Cho 'nuff, Margaret got cool.
As I write today's Shiny Blog review, I find myself wondering: When did Margaret Cho get so cool? I guess it was over a decade ago when I first noticed her, and she was funny enough at the time as a young stand-up comedian. But I never really thought of her as particularly cool. If anything, she was imposed-cool, like MTV or some other arbiter of mandatory cool had demanded that I like her, especially because she was Asian American. You could almost hear the consultants saying “kim chic.” And I really hate cabbage. Makes me gassy.
So I didn't really pay much attention when Margaret got a sitcom. I vaguely remember watching the first episode and not really caring about it, let alone for it, and I vaguely remember it getting canceled. But I do remember with a bit more clarity that ABC or NBC or whoever it was (ok, maybe I don't remember) actually forced Margaret to lose so much weight to do the show that she suffered kidney failure and almost died. And you'll remember, if your memory's better than mine, that I had a little digression about that in my blog about Vivienne, where I pointed out that it will not really be safe to approach beautiful women in the wild until society's vision of beauty changes. Like, "when TV executives ask Margaret Cho to gain weight so she can play herself in a sitcom about her own life. Or when a guy can watch The L Word and go 'Man, I had no idea John Goodman was a lesbian. I mean, I know there was all that controversy when he kissed Roseanne but -- oh, wait, that's Mia Kirshner?'"
In a freakish twist of fate, there was a Margaret Cho stand-up thing on TV that night, and I thought "Hey, what a freakish twist of fate." So I watched it. It was her "Notorious C.H.O." concert, and then her "I'm the One That I Want" concert was on right after. Which is odd, considering that I'm the One That I Want was filmed a year before Notorious C.H.O. But sometimes television, like blogs, works in reverse chronological fashion.
Anyway, when I tuned in she was in the middle of talking about her adventures at a sex club, and she was saying that if she was going to be with a lesbian, she'd want the lesbian to be like John Goodman, not Sharon Stone. And at that, I really perked up. And I never really perk up at the thought of John Goodman, if you know what I mean. I mean, he was fantastic in The West Wing this season, but he's just not my cup of lesbian. I'm much more of a Sharon Stone lesbian kind of guy, preferably with milk, two sugars, and a Beyonce on the side.
But anyway, perked up, above the waist anyway (I mean, really, John Goodman?), I listened. And it was spectacular. As if Margaret was the love child of Lenny Bruce, Ian McKellen, and (because you know I have to work her into my blog somehow) Jillian Ann Durgin. Which I for one wasn't expecting, because Lenny's dead, Jillian Ann's celibate (not to be confused with Celebrate (good times, come on!)), and, even if she weren't, Sir Ian is gay. By the way, just a quick pause to note the quirky fact that Jillian Ann writes about masturbation and lesbian temptation but gives us a video about celibacy. How could this perverse inversion of medium selection have come to pass? My guess is, somewhere in America some not-so-many years ago, some second grade teacher at some tiny school in some small town was rushing to class too fast to notice that some papers she had grabbed off some copier were somewhat out of order, and so, before she had a moment to correct the error, she blurted out "Tell and Show" to her class instead of "Show and Tell," forever altering the minds of her fragile wards, and leaving us, my fellow future readers of today, bereft of what would have been a tasteful essay on celibacy and a really good bit of not-so-celibate video. And who knows what kind of porn-inspired innovations that video might have heralded? This, America, is why we need more teachers, better funded schools, and faster copier machines.
Anyway, back to Margaret Cho, who is neither celibate nor, on video at least, a machine. What she is is a tour de force. Like the late but ever timely Lenny Bruce, Cho likes a cuss or two or twenty, and she's definitely not afraid to shock. But there's also a skillful artistry to her performances, as she moves back and forth between the shocking and the mundane, lulling us into familiarity with narratives about her family and impersonations of her mother, and then pushing into brave new worlds of candor about her experiences with sex or drugs or eating disorders, and then weaving back to a now more liberated sort of normalcy, as she impersonates her mother reacting to her experiences. Over the course of her routine, she pulls us in, pushes us to new edges, and pulls us in again, gradually educating the audience and, hopefully, building up a new level of understanding and tolerance as she goes. And in that respect, she reminds me a bit of Jillian Ann, because she's taking some extraordinarily unpleasant experiences and turning them into a mission, an art form, a statement to everybody else to keep their chin up, their heads high, and their minds open.
