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/
