Eighteen theatergoers at the Stuttgart state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea after watching performances of Florentina Holzinger’s Sancta, which included live piercings, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood. “What’s the big deal?” wondered American observer Daniel Levine. “It’s just like a sorority party at Florida State.”
The opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling admitted “On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday ten people were looked after by our visitor service. A doctor was called in for treatment in three instances. Nobody died and most people seemed to enjoy the show.”
Holzinger, 38, is known for freewheeling performances that blur the line between dance theater and vaudeville. Her all-female cast typically performs partially or fully naked, and previous shows have included live sword-swallowing, tattooing, masturbation and action paintings with blood and fresh excrement. Yep, fresh!
“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” Holzinger told reporters. Sancta, her first foray into opera, premiered at Mecklenburg state theater in Schwerin in May, and is based on Paul Hindemith’s 1920 expressionist opera Sancta Susanna, which has its own history of controversy. Hindeman’s original tells the story of a young nun who is aroused by one of the nunnery’s older women, steps on the altar naked and rips the loincloth from Christ’s torso. An encounter with a large spider leads her to repent her action and beg the other nuns to wall her up alive. Sorry you missed it, eh?
The current version that unsettled the Stuttgart audience this year supplanted the original musical with naked nuns rollerskating on a movable half-pipe at the center of the stage, a wall of crucified naked bodies and a lesbian priest saying mass. After Holzinger brought Sancta to her native Vienna in June, bishops from Salzburg and Innsbruck criticized it as “a disrespectful caricature of the holy mass,” which some observers considered a bit of an understatement.
Ebling recommends that all audience members very carefully read the warnings about the show so they know what to expect. “If you have questions, speak to the visitor service. This is not ‘Bambi.’ And when in doubt, it might help to avert your gaze.”
Reports of medical treatment in the auditorium appear to have done Holzinger’s Sancta no harm. All the remaining shows sold out in short order, leading Gainesville, Florida opera promoter Bill Killeen to consider a Sancta sequel starring Anna Marie Kirkpatrick in the leading role with Gina Hawkins as gangleader of the posse of naked rollerskating nuns. Gregg Jones will lead the Time Warp sequence and Wil Maring will sing Somewhere Over The Rainbow. David Atherton gets the Pope’s seat, as usual, this time with full papal regalia.
Another Reason Finland Is The World’s Happiest Country
Life is a sprint, not a marathon at the annual North American Wife-Carrying Contest in tiny Newry, Maine. This year Caleb and Justine Roesler---Team Roesler to you---splashed through water, leapt over logs and trudged through mud in a piffling 37.88 seconds to capture the prize. The Waukesha, Wisconsin couple won a gaudy seven cases of beer as well as five times Justine’s weight in cash, which turned out to be $510. Following the victory, Caleb told local media, “I don’t expect we’ll turn pro. We just do it for the challenge. Fortunately, I have a lightweight wife who trains by starving a lot. This year she even shaved. Next time, we’re going to feed her more so the check is bigger.”
Wife-carrying is a Finnish sport based on a nineteenth century Baltic legend about a varlet known as Ronkainen the Robber, whose gang of thieves regularly pillaged villages and carried off the women. In the modern contest, most participants use a technique in which the wife is carried upside down---like a backpack---to ensure the runners’ arms are free for better balance and agility.
The first wife-carrying event was held in Finland in 1992, with foreign contestants being admitted three years later. The world championships are held annually in Sonkajarvi, Finland. The course is 278 yards long for some reason and includes one water obstacle and two dry ones. The Worlds have a weight limit of 108 pounds for the female competitor, an obvious example of politically incorrect weightism. If a bumbling husband drops his wife, there will be a penalty of five seconds added to the team’s time. There is no restriction on how the female teammate is carried and several techniques are commonly used, including the time-tested Piggyback and Fireman’s Carry (over the shoulder). The most popular, however, is the abovespoke Estonian Carry in which the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around the husband’s shoulders, holding on to his waist and screaming bloody murder. In a news item of local interest, Illinois songbird Wil Maring was turned down in her request to carry partner Robert Bowlin over the bumpy Maine course. “You’d think they’d wanna shake things up every so often,” she grumbled.
Sounds Familiar
In turtle news, Wan Yee Ng, a Chinese woman smuggler, pled guilty recently to attempting to sneak 29 eastern box turtles, a protected species, across a Vermont lake into Canada by kayak. The culprit was arrested at an Airbnb in Canaan as she was about to get into an inflatable kayak with a duffle bag on Lake Wallace, according to alert Border Patrol agents. The agents had been notified by a crack team of Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the woman’s husband and another man had started to paddle an inflatable watercraft from the Canadian side toward the United States. Inside the duffle bag, authorities found 29 unfortunate but live box turtles neatly wrapped in old socks. Eastern box turtles are known to be sold on the despicable Chinese black market for a staggering $1000 apiece. Ms. Ng is scheduled to be sentenced in December and faces up to 10 years in prison, immense disgrace in her home town of Hong Kong and a fine of up to $250,000. That’s a lot of turtles.
If the above shenanigans sound a lot like what you and your friends might have been doing (sans turtles) in the Everglades in the mid-seventies, stand on a chair and yell “Boy Howdy!” Thank you, group.
