, but I told her to for sure wait until they're done having children...


...because I want to take them there.

She'll thank me later.

Jaimesport

When family and friends come to visit, Jaime's top priority is to take them to Jamesport, an Amish town, located about 20 minutes north of where I was raised but also to definitely not stop where I was raised.

I'm not sure if it's because he knows there will be puppies for sale or because he likes their hats (hats for humans [tragically not for puppies]).

Both are straight up legit reasons, but I'm over it and assume our guests aren't interested.

I'm wrong, though.

We finally took Jaime's parents there last week, and they fucking loved it.

But I'd learned on a previous trip that despite getting a kick out of it, Spaniards and Jamesport are a queer mix. A stranger made the mistake of asking Jaime where he was from, and I've never seen him square up so fast. He thought better of it, though, and instead tersely reminded the man that HE TOO HAD AN ACCENT BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS AN ACCENT then he bought two homemade jams (rhubarb and peach-honey).

He only ever gets that nasty when he's making paella, and I'm the only victim of that hate crime.

This time, it was my father-in-law,  Alfredo, trying to order a beer at a Mennonite restaurant that set the awkward tone for the trip. I thought our poor 13 year-old server was going to shit her frock. We got him a root beer instead. He liked it.

I'd also told Alfredo not to take pictures of the locals because they do not like it, and one time they flipped off my Uncle Louie for doing it. He responded by holding the phone up to the window to record as we passed a horse and buggie driven by a mother with her three nesting doll boys.

I glanced over at their tiny faces under those sweet ass hats and felt a pang of regret that they would never even get the chance to binge drink and expose their penises to their Yale classmates before becoming Supreme Court Justices.

It just seems so unfair.

After asking where a public restroom was and receiving the answer that the climate crisis isn't real and god said the Muslims would always be fighting, we were entertained by a yodeler who was a horse wrangler for a Spanish matador who was best friends with Ernest Hemingway, but if liars can yodel like that, I don't want to know the truth. 

Our last stop was to visit the puppies at a general store with gas lighting. We bought a bag of about 20 dozen potatoes and the craziest shit we could find including the bacon bits that Jaime nearly choked to death on before discovering they were imitation. 

"What are these yummy red, crunchy things on my salad?" 

Again, bless that poor server girl. I hope she's recovered from the mess of waiting on a table of alcoholic vegetarians. 

Special Fucking People- Prince Randian

If I had access to a time machine, I would first go back to the year 1993 and convince Quentin Tarantino to recast Prince Randian as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction with all due respect to Scientology's John Travolta.

We would then go further back to 1920, collect Prince Randian, fit him for a decent black suit and introduce him to his new best friend, Samuel L. Jackson.

That's all I would change about history. Everything else seems fine.

Jackson would carry Randian around set like a clutch until it was time to pop some caps in some motherfuckers' asses.

They would be best friends, and the only reason I know this is that I've seen Prince Randian (The Caterpillar Man, The Living Torso, The Snake Man) roll and light a cigarette with only his lips. It was truly inspiring, and the only other person who could probably do it is Mr. S. L. Jackson.

Randian was maybe brought to the U.S. from Guyana by P.T. Barnum in 1889. I don't know why he was there because he was purportedly an Indian man who spoke Hindi, French, English and German fluently like the royale with cheese he was (he was absolutely for real not a prince).

I have ten working fingers, not to mention hands and arms, and I become absolutely outraged when Duolingo reminds me to use the free app to practice a language I want to learn more than anything else in the world.

He was married to a woman BEFORE he was a famous performer, and they had five children. I don't know much about Princess Sarah, but to hitch your wagon to a horse without legs, especially at that time, seems like a very short trip.

My boyfriend in high school cut the tip of his pinky finger off, and I was like, "EW."

But by all of the one account I read, she genuinely loved him, and they had a happy marriage.

He supported his large family by slinking around stage in a tube sock, writing letters, smoking and shaving. They only thing I've done on that list all summer is wear a single sock.

He, like many of his special contemporaries, acted in the greatest film of all time 💯Freaks💯, and he was amazing.

