VIDE-HOS AND REBUTTALS

Nov 28, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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My uncle Bem was not noted for his sense of humour.  He was a stern-faced man who ran a recreation club in the village of Carapichaima in central Trinidad.  In fact, even though he had a recreation club he never made sport and was not the sort of person you could fool with.
All of us used to tread very carefully around Bem.  But my love for jokes, even as a seven-year-old, always put me in trouble.  My mouth and my sense of self-preservation are generally in harmony except when a pun hits my funny bone and then my mouth opens automatically.  It was so with me and Bem.
I had just started elementary school and one of the bigger kids said something that I thought hilarious especially since it punned on our neighbor Iris, a rather large lady who was extremely garrulous.  Those were the days when words like “backside” or even “bottom” and “bamsee” were taboo.  In fact, when I first heard the word “batty” meaning crazy, I thought that it was the local vulgarism for one’s rear end and laughed my head off.  It was like when I first heard the word “Pokemon” and thought it was a reference to a Jamaican gynecologist.
So there I was, in the early 1950’s, the family gathered in my aunt Deedee’s home where her husband Bharath had his stacks of Ramayanas and other holy Hindu literature, looking at the stubbled and unsmiling face of my uncle Bem and, pointing at my eye, asking, “What is this?”  He said dourly, “Eye.”  My cousin Joe sneaked out of the room because he knew what was coming and wanted no part of it.  I held up my arm and pointing to its interface with my hand asked, “And this?” “Wrist”, he said in a monotone.
I then twisted my arm and held it around my spinal column. “Back.”  Finally, the coup de grâce.  I pointed at my side.  He agreed with a grudging and totally uncharacteristic smile, “Side.”  I then told my aunt, “You hear what he say?  Eye-wris’ backside. I go tell she what you say.”  Everyone else was aghast.  Bharath, bless his soul, was above those petty things and remained focused on Nirvana.  My aunty Moon was scandalized but enjoying it.
“You don’t have any respect for your Uncle Bem and all of us?  The boy need a good cut-tail.”  But Bem was more tolerant and possibly in an alcoholic haze. “Nah, he only making joke,” he said and thus I was spared a licking while at the same time given an epitaph.
Now people have gone beyond tail, backside, batty, bamsee and bottom and the old words have been buttressed by butt, the “A”-word, badonk, junk-in-the-trunk and booty. Worse, even the kids know and use all the words openly.  I remember telling my two youngest children that Henry Morgan and his gang of cut-throats sacked Port Royal because they were after booty and got knowing looks from both of them.
What has emerged is a big booty craze fuelled by Hollywood and Bollywood.  Novelist and blogger, Erica Kennedy, writing in the HUFF POST ENTERTAINMENT, “I truly believe Jennifer Lopez’s greatest contribution to this world will be the way she embraced and flaunted her phat ass.
I am dead serious about that and I say it with the utmost admiration and reverence…Black and Latino people always appreciated a healthy badonk but before J. Lo, white folks weren’t trying to get ass implants. Before J. Lo, mainstream media was not giving props to the junk in anyone’s trunk…J. Lo became a global superstar and created an Ass Industry.”
There is a downside to the craze.  According to a recent media report, “The butts in Hollywood are looking so good that the fans want one too, making women resort to Butt implants. These surgical implants are pretty expensive.
Apart from those bestowed with good and attractive bottoms like Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Thais, Derlene, Lisa Raye and of course the Indian beauty Mallika Arora, most in the Hollywood or the Bollywood stars and some of the models are going to surgeons for butt implants. But normal woman cannot afford to do that and this is resulting in serious health hazards.”
In a recent Florida case reported on ABC News Blogs, a “quack” doctor was arrested for administering dangerous and illegal butt-boosting shots – injecting at least one woman with a bizarre concoction of cement, super glue, mineral oil and Fix-A-Flat tire inflator and sealant.  The woman developed severe complications including pneumonia.
According to the article, “As odd as the idea of cut-rate, illicit, butt-boosting injections may sound, this case is far from the first that has made headlines – and in some cases, the outcome has been deadly.”  In February, 20-year-old British woman Claudia Aderotimi died following a cosmetic buttocks injection administered in a Philadelphia hotel room and in 2010, a Miami woman, Ana Josefa Sevilla, was charged after one of her clients ended up in the emergency room with complications.”
Now a new contender in the “pain-in-the-butt” sweepstakes has emerged.  A fashionista wrote that “Pippa Middleton (the sister of Catherine Duchess of Cambridge, and wife of Prince Harry) is the new global model for butt-enhancement: “Kim Kardashian’s basketball ass is a thing of the past, so is J.Lo’s ‘Jenny from the Block’ behind.
Women are flocking to plastic surgeons claiming they want a butt lift so they can look like Pippa Middleton from behind…women are declaring Pippa the “new queen of booty” and that previous butt idolizations of Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez are ‘a bit too big’ for most women.
Pippa Middleton has a butt for the every-woman, for ladies who want to be booty-licious without looking like a vide-HO.”  “Vide-HOs” are half-naked women in music videos.  Which leads to the question, “What do you do if you have a flat butt?”  I suppose you just lie Lo.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that Trinis say people are “playing the ass” but in the islands they use “forming the ass” showing that islanders were way ahead of the plastic surgery craze.

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