Mama Bear was showing Papa Bear to his chalk mark on the polished wooden floor. Then she brushed lint from his hairy chest with a soft gray brush.
“Two!” Sid Croft shouted.
“I’m ready!” Goldy volleyed back, pulling her ringletted blond wig into place and readjusting her bosom. “Just hold your horses, Sid, I’m ready!”
Out of the corner of his eye Papa Bear spotted Baby Bear at the cappuccino bar, stroking the script girl’s pale cheek with a tender ursine restraint. Look, I may be a bear, the stroke implied. And you may be a woman. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.
“Three! And that’s action, ladies! Roll ’em! Let’s go! I got an early date tonight! Look alive and I mean now!”
Papa Bear felt the room dilate down to the width and glossy thickness of a six-inch lens. At which point Goldilocks, with a stamp of her high-heels on the parquet linoleum, entered stage right.
“Now let me tell you something, Papa Bear! Nothing you say or do can ever hurt me, because I love myself too much to let you beat me down. Before I’ll let your negative-sounding criticisms damage my self-image factor, I’m leaving the Enchanted Forest and never coming back! You can’t throw me out of your miserable hovel, Papa Bear — because I quit!”
Papa Bear took a deep breath, awaiting his cue.
And from the wings, Mama Bear made a perfect round O of her lips.
“O Goldilocks,” Papa Bear woodenly pronounced in Camera Two’s general direction. “I stand naked before you in all my testosterone-drenched male rage. My futile penile egocentrism withers in the all-embracing light of your heterogeneous female-multiplicity. Forgive me, O Goldilocks, for the terrible indignities your brave female self has suffered in my cruel clutches! What I’m trying to tell you, Goldy, is that you win, all-powerful woman! You win, you win, you win, you win!”
Papa Bear dropped his chin to his chest. It was the closest he could bring himself to self-abasement.
“Cut!” Sid Croft shouted. “That’s a wrap, kids! Let’s work together again real soon!”
Papa Bear remained on his mark, waiting. It seemed like forever — the time that elapsed between who he was supposed to be and who he really was. When he looked across the room at Goldy, Goldy steadfastly refused to look at him.
“Let’s go, girls,” Goldy told Hair and Makeup. “I’m opening a factory outlet in Reseda at six.”
Papa Bear watched the overhead arc lights flicker and diminish with a series of foggy pops, while stagehands coiled thick black cables and clumps of electrical wiring around their burly forearms. Papa Bear could smell her scent and perspiration. This was the lie he had been waiting for all day.
“You were wonderful,” Mama Bear whispered as the studio lights dimmed. “Maybe Goldy had all the good lines. But you definitely stole the show.”
Goldilocks was never completely an innocent, even in the original story — she was not only a trespasser but a force of chaos as she destroyed the property of those three sympathetic bears. In Bradfield’s satire she becomes the bitch goddess of the media as she uses her exaggerated experience as a victim to attain her fifteen minutes of fame.
My Life as a Bird
CHARLES DE LINT
Charles de Lint is a writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife MaryAnn Harris, an artist and musician. His most recent novels are Trader (nominated for the World Fantasy Award) and Someplace to Be Flying, both set in the imaginary town of New-ford. He has also published three Newford story collections: Dreams Underfoot, The Ivory and the Horn, and Moonlight and Vines.
From the August 1996 issue of the Spar Distributions catalog.
THE GIRL ZONE, No. 10. Written & illustrated by Mona Morgan. Latest issue features new chapters of “The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl,” “Jupiter Jewell” and “My Life as a Bird.” Includes a one-page jam with Charles Vess.
My Own Comix Co., $2.75
Back issues available.
Mona’s monologue from chapter three:
The thing is, we spend too much time looking outside ourselves for what we should really be trying to find inside. But we can’t seem to trust what we find in ourselves — maybe because that’s where we find it. I suppose it’s all a part of how we ignore who we really are. We’re so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in. Or we do it to someone else. We try to edit the people around us.
I don’t know which is worse.
Most people would say it’s when we do it to someone else, but I don’t think either one’s a very healthy option.
Why do we love ourselves so little? Why are we suspect for trying to love ourselves, for being true to who and what we are rather than what someone else thinks we should be? We’re so ready to betray ourselves, but we never call it that. We have all these other terms to describe it: Fitting in. Doing the right thing. Getting along.
I’m not proposing a world solely ruled by rank self-interest; I know that there have to be some limits of politeness and compromise or all we’ll have left is anarchy. And anyone who expects the entire world to adjust to them is obviously a little too full of their own self-importance.
But how can we expect others to respect or care for us if we don’t respect and care for ourselves? And how come no one asks, “If you’re so ready to betray yourself, why should I believe that you won’t betray me as well?”
“And then he dumped you — just like that?”
Mona nodded. “I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. All it seems we’ve been doing lately is arguing. But I’ve been so busy trying to get the new issue out and dealing with the people at Spar who are still being such pricks …”
She let her voice trail off. Tonight the plan had been to get away from her problems, not focus on them. She often thought that too many people used Jilly as a combination den mother/emotional junkyard, and she’d promised herself a long time ago that she wouldn’t be one of them. But here she was anyway, dumping her problems all over the table between them.
The trouble was, Jilly drew confidences from you as easily as she did a smile. You couldn’t not open up to her.
“I guess what it boils down to,” she said, “is I wish I was more like Rockit Grrl than Mona.”
Jilly smiled. “Which Mona?”
“Good point.”
The real-life Mona wrote and drew three ongoing strips for her own bi-monthly comic book, The Girl Zone. Rockit Grrl was featured in “The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl,” the pen and ink Mona in a semiautobiographical strip called “My Life as a Bird.” Rounding out each issue was “Jupiter Jewel.”
Rockit Grrl, aka “The Menace from Venice”—Venice Avenue, Crowsea, that is, not the Italian city or the California beach — was an in-your-face punkette with an athletic body and excellent fashion sense, strong and unafraid; a little too opinionated for her own good, perhaps, but that only allowed the plots to pretty much write themselves. She spent her time righting wrongs and combating heinous villains like Didn’t-Phone-When-He-Said-He-Would Man and Honest-My-Wife-and-I-Are-As-Good-As-Separated Man.