A showman to the end, Prince Randian, by then a grandfather, died of a heart attack at home just a few hours after a performance.

       Prince Randian (real name unknown) was born without limbs due to tetra-amelia syndrome, 

but that didn't stop him from being a badass motherfucker. 

See him roll a cigarette here...

Sources:
Drimmler, Frederick. Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. New York: Amjon Publishers, Inc., 1973, print.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/prince-randian

Special Fucking People- Julia Pastrana

Jaime and I met because we'd tricked each other into thinking we were hot.

Before I knew him, I knew his Facebook profile, and damn, was it a playground. Most photos focused on his ripped bod doing something dangerous without a helmet or duck-facing in front of an ancient ruin. The others were of bright, chipped murals on the backstreets of small Asian countries or fruit.

I did not know that he was also stalking my equally curated page because he'd been obsessed with redheads ever since his parents sent him to Ireland at the peak of puberty to maintain his English.

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times...thank you-thank you-thank you, Alfredo and Carmen.

But this story isn't about how desperate we are to appear attractive to the world. It's about how Julia Pastrana traveled the world only because she wasn't. What would she have given to look like one of the photos I untagged or deleted because I thought I looked like an inbred pharaoh?

Maybe nothing?

She was photographed in professional studios appearing in newspapers and playbills at a time when most people lived and died without any photographic evidence they ever existed. She traveled to other continents wearing silk shoes and organ-asphyxiating-but-worth-it corsets. She spoke at least three languages fluently and was a talented singer and dancer. She was friends with a countess and married to a man who said he loved her.

The only countess I've ever met named herself that and has a penis (she did tell me she loved me, but I think she tells everyone that).

But, and I suspect this was more likely, maybe she would have given up all of this to have not been so special?

Julia was born in Sinaloa, Mexico in 1832 or 1834. Her mother's death when she was still a child resulted in her being sold by one of her uncles (most likely the one who voted for Trump). In the 1850s, audiences didn't come to see her sing and dance. They came to see the thick hair that covered her face, chest, arms and legs. They came to see the deeply burrowed eyes she kept focused just above everyone's forehead, and they came to see her nose and lips: two features often cited as proof she wasn't fully human.

Her manager, a real twat named Theodore Lent, was also her captor, exploiter, rapist, embezzler and beloved husband. He'd married her to prevent other twats from stealing her away with ludicrous promises of being treated like a person.

Anyway, the twat's micro penis (I can only assume) was functional because she got pregnant.

At the advanced age of 26 or 28, Julia gave birth to her furry son. The infant died two days later. This is where the book loses me, though, because it said she died of a broken heart shortly after him.

It's more likely her death was the result of traumatic childbirth at a time when all your girlfriends chipped in for a casket at your baby shower.

And this was when the twat really began to shine.

Devastated not by the loss of his wife and child but by the loss of income, Lent had the two of them mummified, stuffed and sealed into glass display cases.

This is also my plan for when Jaime dies, but he will rest in peace under my bed.

Julia Pastrana continued her public career as a freak postmortem for another ONE HUNDRED years until her corpse was lost. The author of Very Special People ends her chapter with a plea for anyone who has knowledge of Pastrana and her son's whereabouts to contact him, so he can conclude her story.

But bitches had other plans because he died before solving the mystery.

Turns out the Norwegians had her (the baby had been eaten by gross mice after being vandalized by grosser teenagers). Fellow Mexican artist and admirer of Julia's, Laura Anderson Barbata, was as pissed as you are and led the decade long fight to bring Julia home to Sinaloa.

Finally stripped out of the silk and whale bones she'd worn since her death in 1860, Julia Pastrana was dressed in a traditional cotton huipil handmade for her and buried alone on February 12, 2013.

Julia Pastrana had hypertrichosis terminalis (excessive body hair), andgingival hyperplasia (enlarged gums and lips) and a dick of a husband. Only one of these things killed her. 

