We Feel/Laugh At Your Pain

[robotnik2004]

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Seems to me like you can’t throw a dead armadillo in the Upper South without hitting some Grand Ole Opry-style country music jamboree. And for some reason, every single one features a sad chinless old drunk named “Gummy Joe” or “Cheaplaughs Johnson” or “Gurner Pete”* as comic relief. Pictured here are “Stinky Willie” and Ida May from the Baldknobber’s Kissin’ Cousins Good Time Roundup, or something, in Mousetail Landing, Tennessee. Can you imagine just how offensive this would be if they weren’t white?

*A “gurner” is someone with a rubbery face who can swallow their chin or make other weird expressions. They’re almost required for shows of this ilk. Pete taught me that word on the trip, actually. See: World Gurning Championships.

[2006 Edit: Sorry about the crazy pixellation of that photo. I’ve long since lost the flyer for the Baldknobber’s Inbred Stereotype Hoedown, or whatever it was called, so I had to scan that page in from my zine. And when I made the zine, I didn’t know diddly about scanning and resizing pictures. Actually, the zine really pushed the limits of the technology available to me when I made it. I remember I put most of it together in the computer labs at school, and that meant saving it all onto disk (remember disks?) each time I went home. But if I added all the pictures, the whole zine wouldn’t fit on a floppy. So I laid it all out with the pictures, then deleted them all and printed the pages with blank spaces, then cut and pasted the pictures back in with actual scissors and tape before taking the whole thing to the indie anti-Kinko’s they used to have in Harvard Square. True story.]

Next: The creepiest museum in Arkansas, and that’s saying something.