So I was quite pleased to notice, as the credits rolled at the end of the show, that Margaret has a website. And, looking at the website, it has a blog! So I set about reading. And a few things struck me immediately.
First, Margaret has a great bob-and-weave writing style, seizing on words and dancing about on tangents and just having fun with language and debates on language (especially "foul" language). Really. she could be a professional or something. ;)
Second, like me, Margaret has umlaut issues. She's been having the same problem with getting an umlaut on top of "Fuhrer" and "Bjork" (not to be confused with bork, bork, bork) that I was having with "gemutlichkeit" in my post about Vivienne. Well, not quite the same issue, I suppose. Umlauts are probably afraid of Fuhrers, and the Bjork umlaut was going to wind up in a blog entry about Michael Jackson, and, you know, it might not have been comfortable getting caught up in the debate over MJ just yet. In contrast, any umlaut would want to perch atop my "gemutlichkeit", because it's just such a comfy word to sit on, you know? In fact, I've found it difficult to keep umlauts up there because they get so cozy they just drift off to sleep and then topple off, like tipsy kittens off a kitchen counter when the catnip's a bit too strong. And that's really a danger to passersby in the posts below. If the U.S. ends it war on drugs, I might replace the cozily inebriated German "gemutlichkeit" with the happily stoned Dutch "gezellig" for public safety reasons. In the meantime, though, font engineers sporting "Fight Terror, Grow Your Own" shirts are working on installing a safety net at the base of the "u".
The third thing that struck me, other than the hail of falling tipsy umlauts, is that Margaret has a McKellenesque approach to celebrity. I've mentioned before that I love the way Sir Ian writes about other people with this mix of ease and awe. Like, on the one hand, he's amazed to meet Sir Edmund Hillary and he's star-struck by Olivier, while, on the other hand, he's clearly comfortable engaging in hijinx with his fellow Lord of the Rings stars. And Cho has a similar quality, writing online fan mail to Michael Moore and Richard Pryer, while casually tossing out mentions of moments with Jimmy Eat World or Jerry Seinfeld. And let's not forget that she dated Quentin Tarantino back in the day.
The fourth thing that struck me, and this is the most important, is that Cho blogs about real issues. About the war on drugs and immigration and gay rights or hypocrisy after hypocrisy after hypocrisy. She even has a blog about whether she's a hypocrite for fighting for gay rights even though she's in a heterosexual marriage.
That last one's particularly timely this week. Unless you were too busy partying in that hole with Saddam to notice, you've probably heard that a few days ago -- just a night after night fell on Martin Luther King's birthday -- Bush called for a constitutional amendment to "defend the sanctity of marriage" against "arbitrary judges" who insist that homosexuals be given the same rights as married heterosexuals. I almost expected him to call gays Weapons of Marital Destruction, but if he did, we'd probably never be able to find any, and that'd pretty much put an end to Bravo's ratings, hurting NBC and its parent GE and thereby tanking GE's corporate earnings and projected dividends and the financial world as Dubya sort of vaguely knows it.
There will come a time in the next thirty years when we look back at this debate with the same embarrassed confusion we feel when we look back at McCarthy. Or Hanson. When we ask ourselves how recognizing gay marriages in Massachusetts made Britney marry and divorce in Nevada over the course of 55 hours. How the prospect of lesbian partners getting health benefits hurt the personal marital bliss of Bushes George and Laura. But instead, the day after Bush's State of the Union assault on civil unions, Ohio tightened its bible belt and banned gay marriage.
I can't really preach about this issue. I'm embarassed to admit this but, truth be told, I used to be really concerned about what would happen to American society if we legalized gay marriage. Like many heterosexual males I was terrified by the thought that, if lesbians were allowed to marry, and freely make love in the privacy of their own homes, with the doors closed and the curtains drawn, we might never manage to catch them having sex on tape again. And then Howard Stern's ratings would collapse and, worse yet, the internet would run out of porn, causing a spike in workplace productivity that would, in turn, make it easier for employers to work with fewer workers, thereby wreaking more havoc on American employment figures than an unelected President.