It’s 2001 All Over Again
First it was Utah. Then Romania. And California…Spain…Wales…even Paraguay. The metallic monoliths began popping up in 2020, discovered by unsuspecting people in random locations around the world. The mysterious objects quickly captured the fancy of a sci-fi loving public, drawing crowds despite their often remote locations. Then, early in October, another gleaming prism materialized outside Las Vegas. “People see a lot of weird things when they go hiking,” said a Vegas Metro Police officer, “but this beats them all.” The cops have no clues on the origins of the monoliths, though UFO-loving Nevadans are getting their hopes up.
In November of 2020, the Utah Department of Public Safety announced that a work crew conducting a count of bighorn sheep had come across a reflective object in a remote section of red rock country. Photos showed an eerie metallic monolith standing afront what looked like a rocky Martian landscape. Utah officials didn’t disclose the location but curious citizens found it anyway, flocking there in droves. The Utah Department of Land Management said later that month that the monolith had been removed over Thanksgiving weekend by folks unknown, who left behind “evidence that more than one vehicle had to be towed out.”
In weeks that followed, monoliths started showing up elsewhere. Atop a California mountain. In the ruins of a church in Spain. On the hills of a New Zealand adventure park. When one of the critters appeared in the Romanian city of Patria Neamt, the city’s jolly mayor, Andrei Carabelea, said this: “My guess is that some naughty alien teenagers left home with their parents UFO and started planting metal monuments around the world. They were hoping their ruse would go viral and they’d get on CNN.”
If so, they’ve been busy little green teens. There are now 245 monoliths reported worldwide since the Utah installation of 2020. Whoever created the Utah critter kicked off a veritable monolithon.
David Zwirner, a gallery owner who represents the estate of the late artist John McCracken initially told the New York Times that he believed the object was created by McCracken, but later retracted the assertion after discovering the monolith was machine-made, which was not McCracken’s style. An artists collective called Most Famous Artist, which thrives on lampooning popular culture, began acting like the culprits later in the year, selling its own identical monoliths for $45,000. Other Utahns believe it was a prop used in any one of numerous TV shows and films made at nearby Dead Horse Point State Park, including Westworld and John Carter. If so, however, that only accounts for Utah, leaving 244 lasting questions.
Are the perpetrators one or many? Artistic jokers…Martians out on a bender…unknown cultists with a message for the world? Likely we’ll never know the truth. As the grizzled wizard once declared, there are no answers…only mysteries.
Smells Funny To Us
Nothing much ever happens in the greater Thessaloniki metropolitan area so you can imagine the judge’s surprise when Greek police dragged in a defendant for repeatedly sneaking onto a neighbor’s property and sniffing the family’s shoes. The 28-year-old man told the court he was unable to explain his behavior and he was “greatly embarrassed.”
Police had been called to the sleepy town of Sindos after the neighbor found the defendant in his front yard inhaling away on the family’s brogans which had been left outside for a good airing. The court heard that there had been at least three similar incidents in the past six months…a clear case of serial sniffing…despite several neighbors having asked the defendant’s family to intervene.
“We did try an intervention,” one of his uncles said, “but we made the mistake of asking all the attendees to leave their shoes at the door and, well…”
The judge imposed a one-month sentence, but then suspended it and ordered therapy sessions for the offender, then gave him a stern warning. “If I see you in my court again,” he growled, “I’ll have your nasal passages blocked, so mind your manners. And stay out of shoe stores!”
Speaking of smelling funny, it may have escaped readers’ notice that there is now a Poozeum hard by the Grand Canyon in sprightly Williams, Arizona. Owner George Frandsen has carefully---and we mean carefully---gathered over 8000 coprolites from dinosaurs, sharks and other creatures and put them all on display in one place, so you can now vist an entire museum dedicated to fossilized fecal specimens. You want Tyrannosaurus poop? We got it. Prehistoric shark doody? Right over there in the corner.
Fransen initially used his coprolite collection to launch an online resource center in 2014. Then he created a traveling exhibition and took it to museums across the country. Based on the thrilled responses of ancient shit lovers everywhere, he decided to go all out and open his own permanent dedicated space. And get this---admission is always free any day the museum is open. “I believe it’s important that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy and learn from these fossils,” Frandsen says. While you’re there, don’t miss the single largest coprolite specimen in the world---more than two feet long and up to six inches wide, weighing more than 20 pounds. Now, that’s a load of crap!
“We Heard There Was A Gathering Of The Tribes…”---Rocky Raccoon
“Close the door, they’re comin’ through the windows!”---Jim Lowe
The nights are mostly quiet in Washington’s Kitsap County, though deputies frequently get calls about errant animals like loose livestock and surly dogs. But that all changed one night with a frantic 911 call from a woman besieged by an army of disagreeable raccoons. “I had to flee my property,” she reported. “There were just a few of them at first so I started feeding them. Then more came and they were very demanding, hounding me day and night. More and more kept coming. They were like the biker gang in ‘The Wild One’ movie.”
Police said the increasingly aggressive raccoons scratched on the doors and walls of the home and surrounded the complainant if she went outside. Video from the sheriff’s office shows about 100 of the critters. “There was a big ‘WILL RELENT FOR FOOD!’ sign stuck in the ground by the garage, but we’re pretty sure that came from one of the wiseguy neighbors,” advised the sheriff (but he’s not sure).
A cagey raccoon expert was called in by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to meet with the put-upon victim. “Stop feeding the damn raccoons!” she recommended. The local coon newspaper picked up the advice and made it front page news, and at last notice the grumpy bandits were seen dispersing in scroungy pickup trucks with Idaho license plates. A hand-made banner on the tailgate read “Don’t Stop Believin’ About Tomorrow.”
That’s all, folks….
