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The Hershey Highway

This week’s Project Runway reminds the world that candy is not a material for making clothes. It’s a love substitute.
An Advocate.com exclusive posted January 4, 2008
The Hershey Highway

Good thing this week’s episode sucks so much. It’ll make me feel less awful about turning in a short recap, which is what I’m about to do. That’s because I’m sick right now. A chest full of mucus that I've been horking up for the past 24 hours. I can barely think of interesting things to write when I’m well. So illness is going to make me as dull as this episode was. 

Which brings me to The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. 

I missed that contribution to world cinema during its initial release in 1987. And I’ve felt a Foul Phil-shaped void in my life ever since, one I didn’t even know existed. But I saw it this past week, actually projected onto an actual screen in an actual movie theater -- reason #2,647 why Los Angeles is amazing -- and now I know what that phantom ache of the soul was that I’d been experiencing all these years. And you might think that it’s simply a grotesque children’s film starring little people in hideous Garbage Pail Kid costumes who go around puking and pissing on everything in the moments when raw sewage isn’t nearly drowning then-child-star Mackenzie Astin. But it’s all that and more. Specifically, it’s about fashion. 

See, there’s this duplicitous slut in the movie named Tangerine who’s a fashion designer who makes wildly popular clothes that are so ugly that even the kids on Dance Party USA wouldn’t have worn them. She has a brutal thug (by way of a late-’80s Catalina Video) boyfriend named Juice. Together they terrorize little Mackenzie Astin. Tangerine especially tries to ruin Mackenzie by enlisting him as slave labor to help design her new collection. Naturally, the helpful Garbage Pail Kids want to assist, so they all steal some sewing machines and begin slapping together nightclubbing dresses for teen whores. Because they don’t know how to sew properly, Messy Tessy uses her boogers to affix buttons on garments. They all sing a song about teamwork while they create the slut-fits and Windy Winston farts on everyone. In the end, the GPKs destroy the fashion show with vomit geysers and save the day for their pal Mackenzie. So in their own special way they are very much the living embodiment of that Oscar Wilde quote about being in the gutter and looking at the stars, or however it goes. So really, without stretching the analogy much at all, this season’s Project Runway designers are like the GPKs: Elisa and her spit marks, Jack and his nasal staph, Ricky and his barfy hats. And I too, sitting here on the couch, hot tea to my left, paper towels for nose-blowing to my right, wrapped up in a majorly coughed-on flannel robe that needs to be boiled, I also feel a kinship to the mucusy monster children as I pee all over the boredom that was this week's episode. We are all Garbage Pail Kids in this life. That’s the message the film gifts us with. 

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Dave White is the author of Exile in Guyville, a memoir that involves its own fair share of candy. Send him get-well wishes at www.imdavewhite.com. Guest commenter Elyse Sewell, when not making the world a more modeling-friendly environment, blogs at elysesewell.livejournal.com.

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