But this fear is, of course, ridiculous. In the age of Ashcroft, the Great Eye is ever watchful, no matter how blind or scaly or Scalia the Justice, so, as long as the Federal Bedroom Investigators get a live feed going for the masses, we will always have porn. (I find it a tad disingenuous, by the way, that the seller of that Sauron/Ashcroft 2004 shirt also touts a Nazguls for Bush one. For that matter, he's also got a Nazghuls for Bush going on, so he may be as confused about the spelling as he is about the preferred candidate for the Revilpublican Party. Actually, I could've sworn there was supposed to be a circumflex above the U, but maybe our shirty friend was having accent-fonting difficulties, much as Margaret and I have been suffering from umlaut issues. The circumflex, if you're wondering, is the upside-down-v-shaped pointy hat of an accent that often sits atop a U in French words. I think it has less to do with pronunciation than giving the U something to exercise with so it can stay all buff and sleek and not get pudgy like an O. Of course, in French, a language of luscious vowels from a land where even the Rive Gauche has style and only the Paris Hilton is gauche, even an O or an E might be found circumflexing in a word or two on the way to the cafe. Which is why French words sound so sexy, I think.)
So, clearly, there's no justification for a ban on gay marriage.
There should, however, be a ban on homophobic legislation. Right now, that ban is called "The Constitution," but Bush wants to amend it. Margaret does a much better job of writing about this issue than I can, and she does a great job of exposing the real problem with homophobia: it's bigotry. Institutionalized bigotry. It is separate seating, a back of the bus, a segregationist fountain of irrational hate, spewn from the mouths of hypocritical commentators who have popped too many pills. It is wrong. And it is no less wrong to hate on the basis of love than on the basis of color or creed or where a person's parents were born. Margaret has a truly fantastic blog on racism and homophobia, a blog which is starkly unfunny and startlingly powerful, and you should go read it and link to it and share it with your friends. It's over here.
I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that Margaret was accused of hypocrisy for speaking out on gay rights while marrying a heterosexual. That's just absurd to me. If anything, it's us heteros who need to speak the loudest. Otherwise, the lesbians will be too busy to make porn, and the economy will collapse, as explained above. So it falls to us, the men who love lesbians and the women who love men who can't dance, to stand up and stop mad cowboy disease.
Actually, if I may get up on my serious soap box for a moment -- which I have to do from time to time because I'm really not much taller than Dennis Kucinich -- here's my one cent. (It used to be two cents, but, you know, Bush happens, so the economy makes less cents than it used to.) I had a digression in my last post about Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, an incendiary Russian masterpiece that challenged censorship with the phrase, "Manuscripts don't burn." There was another line in the novel that I didn't mention, but which was just as striking when it was finally published: "Cowardice is the most terrible of vices." Bulgakov was probably writing in part about his own choice to write a favorable play about Stalin, a desperate attempt to curry favor with the censors. But he could just have easily been talking about our politicians today, cravenly caving to the politics of fear instead of raising their voices against censors in conservatives' clothing.
In the wake of Ohio's ban and Bush's call for a constitutional amendment, most prominent Democrats have been silent on the gay marriage issue. No matter how loudly Daschle and Pelosi and Kerry (oh my!) may decry Bush's foreign and economic policies, I've only really heard Al Sharpton attack the State of the Union assault on civil unions. From the rest of the pack, it's either Dean's pathetic "I agree with Dick Cheney" stand for civil unions or just plain silence.
Looking back, the Dems have really given us worse than mere silence, because the "Defense Of Marriage Act" praised by Bush was enacted under Clinton, a right-to-hate law signed by the man from "a place called Hope." And it won the votes of many a democrat. Even Joe Lieberman, who marched with King, voted against queens. And that's just shameful, really. Because in the end, a government is nothing more than an avatar of the will of its citizens, a structure through which we strive to support and protect and promote and maybe even enlighten one another as a people. When it is less than that, when it becomes an instrument for banning books or repressing ideas or persecuting beliefs and behaviors solely because they are unpopular or uncomfortable, then we cease to be a people and devolve into a mob, and our government is at best a golem, and at worst a despot.
So thank God -- even if you're not straight enough to be allowed to pray -- for Margaret Cho. At a time when senators are silent and leaders just follow the mob, this woman, once just a little All American Girl literally starved for attention, has grown the guts to speak out. And it doesn't matter if the left calls her a hypocrite for heterosexualling out or the right calls her a great many things that are shockingly worse. Because at the end of the day, she's got her own kind of cool, her own brand of courage. She's, like, cho-rageous.
