Julie Gentron and the Lady League, Vol. 1, Ep. 4: Duty Calls

Written by Brandon Arkell and Seth Gordon Little

Last time on the Lady League, the ladies encountered an obstacle course in the Kuiper Belt, but they were able to warp-drive their way back home to London with the help of Donna Destruction. At the landing pad, they met a mysterious, foreboding figure, Lady Fairfax, who scolded them over their tardiness.

“Lady Fairfax, I apologise”, cried Julie. “You see, we encountered a sort of obstacle course in the Kuiper Belt—”

“—Mere congestion, Gentron!” replied Fairfax, rolling in on her wicker wheelchair, cane in one hand and gin and tonic in the other. “You know that MI6 agents encounter such notorious bottlenecks every day. You can’t possibly see yourself as special in the strive to defend the galaxy against the horrors which lie beyond our thin atmosphere—the microbes of Mars’s half-frozen crust, the virulent tar-women of Io’s angry volcanoes, the space-whales of Saturn’s engorged rings?” She paused and looked about her, then tapped her cane. “Wh-wh-where do you expect me to place my gin and tonic, girl??”

“May I, Lady Fairfax?” offered Rosalind graciously. Fairfax acquiesced, harrumphing indignantly as Rosalind reverently placed the gin and tonic on the spaceship console. 

“Ladies”, cooed the venerable matron, “you are tardy for your next assignment. I have intelligence on a surreptitious figure rumoured to frequent the salons of Paris, the gay bathhouses of Seattle, the opium dens of Shanghai. It—for we do not yet know what shape it takes—traffics in something more precious than the methane riches of Titan itself. Humans!”

“Humans!” gasped the Lady League. Fairfax nodded soberly.

“I—I don’t understand”,  said Julie. “Why, we should have no trouble apprehending a mere slave-trader. We’ve done it before. Remember Slimeball and his power over slime? That’s how Rosalind joined the League. She was his captive aboard his Red Sea freighter, and we helped her escape.”

“This isn’t some seaborne skirmish, Gentron”, thundered Fairfax, thumping her cane. She resumed her milder tone. “Due either to some sort of genetic mutation or medical procedure, this—entity—has acquired a symbiotic relationship with a material we all know too well—far too well. And it is to our detriment. Plastic!” The girls shrieked. “This being has commandeered the entire plastic manufacturing industry of Europe. It has so insinuated its way into the beauty and fashion marketplace that one cannot slide on a condom or spear one’s beans with a cafeteria spork without this—thing—turning it against one. The Continent’s brightest plastic surgeons have either disappeared or fallen into secrecy, avowing nothing for fear of retribution. I am afraid Britain is Europe’s last bastion of defense”, she said gravely in her rich, woody Home Counties accent. “This thing, it seems to control certain people. It targets beauties—those who have fallen under the knife, as it were. Supermodels. Actors. Homosexual fashion critics. The list goes on. Our best biophysicists cannot crack this one, girls. Earth—the solar system—is at risk of falling prey to this fiend’s wiles. It has evaded my smartest agents, some of whom never returned from their missions. I fear the worst for them. I fear that they have become a part of its shapeless morass.”

“Fairfax, this is horrible!” cried Julie. “Why, it is inconsistent with the Lady League mission protocol to allow such a crime against humanity to be committed. What can we do to stop this—this creature?”

“Nothing—but to hate plastic!” cried Fairfax. “You must waste no time. Take nothing of plastic with you—it is the warhead of this hideous fiend. You must rely on your own feminine prowess now more than ever. Rosalind Armour, you possess superhuman strength and near-indestructible skin. Donna Destruction, you can move objects with the power of your mind. And, Julie Gentron, with the power of your mind you can control all technology, including the arsenal of deadly weapons implanted within your body by extraterrestrial beings. Surely”, she said, focussing her bespectacled eyes on Julie, “as director of the MI6, I can rely on you ladies to fulfil the objectives of this mission?”

“We will do everything in our power to smoke this fox out of its hole and put an end to it”, said Julie, “even if it requires digging our bare, hangnailed fingers into that hole.”

“Beautiful. You will commence your assignment forthwith by escorting famed New York fashion critic Simpson Oswald to his next fashion show”, said Fairfax, cringing slightly at the name. “He boasts a number of friends in the industry, but, recently, he has acquired a few enemies, so we have reason to suspect he is target number one for this—this—plastic demon. Yes, I know that the pansies can be rather flakey and out-of-touch with reality, but you, Julie, are wearing one of his creations”, she revealed, grabbing the gin-and-tonic back from the spaceship console.

“Really?” cried Julie, scanning her shapely physique up and down. It was a sheer, form-fitting, silvery-metallic suit which covered everything but her face, and was implanted with myriad wires and electrodes which channelled and amplified her thought patterns. Unbeknownst to Julie, the electronic armoury embedded within the suit was the work of the galaxy’s best British engineers–its true powers remained a sinister secret. She wondered at the thing she was wearing, Who am I? What am I?

“What about me??” cried Donna.

“You’re wearing nothing but a leftover tarp from last season’s Halloween sales rack at The Bay”, said Rosalind peremptorily.

“But it’s vintage!” cried Donna, “and it goes with my complexion! Doesn’t it?” There was an awkward pause as everybody else looked at her.

“Enough small talk!” said Fairfax impatiently, waving away Donna with her gin and tonic. “Ladies, you will escort this Oswald to his next show in Paris. As I have stated, he is most likely the fiend’s next target. But beware the plastic demon’s wiles. I warn you. It is as sly as a snake in grass, and it owns every blade.” At this, Julie knew exactly what to do.

