In Praise of Pigs

Part of the collateral damage from the COVID-19 pandemic has been a shortage of meat. Many processing plants have been shut down because of outbreaks of the disease. The domino effect of this is that cattle and pig ranchers have no place to sell their animals. A recent news feature showed a pig farm where the mature stock was being “humanely euthanized” to make room for the baby piglets to grow up. You needed a heart of lead to not feel sad about all those pigs being shot. Of course, absent the pandemic, they were headed to a fate that was no happier.

My husband and I don’t eat a lot of meat, other than chicken. We prefer fish. I stopped eating veal altogether years ago. I had seen photos of young calves kept in tiny stalls so they wouldn’t develop muscles and would stay tender until they were slaughtered. Now I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to eat a pork chop again. My husband and I have often toyed with becoming vegetarians. The pig TV feature has me considering this more seriously. It also led me to think about the places that pigs appear in our cultural psyche.

It starts when we’re babies and everyone around us wants to count on our toes. “This little piggy went to market; this little piggy stayed home.” And so on. There’s also the nursery rhyme: “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. To market, to market, to buy a fat hog. Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.” I sing this to my cats on the way back from the vet, letting them know that we’re headed home. I have no idea if they understand this, but it makes me feel better.

Early on, we learned about The Three Little Pigs, with their varying home construction materials and how those fared against the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf. Not long after that, we became familiar with Looney Tunes and P-P-P-Porky Pig and his girlfriend Petunia. As our literature selections became somewhat more sophisticated, we were no doubt introduced to Winnie the Pooh and his dearest friend, Piglet. And who can forget Wilbur, the pig who was saved from slaughter in Charlotte’s Web?

The Muppet, Miss Piggy, deserves a paragraph all her own, even if it’s just two sentences. She has an entire media and promotional empire built around her. The literary creation, Olivia, could give Miss Piggy a run for her money. Olivia has her own books, translated into many languages. Her original book won a Caldecott Honor in 2000. Both of these ladies were featured on U.S. Postal Service stamps, Miss Piggy in 2005 and Olivia in 2006.

Many celebrities have (or had) pet pigs, including George Clooney, Ariana Grande (who appears to have won the custody battle with Pete Davidson), the Beckhams, Miley Cyrus and countless others.

Let’s not forget colloquial expressions that feature pigs: a pig in a poke, in a pig’s eye, when pigs fly, male chauvinist pig. OK, maybe let’s forget that last one, but the other three are permanently entrenched in our lexicon. How about going hog wild and its cousin, going whole hog? Did you have a piggy bank? Ever get carried piggyback? Wear pig tails? And one that I could never do without: As happy as a pig in ____. (You fill in the blank.) Let’s end this exercise with a phrase that’s been showing up in political discourse lately: Put lipstick on a pig. I know there are more pig/hog/sow expressions, but my list should give you a sense of porcine usefulness in language.

This essay is by no means a complete survey of pigs in our culture, but I hope it makes you think twice the next time you order roast pork in a restaurant. Maybe the shortage of chops during the pandemic will result in permanent changes to our culinary behavior. For the sake of all those little porkers, I certainly hope so.

Copyright 2020 Business Theatre Unlimited

Pandemic Beauty Regimens

A friend contacted me during the stay-at-home phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to participate in a Zoom meeting with several other women. She described it as a chance to do hair and makeup, adding LOL at the end. LOL is right, thought I.

I keep my hair very short, getting it cut at least every 6 weeks. It will be 12 weeks out from its last cut when we Zoom. As for the makeup part, in a typical year, I put on makeup maybe five or six times. That’s not per week or month. That’s per year. It pretty much depends on how many weddings we go to. I stopped putting on makeup for funerals years ago. The mourners at funerals these days have eyesight as bad as my own. They’re just glad I can still show up and share memories.

So this “do hair and makeup” for my friend’s Zoom party got me thinking. Exactly what should I do to prepare for this event? I color my own hair. It’s a few weeks past its prime, but the roots aren’t really due for a while. Will the emerging gray show up more on the computer screen? I know those cameras magnify the tiniest details.

More importantly, how do I do the “styling?” I can’t just mush it with my fingers like I can when it’s short. It’s an understatement to describe my current look as raggedy. It’s more like extreme bed head. Years ago, I cut my own hair, but I’m not that flexible anymore. I’m sure I can’t reach around to the back now. I could draft my husband to help; I cut his hair, after all. But he has challenges to his vision for which the treatments are on hold during the pandemic. It would tempt fate to let him near my head with our barber shears.

I suddenly had a great idea. I’ll wear a hairband to push the wayward locks back from my face. It was a look I wore often when I was young and I still have a basket of bands in different materials and widths. A test run showed my hair isn’t long enough yet for those to work. I have plenty of scarves I could try tying on my head, but would I look like Rosie the Riveter?

I decided to defer a decision on my hair and move on to the makeup part of my friend’s suggestion. The other women on this Zoom call are all at least five or ten years younger than I am, so they have less mileage on their complexions. As I already mentioned, I never was one for a lot of makeup. I have a bottle of base coating from decades ago and lipstick that’s almost as old. Mostly I just do my brows and lashes and dust some color on my cheeks.

As I lean in to the mirror in my bathroom, I see that there are now wrinkles all around my eyes. When did they arrive? Probably about the same time as the crinkly lines I see around my mouth. I guess I haven’t leaned in that far in a long time. I realize there will be virtually no chance of hiding any of these without a major spackling job, and I’m not about to get into that. It’s not like I’m going to someone’s wedding, after all.

The close-up does remind me that I’ll need to pluck all my chin hairs the day before the call. Ditto for shaving the fuzz on the sides of my face with that special device I found in the “As Seen On TV” section of the local drug store. I decide I should also spend some time thinking about the lighting around the area where I plan to sit when we Zoom.

I get my laptop and try out a few locations, being sure to do it at the same time of day as the get together is scheduled. We have windows on four sides of our condo, but only two sides are options that make any sense. I try out a few spots, having first removed a cat or two from the place I plan to sit.

Good grief! My neck wattle shines like a distress signal in the fog! No matter how I angle the laptop or reposition the chair, there’s no getting rid of that glow. It seems like the only solution will be a Dr. Brix-type camouflage—I have plenty of scarves, after all. Of course, that means I’ll have to coordinate my hair scarf with the one on my neck, which will take some doing. Then the perfect idea came to me: I’ll just wear my COVID-19 facemask. It hides everything.

Copyright 2020 Business Theatre Unlimited