So, go check out her blog, and if you bump into her on the street, compliment her on her nice new feet and her socio-comedic feats. And then maybe give her a nice, big, John-Goodman-lesbian hug for me.
So I didn't really pay much attention when Margaret got a sitcom. I vaguely remember watching the first episode and not really caring about it, let alone for it, and I vaguely remember it getting canceled. But I do remember with a bit more clarity that ABC or NBC or whoever it was (ok, maybe I don't remember) actually forced Margaret to lose so much weight to do the show that she suffered kidney failure and almost died. And you'll remember, if your memory's better than mine, that I had a little digression about that in my blog about Vivienne, where I pointed out that it will not really be safe to approach beautiful women in the wild until society's vision of beauty changes. Like, "when TV executives ask Margaret Cho to gain weight so she can play herself in a sitcom about her own life. Or when a guy can watch The L Word and go 'Man, I had no idea John Goodman was a lesbian. I mean, I know there was all that controversy when he kissed Roseanne but -- oh, wait, that's Mia Kirshner?'"
In a freakish twist of fate, there was a Margaret Cho stand-up thing on TV that night, and I thought "Hey, what a freakish twist of fate." So I watched it. It was her "Notorious C.H.O." concert, and then her "I'm the One That I Want" concert was on right after. Which is odd, considering that I'm the One That I Want was filmed a year before Notorious C.H.O. But sometimes television, like blogs, works in reverse chronological fashion.
Anyway, when I tuned in she was in the middle of talking about her adventures at a sex club, and she was saying that if she was going to be with a lesbian, she'd want the lesbian to be like John Goodman, not Sharon Stone. And at that, I really perked up. And I never really perk up at the thought of John Goodman, if you know what I mean. I mean, he was fantastic in The West Wing this season, but he's just not my cup of lesbian. I'm much more of a Sharon Stone lesbian kind of guy, preferably with milk, two sugars, and a Beyonce on the side.
But anyway, perked up, above the waist anyway (I mean, really, John Goodman?), I listened. And it was spectacular. As if Margaret was the love child of Lenny Bruce, Ian McKellen, and (because you know I have to work her into my blog somehow) Jillian Ann Durgin. Which I for one wasn't expecting, because Lenny's dead, Jillian Ann's celibate (not to be confused with Celebrate (good times, come on!)), and, even if she weren't, Sir Ian is gay. By the way, just a quick pause to note the quirky fact that Jillian Ann writes about masturbation and lesbian temptation but gives us a video about celibacy. How could this perverse inversion of medium selection have come to pass? My guess is, somewhere in America some not-so-many years ago, some second grade teacher at some tiny school in some small town was rushing to class too fast to notice that some papers she had grabbed off some copier were somewhat out of order, and so, before she had a moment to correct the error, she blurted out "Tell and Show" to her class instead of "Show and Tell," forever altering the minds of her fragile wards, and leaving us, my fellow future readers of today, bereft of what would have been a tasteful essay on celibacy and a really good bit of not-so-celibate video. And who knows what kind of porn-inspired innovations that video might have heralded? This, America, is why we need more teachers, better funded schools, and faster copier machines.
Anyway, back to Margaret Cho, who is neither celibate nor, on video at least, a machine. What she is is a tour de force. Like the late but ever timely Lenny Bruce, Cho likes a cuss or two or twenty, and she's definitely not afraid to shock. But there's also a skillful artistry to her performances, as she moves back and forth between the shocking and the mundane, lulling us into familiarity with narratives about her family and impersonations of her mother, and then pushing into brave new worlds of candor about her experiences with sex or drugs or eating disorders, and then weaving back to a now more liberated sort of normalcy, as she impersonates her mother reacting to her experiences. Over the course of her routine, she pulls us in, pushes us to new edges, and pulls us in again, gradually educating the audience and, hopefully, building up a new level of understanding and tolerance as she goes. And in that respect, she reminds me a bit of Jillian Ann, because she's taking some extraordinarily unpleasant experiences and turning them into a mission, an art form, a statement to everybody else to keep their chin up, their heads high, and their minds open.
So I was quite pleased to notice, as the credits rolled at the end of the show, that Margaret has a website. And, looking at the website, it has a blog! So I set about reading. And a few things struck me immediately.
