Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir

So I finished reading Pat Benatar's Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir. It was pretty awesome. Not a lot of drugs or drinking or ego which make me love celebrity autobiographies (for example, right now I'm reading Belinda Carlisle's which is all sorts of -- you know what? I'll save it for later for when I finish it and write a blog post).


Notable things:


-Benatar was the last name of Pat's first husband, not the last name of her current husband (nor her maiden name)
-She makes money money selling her music through her own indie label even though she sells fewer albums
-She tours in the summer to support her family and not the whole year (because she doesn't need to)
-She would be OK with never making another recording ever again 
-her parents did not make a lot of money, and sometimes they didn't have enough money to buy toilet paper, and as a result as an adult, she has vowed to ALWAYS have lots of toilet paper in the house


I was very taken with her sense of self; growing up she was simultaneously really girly and had her friends that she did "girly" stuff with and loved that, and then also she was into doing "boyish" stuff with the males in her life, and this allowed her to really be her own person, and you can see how that plays out in the way her image is, especially as her career progresses. The record label early in her career was really playing up the sexy rocker chick thing even though she was ready to move on and do other looks too.


One thing that I thought was amusing was that growing up she was all about being the sexy catholic school girl and hiking up her skirt, long before Britney came along in the video for "...Baby One More Time." And she actually wrote something to that effect, actually mentioning Britney's name. That was a total aside in the book and not a major focus but because I am a Britney fan of course I have to point that out. (Speaking of which, new Britney song. She's paired up with producer Max Martin again, who -- bah! Another blog post for another time!)


Anyway, I was just thinking about how there's that line in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" where one of the character says something like, "Do guys really go for that Pat Benatar look?" I wonder what Pat Benatar thought about that line.


And oh! In other news! I just got a damaged copy of the new Patton Oswalt book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland at work and so I get to take it home and read it for free, which I am super excited about. Will it be as awesome as his stand-up? I hope so.


In other news, as part of 2011: The Revenge of Print my first printed thing that was technically printed in 2011 is a silly comic I made that was a response to the multitude of sad angsty animal comics (yes, there are tons, and in truth, I love them all really, I'm not complaining.) But I decided to do my own spin on it. So they're pictures of things like a fat seal with multiple chins, a sheep that's all sheep and a tiny head, a tubby walrus that says FATSO in big bubbly letters, a fat wiener dog, eand all sorts of silliness. And they're stapled all willy nilly. Contact me if you want one.. Or you can go to Quimby's where I left some in the free area. I know you're racing out to see my fatso animal drawings. Hippo hippo hooray!


Speaking of anthropormortization, Joe and I were watching the entire series of The Critic and agreed that the best episode was the one about Jay being a speech writer, and they show Bill Clinton as a one of the Hillbilly Bears. To view go here:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmezL7MgOeM


And then go to where the time is at the 8:15 point. HILARIOUS!