“I’m afraid of how you’ll answer, but are you familiar with Bibleman?” I asked Crankenstein this evening, when she didn’t recognize Willie Aames on Eight is Enough. There was no way her parents let her watch Charles in Charge reruns, which my mom, a former Scott Baio fan, caught in syndication in the early ’90s. But Bibleman, Aames’s direct-to-video evangelical children’s series that debuted in 1995, sounded terrible enough to have earned their approval.
My heart sank as she smiled and eagerly nodded, but my spirits were buoyed by an unexpected answer: “Yes! I even know someone who was on it.” She mentioned a name I’ll omit to protect the innocent, continuing “He was also in a New Orleans episode of COPS… with his d*ck out.”
“Are you referring to your friend or Aames?” I almost joked, but we had no time for such frivolity, for my investigation into Bibleman uncovered something interesting that we urgently needed to discuss: accusations of antisemitism. In skimming a Wikipedia list of its characters, I found this entry for the Gossip Queen (played by Maylo Upton, one of Aames’s ex-wives):
A villainess queen whose character design was later widely criticized for sharing many characteristics with traditional Jewish stereotypes (e.g., possessing dark skin, curly black hair, a large hook-nose, thick lips, and dark-colored beady eyes). She tried to rip the Church singing group apart. She has two henchmen named Loose Lips and Blabbermouth and could fire Beams of Bitterness from her fingers. She was destroyed when she was hit by Bibleman’s sword of the Spirit.
–Wikipedia
Amused by Crankenstein’s dismay, I added a few stereotypes of my own: “Gossip Queen was also criticized for returning unsatisfactory meals at restaurants and not engaging in particular sex acts with male partners.” But more than that, the “church singing group” detail made me laugh because of something that happened after Crankenstein and I moved in together: she extricated herself from her church’s choir, and a few of its older, lonelier members were upset by her absence and seemed to suspect her new Jewish girlfriend was to blame.*
The mundane truth was that there was only so much time in the day, and residency — including overnight shifts — already consumed most of it. No one came after me with the sword of the Spirit, but I’ve never shaken the feeling that any time she misses church (which she skips more often than not these days to sleep in and catch up on her work), her old friends notice and shake their heads sadly, convinced I’m holding her captive in a deli somewhere and schmearing her Hymnal 1982 with cream cheese.**
If anyone’s as curious as I am, the Bibleman episode in question, “Silencing the Gossip Queen” (presumably the distributor put the kibosh on “Shutting the JAP’s Yap”), is currently on YouTube. I’d love to yammer a bit about the sexism in Eight is Enough’s second episode, which found Tom Bradford, its non-sportswriter newspaperman patriarch, regarding his eldest son’s sex life rather differently than he viewed those of his daughters and Mary’s pregnant friend. But that’s a timeless double standard already familiar to women of all ages, and sleep beckons.
On the Covid front, if anyone cares (personally, I’ve lost interest), I’m still congested and tired, and still can’t smell or taste, but the on-off fever seems to have disappeared. I want my tastebuds firing on all cylinders by Saturday, because it’s a Grand Slam tradition of mine to order pizza on championship weekend and enjoy it while reading newspaper articles about the finals.
* If I could’ve controlled Crankenstein’s behavior, I would’ve gone for much lower-hanging fruit than choir participation, preferring to eliminate the eating disorder, suicidal depression, or Tolkien fanaticism.
** Sometimes I picture it more like Scooby-Doo, with mild-mannered octogenarian Episcopalians railing “And we would’ve gotten away with it” — ‘it’ being Crankenstein’s soul — “if not for that meddling Jewess…”