First, Margaret has a great bob-and-weave writing style, seizing on words and dancing about on tangents and just having fun with language and debates on language (especially "foul" language). Really. she could be a professional or something. ;)
Second, like me, Margaret has umlaut issues. She's been having the same problem with getting an umlaut on top of "Fuhrer" and "Bjork" (not to be confused with bork, bork, bork) that I was having with "gemutlichkeit" in my post about Vivienne. Well, not quite the same issue, I suppose. Umlauts are probably afraid of Fuhrers, and the Bjork umlaut was going to wind up in a blog entry about Michael Jackson, and, you know, it might not have been comfortable getting caught up in the debate over MJ just yet. In contrast, any umlaut would want to perch atop my "gemutlichkeit", because it's just such a comfy word to sit on, you know? In fact, I've found it difficult to keep umlauts up there because they get so cozy they just drift off to sleep and then topple off, like tipsy kittens off a kitchen counter when the catnip's a bit too strong. And that's really a danger to passersby in the posts below. If the U.S. ends it war on drugs, I might replace the cozily inebriated German "gemutlichkeit" with the happily stoned Dutch "gezellig" for public safety reasons. In the meantime, though, font engineers sporting "Fight Terror, Grow Your Own" shirts are working on installing a safety net at the base of the "u".
The third thing that struck me, other than the hail of falling tipsy umlauts, is that Margaret has a McKellenesque approach to celebrity. I've mentioned before that I love the way Sir Ian writes about other people with this mix of ease and awe. Like, on the one hand, he's amazed to meet Sir Edmund Hillary and he's star-struck by Olivier, while, on the other hand, he's clearly comfortable engaging in hijinx with his fellow Lord of the Rings stars. And Cho has a similar quality, writing online fan mail to Michael Moore and Richard Pryer, while casually tossing out mentions of moments with Jimmy Eat World or Jerry Seinfeld. And let's not forget that she dated Quentin Tarantino back in the day.
The fourth thing that struck me, and this is the most important, is that Cho blogs about real issues. About the war on drugs and immigration and gay rights or hypocrisy after hypocrisy after hypocrisy. She even has a blog about whether she's a hypocrite for fighting for gay rights even though she's in a heterosexual marriage.
That last one's particularly timely this week. Unless you were too busy partying in that hole with Saddam to notice, you've probably heard that a few days ago -- just a night after night fell on Martin Luther King's birthday -- Bush called for a constitutional amendment to "defend the sanctity of marriage" against "arbitrary judges" who insist that homosexuals be given the same rights as married heterosexuals. I almost expected him to call gays Weapons of Marital Destruction, but if he did, we'd probably never be able to find any, and that'd pretty much put an end to Bravo's ratings, hurting NBC and its parent GE and thereby tanking GE's corporate earnings and projected dividends and the financial world as Dubya sort of vaguely knows it.
There will come a time in the next thirty years when we look back at this debate with the same embarrassed confusion we feel when we look back at McCarthy. Or Hanson. When we ask ourselves how recognizing gay marriages in Massachusetts made Britney marry and divorce in Nevada over the course of 55 hours. How the prospect of lesbian partners getting health benefits hurt the personal marital bliss of Bushes George and Laura. But instead, the day after Bush's State of the Union assault on civil unions, Ohio tightened its bible belt and banned gay marriage.
I can't really preach about this issue. I'm embarassed to admit this but, truth be told, I used to be really concerned about what would happen to American society if we legalized gay marriage. Like many heterosexual males I was terrified by the thought that, if lesbians were allowed to marry, and freely make love in the privacy of their own homes, with the doors closed and the curtains drawn, we might never manage to catch them having sex on tape again. And then Howard Stern's ratings would collapse and, worse yet, the internet would run out of porn, causing a spike in workplace productivity that would, in turn, make it easier for employers to work with fewer workers, thereby wreaking more havoc on American employment figures than an unelected President.
