Beautiful Pigs

I have touched you and —

Photo by Gary J Stearman on Unsplash

Yes, yes, I know, I know … I have only one story left of Mad Art Project, so why don’t I, like, get on with it?

I have half of that last story written. And it’s mostly introspection with some induced lactation (my story, my smutty fantasies) and a gunfight and a lot of Tim’s miseries. Tim, you’ll have guessed, gets his magical forced-femme moment and, true to form, grouses and disbelieves the whole time. Ah well, what can ya do? I’ll let him tell you in his own words.

But in the meantime, I told the Lad, the sweet Faun, I’d write something.

It’s past 10 p.m. and I’ve put in about 10 and a half hours at the day job plus a walk and a squelch through a marsh at twilight where I saw nine deer and innumerable ducks, so I can’t write anything very long.

I think I’ll write about that ancient Goth-looking glam rock musician, Alice Cooper. Here goes —

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I have touched you and made you beautiful.

A long time ago, Alice Cooper, runny black mascara and Ichabod Crane nose and caved-in chest and all the rest of it, came on The Muppet Show, as artists do, and Miss Piggy got a mad pash on him and threw herself at him as only Miss Piggy can do.

Wonder of wonders, Alice Cooper loved her back.

Or so I remember. I was about six years old at the time.

But before they could consummate their love in a tender duet, Alice turned Miss Piggy into a monster — not a cute one but a sinister-sickening one. Plague-doctor beak, hideously slanted eyes, a clown’s rainbow wig, green and purple fur, black crow feathers wafting out at intervals. Not an inch of Miss Piggy remained.

Miss Piggy, of course, had no idea she’d been transformed. All the sass drained out of her, she lay tenderly on her new idol’s chest. They both — puppet and glam rocker — played the scene perfectly straight. The joke was in the audience’s knowledge that Miss Piggy had been changed from muppet to monster. Galatea and Pig-Malion, you might say, swapping the roles a bit.

I have touched you and made you beautiful.

If a kindergartener is capable of an erotic awakening, that was mine.

Before I was out of elementary school I was thinking about being turned into a fairy. A wild deer. A mermaid — and not a pretty mermaid. Cave mouth with the water level rising. Blood on the stone floor. A flint knife. Gills —

Monstrous Transformations 'R' Us.

Love, Judith Butler says, undoes us. Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something —

And if we’re undone by each other, by mere humans, how much more — But we all, beholding with an open face as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory — 

Or not, right?

You labor until your hip joints crack. The mason separates the foundation-stones. You look in the mirror and you’re 95 years old and drooling and there’s a black feather sprouting from your chin and your memory’s breaking up like a frozen river in spring and despite this monstrous visage you’re all in for love, you may look ridiculous and have no idea who you’re throwing yourself at but at least you’ve striven to the last —

and your beloved touches you and transforms you and —

and I don’t know. I don’t know what happens next.

Miss Piggy sees herself in the mirror and gets royally pissed, that’s what happens.

But she was still a young piggy back in the 1980s. Maybe now she sees something she didn’t see before. Maybe now she looks at this new face that isn’t her, this alien face, and she says, All right. All right, then. Yes.

And then she looks up, done with the mirror at last, and she sees beyond it —

what?

I have touched you and made you beautiful.