I Yam What I Yam

Once upon a time, back before the Republicans had important things to do, like prevent Americans from getting health care, they had to while away their days with more frivolous matters like preventing Americans from seeing art.

I, for one, was grateful to the Republicans for banning controversial art.  After all, I was raised in a suburban shopping mall. How would I have known what culture was if it weren't for some crusty old senator railing on about how I better not lay eyes on it?

Of course, it's easy to be nostalgic for those good old days when the government still funded art and thus could censor it.  

Back then, we young irate feminists would rant about how empowering it was that Karen Finley advocated peeing  in art museums that didn't display enough work by women artists or artist of color, or peeing in polling booths when only white males are on the ticket.

Now, alas, I live in mail-only ballot Oregon, so if I pee in my polling place, it also means I'm mopping my floor and trying to blame it on my cat.  

And most of my sisterhood-was-powerful feminista comrades have turned breeder.  They still talk about peeing all over the place, of course.

It's just that now they're talking about it because they're swapping stories about pregnancy-related loss of bladder control.

(Note to Republicans: if you really don't want teens to have sex, don't bother telling them about the merits of abstinence.  Tell them that sex leads to peeing in your pants.  And your car.  And in at least a few cases I've heard of, the grocery store.  Trust me, that will be more persuasive.

Or you could just teach them to use condoms.  That way we won't need nearly as many clean-ups on Aisle Seven).

All of this might explain why I never became a Karen Finley-level performance artist.  It's not that I don't admire her for shoving a yam you-know-where.  It's just that when given a yam myself, my inclination is to shove it into a nice sweet potato pecan pie.

Because that is my level of subversive behavior, really:  substituting yams for sweet potatoes.  

It sounds a little more rad if you call it commingling the ol' angiosperms.

But not much.

In fact, I am such a garden-variety goody two shoes, that when I was in a performing arts fest this weekend, it involved 

not yams in the can (and no, I don't mean the kind of can you can find in Aisle Seven, if you step rather gingerly around the all-too-apt Piso Mojado sign), but merely pancakes from a mix.

And even then, when I was having trouble getting my 1 cup measure into the box (I know, getting my 1 cup measure into the box sounds like it could possibly be a euphemism for some really perverse thing one of the NEA Four might have tried and failed to get funding to do, but really, it isn't), I was so goody two shoes that instead of just dumping my Bisquick all over the place (again, dumping my Bisquick all over the place is, alas, not a sexual euphemism), I just fumphered my way through the performance, hoping if I cut back on the milk, all would go well.

It didn't.  

Which meant no steaming stack of pancakes to buy the audience's love.  

But we did win their hearts with the video that played while my batter ran rampant over the sizzling-hot onstage griddle (again, NOT a euphemism).  

Because if you are going to confront an audience with a brilliant director's impenetrable storyline, you might as double your pleasure, double your fun by mashing it up with yet another brilliant director's impenetrable you-know-what.

And no, I am not talking about his yams.

The audience was certainly amused.  Though I don't think any laughed so hard they peed themselves.  Sorry, Karen.  Maybe next year.