But this fear is, of course, ridiculous. In the age of Ashcroft, the Great Eye is ever watchful, no matter how blind or scaly or Scalia the Justice, so, as long as the Federal Bedroom Investigators get a live feed going for the masses, we will always have porn. (I find it a tad disingenuous, by the way, that the seller of that Sauron/Ashcroft 2004 shirt also touts a Nazguls for Bush one. For that matter, he's also got a Nazghuls for Bush going on, so he may be as confused about the spelling as he is about the preferred candidate for the Revilpublican Party. Actually, I could've sworn there was supposed to be a circumflex above the U, but maybe our shirty friend was having accent-fonting difficulties, much as Margaret and I have been suffering from umlaut issues. The circumflex, if you're wondering, is the upside-down-v-shaped pointy hat of an accent that often sits atop a U in French words. I think it has less to do with pronunciation than giving the U something to exercise with so it can stay all buff and sleek and not get pudgy like an O. Of course, in French, a language of luscious vowels from a land where even the Rive Gauche has style and only the Paris Hilton is gauche, even an O or an E might be found circumflexing in a word or two on the way to the cafe. Which is why French words sound so sexy, I think.)
So, clearly, there's no justification for a ban on gay marriage.
There should, however, be a ban on homophobic legislation. Right now, that ban is called "The Constitution," but Bush wants to amend it. Margaret does a much better job of writing about this issue than I can, and she does a great job of exposing the real problem with homophobia: it's bigotry. Institutionalized bigotry. It is separate seating, a back of the bus, a segregationist fountain of irrational hate, spewn from the mouths of hypocritical commentators who have popped too many pills. It is wrong. And it is no less wrong to hate on the basis of love than on the basis of color or creed or where a person's parents were born. Margaret has a truly fantastic blog on racism and homophobia, a blog which is starkly unfunny and startlingly powerful, and you should go read it and link to it and share it with your friends. It's over here.
I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that Margaret was accused of hypocrisy for speaking out on gay rights while marrying a heterosexual. That's just absurd to me. If anything, it's us heteros who need to speak the loudest. Otherwise, the lesbians will be too busy to make porn, and the economy will collapse, as explained above. So it falls to us, the men who love lesbians and the women who love men who can't dance, to stand up and stop mad cowboy disease.
Actually, if I may get up on my serious soap box for a moment -- which I have to do from time to time because I'm really not much taller than Dennis Kucinich -- here's my one cent. (It used to be two cents, but, you know, Bush happens, so the economy makes less cents than it used to.) I had a digression in my last post about Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, an incendiary Russian masterpiece that challenged censorship with the phrase, "Manuscripts don't burn." There was another line in the novel that I didn't mention, but which was just as striking when it was finally published: "Cowardice is the most terrible of vices." Bulgakov was probably writing in part about his own choice to write a favorable play about Stalin, a desperate attempt to curry favor with the censors. But he could just have easily been talking about our politicians today, cravenly caving to the politics of fear instead of raising their voices against censors in conservatives' clothing.
In the wake of Ohio's ban and Bush's call for a constitutional amendment, most prominent Democrats have been silent on the gay marriage issue. No matter how loudly Daschle and Pelosi and Kerry (oh my!) may decry Bush's foreign and economic policies, I've only really heard Al Sharpton attack the State of the Union assault on civil unions. From the rest of the pack, it's either Dean's pathetic "I agree with Dick Cheney" stand for civil unions or just plain silence.
Looking back, the Dems have really given us worse than mere silence, because the "Defense Of Marriage Act" praised by Bush was enacted under Clinton, a right-to-hate law signed by the man from "a place called Hope." And it won the votes of many a democrat. Even Joe Lieberman, who marched with King, voted against queens. And that's just shameful, really. Because in the end, a government is nothing more than an avatar of the will of its citizens, a structure through which we strive to support and protect and promote and maybe even enlighten one another as a people. When it is less than that, when it becomes an instrument for banning books or repressing ideas or persecuting beliefs and behaviors solely because they are unpopular or uncomfortable, then we cease to be a people and devolve into a mob, and our government is at best a golem, and at worst a despot.
So thank God -- even if you're not straight enough to be allowed to pray -- for Margaret Cho. At a time when senators are silent and leaders just follow the mob, this woman, once just a little All American Girl literally starved for attention, has grown the guts to speak out. And it doesn't matter if the left calls her a hypocrite for heterosexualling out or the right calls her a great many things that are shockingly worse. Because at the end of the day, she's got her own kind of cool, her own brand of courage. She's, like, cho-rageous.
So, go check out her blog, and if you bump into her on the street, compliment her on her nice new feet and her socio-comedic feats. And then maybe give her a nice, big, John-Goodman-lesbian hug for me.