Sources:
Drimmler, Frederick. Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. New York: Amjon Publishers, Inc., 1973, print.
http://juliapastranaonline.com/
https://hyperallergic.com/421575/artist-repatriation-of-julia-pastrana/

Special Fucking People

I was on the phone with my cousin, who has had her incredibly unfair share of bad luck, talking about her latest bout with some undeserved bullshit.

Somehow always pragmatic, she implied that I could relate because bad things happen to everyone from time to time.

It was a great opportunity to lie, "MmmHmm. Yes, I understand."

But instead I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about. Bad things don't happen to me."

She did me a solid by laughing, but we both know it's true. I used to try to fabricate the struggle like Republicans do, but I've learned to embrace the rainbow filled bubble in which I float through life.

...Glenda the Good Witch style except without helping people.

It's why I gravitate towards salacious gossip, true crime podcasts and stories about freaks--a term I use with the utmost love and respect.

Many years ago, when I used to read, I found the first thing my father ever bought himself. I couldn't have known then as I opened the strange cover of Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities that I would go on to read it in its entirety at least a dozen times and reference it many more, but I did know I had found something magical.

I became so obsessed that my dad eventually just gave me the book, and it's one of the few that have survived every move.

It is because I can walk down nearly every street nearly anywhere and be ignored that I am sympathetically curious about people who cannot...even though they've never asked me to...even if I'm around that friend of Jaime's who told him, "Red heads aren't attractive because they don't look like fully formed humans." Fuck you, Louis.

In an effort to write more this summer instead of doing what I really want to do -*-unnecessary DIY projects that piss off Jaime and watch the Netflix-*- and to honor those who've given me hours of inspiration, I'm going to post an undetermined amount (possibly one) of small essays about people who are fucking special.

I'll start with Julia Pastrana.

Slight Delay

I do not go to the Germans for laughs. I do not go to the Germans for the warmth of a human's touch.

I go to the Germans for scheduling.

That's why I didn't flinch when I saw that Lufthansa had decently priced tickets to Valencia. My only concern was how soft my pretzel would be.

We arrived in Frankfurt the morning of Jaime's birthday, April 20th, tired but excited he'd get to spend the afternoon and evening with his parents.

There was a slight delay before we could board for Valencia, and we cracked the same joke. Wouldn't it be hilarious if the Germans got us there late, and all the Spaniards were like, "Jesus, get your shit together guys, time is of the utmost, chippity chop!"?

And I believe it was this slightly offensive ^^^FORESHADOWING^^^ that fucked us.

The flight was uneventful, but while making our descent, the captain announced we had to turn around and land in Barcelona.

It was windy, our plane was small, and even though it would have been hilarious for our tombstones to read that we died on 4/20, I preferred to live on that day.

Like always, I got teary eyed as the sea got closer to my window and Montjuic came into view over Barcelona. My heart almost burst as the Catalan air traffic controller with the most frighteningly aggressive mullet (typical of the city) welcomed us to our second home.

The nostalgic feelings were short lived, however, as the crew informed us that the airline had decided our best option was to return to Germany and try for a later flight. Of course, they couldn't force us to remain on the plane, and we were welcome to find our own way to Valencia from the tarmac.

Pretty much every passenger told anyone in a Lufthansa uniform to gah fuck themselves, and the race was on to get to Sants Estacio for the 4:00 train. We split the cab fare with a nice couple from Stockholm going to visit their daughter and ordered our tickets in a group of four, so we could get the comfortable seats with a table in the middle even though it was only a three hour trip.

A three hour trip. A three hour train ride. A three hour tour. A.Three.Hour.Tour.

The Swedish man who was actually British bought us some Heinekens and crisps (which are chips but not fries) as both a thank you and happy birthday gift to Jaime who really had been the champion of the day while cooling everyone's tits.

About an hour and a half into the trip, just past Tarragona but far enough to be in the middle of nowhere, the train lit up like everyone who wasn't traveling on 4/20.

The same wind that had fucked us before had fucked us again by blowing out the electric cable on our line from the North of Spain to the South stranding two thousand people.

