Eat

Eat, Pray, Love

Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, Billy Crudup

While every teenager feels that they are the ugliest human being to ever exist, Julia Pastrana was probably in contention for the title. She stood just four foot, six inches tall and weighed 115 pounds. She had a beautiful singing voice and loved to dance. Extremely bright, she knew how to cook, clean, sew, and wash clothes. While the world thought she was illiterate, she spent her free time reading. Yet this small Native American girl born in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico in 1834 had coarse black hair all over her body, including a full beard and hairy forehead. Along with large ears, wide nose, overdeveloped jaw, and thick lips, she looked like a walking ape. As if to add insult to injury, the genetic lottery of life had given her two rows of teeth. She suffered from congenital, generalized hypertrichosis terminalis. In other words, her body produced extreme amounts of androgen, which resulted in her excessive body hair (hirsutism). She also suffered from enlarged gums (Gingival hyperoplasia). Her early years were spent as a serving girl and court curiosity for Governor Pedro Sanchez in Sinaloa, Mexico. In December 1854, she was taken to New York City to be examined by doctors. It was generally conceded by these learned men that she was a hybrid, a cross between human and ape, or possibly a bear.

What does a civilized society do with a person like her? Put her on display of course. In 1857, Theodore Lent became her manager, and she became an international sensation as the human-ape hybrid. His show involved Julia performing acrobatic stunts while on the back of a horse. To maintain the mystery and keep attendance high, she was forbidden to leave her apartment during daylight hours. Any time she ventured into public, she put on a thick veil over her face. As hideous as she looked, a person would think that she would have spent her life alone, but strangely, it seems Mr. Lent fell in love with his attraction. Although many scoffed that it was just a publicity stunt, while on a tour of Moscow, they were married. The next year she became pregnant. Now we all want happy endings, but reality doesn’t work that way. The couple hoped that the child would be born normal. In March 1860, she went into labor, and due to her small size, doctors choose to remove the baby by forceps, killing both the mother and the baby. During the procedure, Julia was severely lacerated and died. Before dying, she got to see her baby, and much to her horror, the baby boy had her facial deformities and was hairy just like her. As if losing his wife was not enough, Lent watched his child die three days later. Until the last moments of her life, she believed that Lent truly loved her.

In what might be considered ghoulish by today’s standards, Lent took the bodies of his wife and child to Dr. Sukolov at the University of Moscow. Sukolov was famous for his amazing ability to preserve bodies. In reality, the doctor stuffed the bodies. Lent then took these “mummies” on tour with him and large crowds continued to flock to see them. In time, Theodore married another “bearded lady” named Zenora. In public, he claimed that she was Julia’s sister, or even Julia herself. It all became too much for Lent, who, one night, suffered a nervous breakdown, and threw all the money they had made into a nearby river. Shortly there after, he was committed to a Russian insane asylum where he died. Zenora, on the other hand, took possession of the two mummies and continued to tour the world with them. Julia and her child continued to be a touring sideshow well into the twentieth century.

I tell Julia’s story because, from all reports of her life, she was happy. She had no reason to be, but she was happy. How many of us could say the same thing if we were in her shoes? If we were the ones stared at when we ventured out in public? If we were the ones who were put on display like a sideshow freak? If little children cried when we walked by? (Okay, that does happen to me.) And she won the lottery of life. She found love. Looking around me, very few people can say the same thing. If Julia had written a book about the secret of life, I would have read it.

For all practical purposes, I could care less what Elizabeth Gilbert has to say. In the game of life she is hugging third. After watching several YouTube videos of her, I can safely say she is beautiful woman, from a waspy Connecticut family, well read and educated with a college degree from New York University, and has had a career as a writer that most people could only dream of, even before Eat, Pray, Love. She was in position financially to be able to tour the world for a year, on the publisher’s dime. Even factoring in a divorce, which can emotionally strip a person, there is no reason, none, zero, zip, that she should not wake up happy every morning. She is the anti-Julia Pastrana. The fact that thousands of middle-aged yentas, many of whom have real problems, purchased what I found to be a book of extremely shallow insights into life, blows my mind. Fueled by Oprah’s seal of approval, her book spent 110 weeks on the New York Best Seller list, despite the fact that her understanding (and ultimately bastardization) of Eastern thought and other philosophical traditions often makes Jenny McCarthy’s insights into autism seem genius. I do not think that there is a person out there who, after a messy divorce, could not take a year off from life, visit all the beautiful spots in the world, and come home with their batteries recharged and a lot happier. I know people who go on those stupid cruises, the ones where you spend the entire week talking to the fat couple from Omaha and viruses are swapped back and forth like a floating Petri dish, for five days who come home happy as a lark with most of their new philosophy coming from the lyrics of Jimmy Buffet songs and a Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes box. It is New Age-y, narcissistic claptrap.

The Oprah zombies who are going to this film have already read the book, so for the rest of you, the broad stroke is: Elizabeth Gilbert is in an unhappy marriage. From what I could tell, she seemed to spend most of it crying on the bathroom floor, mainly because she cannot get pregnant. She gets divorced, has a rebound relationship, and then sets sail across the world to find herself. Over the next year she divides her time between Italy, where she learns about how to enjoy food and life (Eat), India where she finds her spiritually (Pray), and finally ending up in Bali, Indonesia where she learns to balance the two (Love).

Now you think I would hammer the movie, but it is what it is, escapist fare. A botoxed Julia Roberts, looking beautiful, with handsome Javier Bardem, as the love interest, the best and most beautiful locations in the world, shot from the best angles, a journey of empowerment and fulfillment, the kind of thing that is nice to watch before going home to your portly husband, ungrateful children, and stack of bills that never seems to get smaller. Maybe that is how Elizabeth Gilbert’s book should be taken, well-written escapist fare, nothing profound, just something you take to the beach. Stripped of all our pretense, who does not want to imagine enjoying Italian food in the shadows of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Colosseum, or splashing around a beach with one of the beautiful people. (I will pass on India, thank you. I don’t care how beautiful the place is, the fact that the Ganges River is one massive toilet and you could probably catch two million diseases that would make your body resemble a Jackson Pollack painting, strikes it off my map of places to visit in the world.) It is worth wasting two hours of your life to watch this film, but if you want profound, study the lives of the saints and others like Julia Pastrana, and ask yourself why they were happy.

Verdict: A Piece of Fluff For Middle Aged Women