Fighting the Elements
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post can be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Hi, Jazz Pickles. The Oyl and I are vacationing on a remote beach in Mexico with a couple of good friends and the Internet here is alarmingly reminiscent of 1980s dial-up, so posting is a problem.
So that I can get back to the more important activities of our days here—walking on the beach, drinking margaritas at inappropriate times of the day, only using brain cells in cases of emergency—instead of writing a fresh mini-essay, I’m going to post a story I wrote for a magazine around fifteen years ago, which I think you’ll enjoy.
It’s a true story that happened while the same friends with us here this week and I were vacationing in Italy. My beloved Olive Oyl and I were a few years away from meeting yet, so the fourth person in this story is my ex-wife, whom I’ll call “X” for privacy reasons. All four of us were animal activists and vegans at the time, which figures into the story, as you will see.
Fur Fight (reprinted from Satya Magazine with small changes for clarity)
If you had been walking down Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Rome, Italy, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in early December of 2006, you would have seen tourists ambling casually among the many exclusive shops. You would have seen locals strolling casually with their dogs along the tree-lined walkway. You may have been amused by the wide variety of adorable, little cars traveling down the cobblestone street and parked along the curb. And if you happened by the right spot at just the right moment, you might have seen eight, middle-aged, well-dressed white people slugging, kicking and wrestling each other on the sidewalk in front of a fur store.
Four of those people were my close friends Jenny and Doug, the founders of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, my (ex)wife, X, and myself. We had all traveled to Rome a couple of weeks earlier to attend the wedding of some friends and had spent the subsequent 12 days touring around Italy together on holiday. In spite of it being the rainy season, we’d had a wonderful time driving aimlessly around the countryside in a rental car attempting to play archeologists to Italy’s hieroglyphic road signs. We marveled at paintings of naked fat women and Bible heroes in museums and did all we could to assist the natives with their ongoing challenge of dispensing with the copious amounts of red wine and pasta the country produces. All in all, it was a fabulous and relaxing vacation with good friends.
However, one of the very few distasteful aspects of our trip was the constant presence of fur worn by someone other than its original owner. As animal advocates who live or have lived in New York City, we are all used to enduring the throngs of fur-bedecked pedestrians that fill the sidewalks throughout the winter months. New York seems particularly bad about this, but, if possible, Italy is worse even though their winter weather is fairly mild.
For Italian women, especially the post-menopausal set, fur has always been an important status symbol. My own Italian-American aunts, great aunts, and grandmother were always covered in it, looking as though they’d been eaten by a bear and only their heads remained unswallowed.
After two weeks of this fairly constant display of human arrogance, we were all a bit close to our tipping point. But we were guests in another country, after all, so we had maintained the decorum we deemed appropriate. Until our final day abroad, a sunny Sunday afternoon.
As we strolled down Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we happened to pass a fur store with particularly large window displays of dead things. This was perhaps the hundredth such store we had seen in our nearly two-week journey, but this one had an extra twist. Outside the front door, parked at the curb, was a station wagon with its tailgate open. Inside the cargo space was a pile of fur garments from floor to ceiling. The door of the shop was open and the family of four that we presumed owned the store was bringing the fur inside.
Appalled at the sight, we joked about what we’d like to do to the coats in the back of the car. But we were only joking, of course. None of us is the type to offer ourselves up to the Italian penal system for the sake of a few urine-soaked coats. For the most part, we had resigned ourselves to walking past quietly and shaking our heads. Until X reached her boiling point.
The people loading the coats had all gone into the store when, thinking no one would even see her, X spat indignantly on the sidewalk in front of the store. Following suit, Jenny, who had had a head cold for most of the trip and was at no shortage of viscous projectiles, turned and did the same, with all the drama of Sarah Bernhardt in her farewell performance. We giggled a bit and kept walking. Seconds later, time as we know it changed, and things began happening very quickly.
We heard a woman’s voice behind us, screaming in Italian what must have been, judging by her tone, horrible obscenities. We spun around and saw her giving us the cliché “Italian Salute”—one arm up in an “L” shape, the other grasping the bicep. Jenny reciprocated with a single finger raised to the heavens, shouting back what must have been, judging by her tone and my 40-some years of experience with English, horrible obscenities. The woman charged her and the two charm school dropouts stood literally nose-to-nose, shouting hysterically at each other in the language of their homelands.
Appropriately, Doug, X, and I rushed up behind Jenny to pull her away; the other woman’s (presumed) family rushed up behind her—a man of about 40, her husband we guessed, and an older couple of around 70, likely her parents) to (presumably) pull her away as well. The old man got there first, but instead of pulling his daughter away, he pushed her aside and delivered a fisted, roundhouse blow to the side of Jenny’s head, knocking her over the hood of one of those adorable, little parked cars.
Utterly unprepared for this, we all sprang into what can only be called “clumsy, slapstick, stop-the-chaos-at-any-cost, flailing, WHAT THE FUCK?!, schoolyard defense” mode.
I grabbed The Old Man and he spun and caught me with a fist to the mouth, splitting my lip and sending my glasses flying. The Husband grabbed me from behind and threw me to the ground where The Old Man began kicking at me with all his might. (Fortunately, “all his might” was approximately that of a corpse’s involuntary reflexes as rigor mortis sets in.) As I struggled back to my feet, Doug rushed to my defense by slamming his cheek into The Husband’s swinging fist. Meanwhile, a few feet away, Jenny, X, Screaming Woman, and Her Mom, were all grappling, clawing, pushing, and pulling one another, emitting a high-pitched cacophony of bilingual profanity for all to enjoy. Once on my feet, The Old Man charged me again, swinging his arms like Pete Townshend during an encore. I grabbed him around the neck, bent him down in “noogy” style, and banged his head a couple of times against a nearby pole. Not wishing to kill him and spend the rest of my life with non-English-speaking Italian Gestapo, I let him go, hoping the lumps on his thick skull would slow him down. My hopes were unfounded, however, as his skull was even thicker than I had estimated. He came at me again, at which time I wrapped him up in my arms as tightly as possible and gave him a moment to realize how tired he was. This tactic worked and he shouted, “Basta, basta!” He’d had enough. We all had.
Within minutes, the gladiators shuffled off in opposite directions mumbling and cursing as the fight had come to an end as abruptly as it had started. Not because anyone had convinced anyone of their viewpoint nor because they had successfully handed the other camp a humiliating defeat, but because we were eight, well-dressed, middle-aged people on a sunny Sunday afternoon strolling through a chic shopping district in Rome and were too exhausted and sore to hop back in the ring for round two.
Of the large crowd of pedestrians and motorists who had stopped to watch the smackdown, it is rumored that all wished they had had their video cameras. If someone had, I would pay dearly to see the tape
Three days after we were home, still reliving the story in our heads, X bolted upright one day and proclaimed, “Oh my god, I totally forgot! I picked up that old lady’s fur hat and threw it into the street and a car ran over it!”
We fight this battle one tiny victory at a time.
Let’s catch our breath and review the entertaining Bizarro cartoons that Wayno prepared for us this week…
Then the other guys says, “Rats,” which is what the coachmen just turned into.
But why does he look so surprised by it?
You can find those at KripsyKreme 51.
As sinful as I am, I’d have diabetes in no time.
We’ve cast Gene Wilder as the mechanic, of course.
Take it from me, land spawning leads to land spawn, and you have to raise them.
Thanks for hanging out on the beach with us for a few minutes. I may not post next week because the internet is too time-consuming and frustrating. I know you’ll understand.
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Until next week, if your dog rolls in something on the beach, don’t leave your bedroom door open.
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