But we didn't know that yet, nor would we know anything for quite a while because we were in the hands of Spaniards, and Spaniards would be very proud of their constant not giving of any fucks if they ever gave a fuck, but they never do.

Over the course of the next 7 1/2 hours, we got to know our companions very well (just not their names) over several more Heinekens near the village of Mont Roig. A place I hope to never see or hear pronounced ever again.

To be fair, Renfe, the train company, did give us one free drink with our ticket about 5 hours into the hostage situation, which further pissed everyone off except for me because Jaime ordered a tea, which prompted the only nice thing he's ever said about the United States.

"It's the size of a fecking thimble!" Is what he would have said if he could have remembered the word for thimble. He admitted he missed the size of American drinks and free water.

I don't know what Europe has up its much smaller butt than America's giant butt about drinks, but really fuck the size and price of their drinks.

I didn't share that with our friends, though, because I knew gosh darn well that had we been stuck on a train for this long with a bunch of Americans, everyone's head would have been shaved and each train car that wasn't on fire would have a different gang color and flag.

Not long after midnight, on a day that wasn't Jaime's birthday, two charter buses pulled up to the small stop at Mont Roig. There weren't enough seats, but that sounded like a problem for the elderly and the invalid.

We secured a couple near the back and wondered what horrible thing was going to happen to this mode of transportation. I wished I'd peed on the train one last time as we pulled away.

I'm not even going to try to explain how we got wedged into a one way street in a different small village even though Valencia is a straight shot on the highway, but it was just after that that we borrowed yet another phone to call Jaime's parents and tell them for the final time to go home. We would get a taxi from the bus station.

Time no longer had any meaning when we finally pulled into Estacio Nord in Valencia. I let Jaime worry about how we were going to beat the crowd to a cab while I looked out onto the street. I caught a glimpse of a tiny familiar face trying to see through the heavily tinted windows. It was my mother-in-law Carmen who had been at the airport at noon, the train station at 7 p.m. and the bus station at 2 a.m.

Always on time and never giving up and going home when it comes to her 34 year-old baby boy.





4/20 Babies be like...

Pray for Us Sinners

I can't get into it right now, but the only way Jaime and I can watch our show is on a small laptop with headphones always attached to an extension cord running from the surge protector across the room.

Each night, Jaime simply covers his balls with a pillow, plugs the charger into the computer, inserts the split headphone jack beside it and untangles my free airplane earphones and his Apple ones before connecting them.

By that time, we're tightly tucked beneath our down comforter, so it drives him nuts when I'm restless, have to pee or get a drink of water. All things I cannot do at the same time.

Saturday night, we were about 20 minutes into an episode when I swore I could hear someone moving around the backyard. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything, so it was more a feeling of commotion. I kept squirming and taking a single earphone out to hear better, but that's as far as I was willing to go with my investigation.

The fifth or sixth time, his frustration propelled him out of bed to prove to me my true crime podcasts had turned me into a paranoid meerkat.

He threw back the sliding door curtains and before his face could turn from fuck you to oh fuck, he said, "Oh shit."

He explained that a tree in our backyard was on fire, and I kid you not, I hesitated. Our house is insured, but the chance to really stick it to Jaime is rare.

I regretted the pants I'd chosen as the truck pulled up because the first time an emergency vehicle had come to my house, the actual hottest firefighters of the year of our lord 2008 had gotten out, and I looked like shit then, too.

This time, a hot lesbian and not hot dude got out. My pants were fine.

They couldn't spray active power lines with water, so the most helpful advice they gave us was it was okay to fall asleep as long as our house didn't catch fire while we were asleep.

They left, and Jaime wanted to get back to our screen friends before we lost power like we owed them something.

Fuck that. It was time for some Night's Watch shit. My Jon Snow ass took the first shift.

The lines and tree had been sparking or on fire for about 20 minutes when I decided to film it. Eleven seconds later, I caught the moment that gave me the push I needed to finally buy those velas de santos I'd been putting in my cart then back on the shelves of Price Choppers for years.

Like most things Catholic, they really tie the freezing, dark and desolate room together.