underdog

The first performance artist I ever knew was a woman who lived in the township where I grew up, named Suzanne (pronouced "Susan", from what I can remember). She was known, when I was a kid, for rollerskating up and down the blocks of Delran with her cat in a bag, a wide cape trailing behind her. Capes, long, long skirts, and her rollerskates: she was completely out of place in the mall-obsessed, consumer-savvy Delran of the late-1970s and 1980s. When I was seven, she was probably 23. The kids on my block called her "The Rollerskating Lady." She lived in an apartment complex across the highway. When I was very young, she was like a celebrity. I wanted to ask her questions. She made me so curious: did she *know* she was wearing things that made people gawk, or did she not? Did she *want* for people to look at her funny, or did she want to be accepted? Later, when I was a pre-teen and early-adolescent, even though she was about fifteen years older than me, I thought of her as a kindred spirit -- a weird-o living in an anti-art, pro-athlete, all-white middle-class suburb.

She also had a beautiful voice, and sang in the Catholic church attached to the Catholic school I went to from first- through eighth-grade. She wore her plain brown hair long and straight. She had an Irish face, often scrunched into a contemplative frown. She did not seem to care in the least what anyone thought of her even though it was clear to me that she was an outsider. When I would ask questions about her, my parents told me she was retarded, which did not seem correct to me since she was not, to my mind, the same as other people I knew who bore that description. I have a bad, emotionally-charged memory of being in the second grade, just when school was about to let out for the summer, and hearing stories about how some older boys bought a slice of pizza at the parish carnival and purposely dropped it on the blacktop so they could laugh at her when she walked over and picked it up and ate it.

When I stopped going to mass in high school, I stopped seeing Suzanne. Shortly thereafter, however, my cousins came to visit from north Jersey and asking if we knew Underdog. "Who's Underdog?" "She's this crazy woman from Delran who's been on the Howard Stern Show who has this whole dance that she does." My mother interrupted, "That's Suzanne! And that Howard Stern ought to be ashamed of himself for exploiting that poor girl!" Really? Suzanne? The Rollerskating Lady? She was on Howard Stern?

It was true. Suzanne had made quite a name for herself through Stern's radio and television show as The Underdog Lady. Although I never saw this show, or her performance, I was left with the same feeling about how "funny" she was as the day I heard about dropping the slice of pizza -- a sort of soul-crushing blow to the heart triggered by the awful realization that cruelty comes readily and easily to people, and that people take a real pleasure in watching it happen over and over again.

When I left for college, Stern's book [title?] came out. I heard there was a photo of Suzanne in it. At a bookstore, I opened up right to a page with a photo of Hollyweird Squares, a knock-off on Hollywood Squares and, in one of the squares, sat a tiny little Suzanne with the word "Underdog" marking her square. I looked at the picture for a long time, trying to see the details of her face. I didn't buy it.

Time passed. I moved to Houston and meet people from all over the place. Every once in a while I was reminded of and tried to accurately describe this Suzanne from my childhood, a.k.a. Underdog, a.k.a. the Rollerskating Lady. I have not thought about her for what? -- years, probably. Today, however, my sister forwarded me the Wikipedia entry on Suzanne Muldowney [her full name], and I found out that she has Asperger's Syndrome, and that she has worked hard to shed the Howard Stern years, to bring dignity back to her art by establishing herself to be an artist with a life-long devotion to public performance. Underdog is not her only character, but one of several that she brings to life in public at small-town New Jersey parades and carnivals. This, I think, is really cool.

It's hard, still, though, because (as I discovered over the past, um, three hours has it been?) YouTube videos of her are accompanied by really mean-spirited comments that totally debase her. I can't even watch the stuff left over from Stern. I got about five seconds in to one of her picking up tootsie roll candies at a parade before I had to stop it. Just mean. Horrible. Like the pizza slice. It fucking makes me die inside.

I'm interested in seeing the documentary film about her, though, which got rave reviews from the critics when it screened at the Atlanta Film Festival last year. The trailer makes the film seem decent. You can watch the trailer at www.artofmadness.com.