My friend Shmandance ( not her real name ) brings so much joy to my life. A single parent like me, we often commiserate on the specific challenges of raising kids, working, dating and struggling to make ends meet. But most important when I need to laugh I go straight to Shmandance.
She is the first person to put something funny on her head and call it a hat, I get her, she gets me, it is a beautiful thing. The other day we were texting back and forth pictures of things we would buy If we were super rich. She wanted a school bus called the “Fool Bus” , I wanted a giant larger then life dinosaur for my front yard. It became immediately clear that we are NOT the sort of people who should ever have too much money.
I would blow my millions on costumes, gag gifts and horrible ideas. I would also be really really extra fat, ordering whatever I wanted on my pizza.
Anyway… As a joke (OMG I’m a bad person) I scoured the Internet looking for the perfect “save the children” advertisement, so that when Shmandance responded with some extravagant picture of an animatronic singing pig or something, I could reply with this sad picture of a starving child and make her feel really selfish!
So I google save the children and there are a ton of perfect pictures that symbolize perfectly what an a-hole she is for wanting a school bus when there are starving children in the world!
But I don’t pick one.. I am distracted.
Frankly I am amused… Why on earth is there a picture of scary dolls in boxes in this charity search.
I laugh to myself at how I actually would buy all those dolls in boxes if I had too much money, just so I could install a wall of them in someone’s house when they go out of town. It is such a good idea, fake baby walls are a great prank to come home to. ” Honey can you grab the suitcase, just put it in the ….. What the hell who replaced our family portrait with this wall of plastic babies? Call the police!” … “Hello, officer…I think we’ve been Hosed!”
I don’t know if it’s funny to anyone else…. But I cry Dildo tears over here. ( dildo tears, if you don’t know, are the kind of tears you cry as you break into your friends apartment while he is on a date and put a giant dildo in his bathroom, anticipating he will bring the girl home and eventually she will need to pee and then …. Hahaha hilarity!)
I can’t get the doll picture out of my mind, I actually go back to it and I realize
ONE OF THE DOLLS LOOKS PREGNANT !!!! I have hit comedy gold! I don’t even know what to do with myself. I am composing the perfect viral Internet meme …. I come up with …. “GI Joe*and I have something to tell you” “mom can you get pregnant at a tea party” “Bad Girl Barbie” …… and then… it suddenly dawns on me why this came up in my search for “save the children”.
It is an ad campaign. A brilliant gut punching ad campaign so pointed it deserves an award.
Save the children. This is about babies having babies. I am silenced by the profound and powerful effect a picture can have.
I tried to research Who is responsible for it, what other campaigns did this person create. Subtle, different, thought provoking.
I didn’t really DRAW a conclusion here at all… It’s just something that happened that made me think thoughts.
Thats what good pictures do…. oh wait that IS my conclusion. A good picture stays with you, makes you curious, makes you come back and learn and explore… It changes something inside you at your core. I’m not the same person I was before I saw and accidentally made fun of in my mind a pregnant baby doll…
I don’t think I could save all the starving children in the world or even change the lives of young girls worldwide who are forced to have children while they are still children… But I can aspire to make a picture that makes someone think, create a campaign, get it out in the world…. Yeah that is what I would do if I had too much money…and Wow! I don’t even need too much money to do that!
If you have a life changing campaign idea you want to see drawn, send me a note….so we can all be angels on earth together.
Or check out my website www.edhose.com where you can find this lovely angel on earth print !
And ad to my bijillions so that I can get an authentic Viking outfit! With helmet horns! For just hanging out in.
Oh and Shmandance…. She never knew all this was going on on the other side of the phone… And while I relish the opportunity to joke around with her… I love even more the opportunities she provides to make a difference in the world!
* Unrelated side-note : Is it just me, or does GI Joe …. Always read as Gastrointestinal Joe….. Now right there… That is a doll!