“Lady League”, cried Julie, “unite!” The League spread their legs in a buffalo stance and joined fists—which included Lupa’s fin—and a beam of super-powered lady plasma shot forth, illuminating London’s dank, dirty nighttime skyline. The girls were hot and ready to cream that plastic bitch.

Stay tuned for the next instalment to find out what the Lady League do with their legs.

Dina Martina Time!

There is a God.

For the first time ever, I attended the Dina Martina Christmas Show, held each December in the divey Rebar, a mixed bar in downtown Seattle. I was not disappointed. What the hell was I waiting for?! Words cannot adequately describe the surreal and carnivalesque experience of peering into the colourfully twisted imagination of what may be the most deliciously bizarre drag comedian of our age. In fact, I would even suggest that Ms. Martina might be Seattle’s most boast-worthy import to the rest of the world.

While drag comedians such as Shirley Q. Liquor often exploit racist stereotypes to engage and shock their audience, Ms. Martina is able to achieve the same effect without resorting to cheap shots–instead, what we observe is an innocent, almost childlike naiveté characterized by a whirlwind of perfectly-placed malapropisms, random, out-of-the-blue references, horrifyingly unflattering fashion-pieces, and dyslexic lyrical errors. (Yes, she does poke fun at Irish culture, the elderly, and rural, southern Americans, but it’s all done so sweetly and harmlessly, and it’s so silly and over-the-top, that it can’t possibly be taken seriously.) The result is a charmingly old-fashioned self-mockery which is so outrageously pathetic as to make one rupture an intestine from crying with laughter. Imagine Dame Edna on a cocaine bender after inhaling helium from a balloon.

Unfortunately, this is over the head of most Americans, who are so accustomed to humour of the artlessly normal, safe, and straightforward variety. But maybe that’s why she does so well in Seattle–which produced the likes of Almost Live!–a corner of the U.S. which seems to have developed a wackier, more ironic comic tradition than the rest of the country, a tradition that is reminiscent to some extent of British or Australian sensibilities, and which just may be as irreligious as these (Seattle is supposed to be the “least-churched” city in America). This might also be said of the gay subculture, which, I personally believe, is more humorously subsersive, whether this is because they have been motivated to be subversive as a reaction to the mainstream, or because they are deemed subversive for being outside the mainstream in the first place. At any rate, Ms. Martina might be said to embody this much-beloved, off-the-wall buffoonery.

Despite the fact that my cheeks were so sore from laughter that I thought my face would explode, I was able to retain a few tidbits from the show I attended. In the first half of the show, which was a matinee, Dame Martina graced the drunken audience with her rendition of “Angels We Have Heard on High”, which is memorable not only for the fortuitous substitution of “angles” for “angels”, but also for its totally out-of-leftfield allusion to the early ’80s disco classic by Laura Branigan, “Gloria”. This was followed by the teary ballad about Christ’s birth, called “Christmas”, in which she reverently describes Mary’s water breaking, her violent contractions, and a Christmas dinner inside the barn followed by a campfire replete with roasted marshmallows and campfire songs. Then there was an original version of “Edelweiss”, which merged seamlessly into “I’m Every Mountain”, a soulful homage to the Chaka Khan hit “I’m Every Woman”. Then there was the gift-giving–I mean “jift-jivving”–ceremony, in which Ms. Martina bestowed on a random audience member the jifts that keep on jivving–a stick of Cheetos-flavoured lip-balm, an inflated plastic turkey, and, perhaps most generous of all, the world’s largest pair of underpants, which she thoughtfully pressed against her face, leaving an imprint of her caked-on make-up on the crotch, before jivving it away to the lucky fan.

Perhaps the highlight of the show, however, was a story of hope in the midst of tragedy which Ms. Martina related whilst sitting next to a plastic Santa Claus statue. In it, she told about the goiter which cursed the neck of her 11 year-old adopted daughter, and how, one night, while her daughter slept, she tied one end of a string to the goiter, and the other end of the string to the door, and then slammed the door shut, removing the goiter quite effectively. She then told how she dried the goiter and filled it with candy to give to the poor Mexicans who lived on the other side of the railway tracks in the apple maggot quarantine area she calls home. You see, this Mexican family was celebrating a birthday and had no money for a real piñata. It took them several hours to finally break the makeshift piñata open, after which all the candy…and stuff…spilled out onto the gleeful children. The end.

One London reviewer was less than impressed with Ms. Martina’s graceful and elegant performance–the “ironic homophobia” was not to his liking, and, for him, the spoken interludes between songs dragged. This I cannot understand. I couldn’t take my eyes, nor my ears, away from the otherworldly spectacle gracing the stage throughout the entire show, and I couldn’t wait to get back after intermission to see what else the gal might pull out of her plastic shopping-bag of delights, or what other disco tune she would integrate into her deferential commemoration of Christ’s birthday. Could you?

If you get this humour, and you’re in Seattle, you can buy tickets to the Dina Martina Christmas Show at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/46945. In addition, you can celebrate the holidays with particularly horrifying pathos by purchasing the Dina Martina Holiday Album at either Amazon.com or iTunes. She is also on Facebook, for your enjoyment. I can’t wait to go back next year! Or maybe sometime in the crevasse that begs to be filled between Christmas and New Year’s. Or maybe on St. Patrick’s Day. Or possibly Easter. Perhaps Lammas, the harvest day.

<<News Update: I’m going to another Dina concert tonight (12/27/2010)! With my SIBLINGS. I know. I hope they get the tongue-in-cheek, burlesque humour.>>