Friday, June 22, 2007 at 2:02am
Vandalizing comedy
Column: Outing the Goddess Within
How cool would it be to have a subculture named after you? I mean, Buddha has Buddhists, Paris Hilton has Parisites, and quantum comic Vanda Mikoloski has a growing fan-base of "evandalists" who call themselves Vandalites. (And no, last time I checked, they're not low-fat salami addicts, despite what the name suggests.)
Unlike the more common variety of evangelism (defined by Wikipedia as "a Christian movement for emphasizing personal conversion and ... any other form of preaching or proselytizing," whatever that is), modern evangelistizing is morphing into modern strains such as Televangelism, Onlinevangelism and now Vandavangelism (which is anti-vangelism).
OK, I made that bit up. But I just like seeing how many syllables I can get into a subculture. So far I can get up to eight: Vandavangelisticism. Pretty good when you compare it with the relatively dull Goddessology.
Anyhoo, I digress. Which is something that Vanda likes doing too. She happened to be in the middle of an "I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this-at age-45 asana" yoga pose when she realized she wanted to become a quantum comic.
"It was weird," she says. "Not the idea of becoming a comic, but the yogic idea of NOT doing inversions during menses. ... If you research it, you find that there's no good reason for that. You see that a lot of that in yoga and in many religions and disciplines: regurgitated ignorance becomes doctrine."
And that, according to Vanda, is what is cute about us humans — "how we take ourselves and our dogma so seriously."
That's why Vanda had T-shirts printed with the anti-vangelistic message: Why do we need beliefs? Can't we just show up?.
"I mean, why do we need a narrative in our heads about the way things are? Why can't we just actually model the behavior we want kids to learn?" she asks.
To illustrate her point, Vanda told me about a time she was talking to some little girls in her neighborhood who were beginning to take on their parents' religious beliefs (even though, at that age they don't relate to their religion as a belief, they relate to it as a truth).
"I asked these Judeo-Christian indoctrinated girls, 'Is Heaven any fun?' and their mothers ended up telling them not to talk to me. It was threatening to their box-o'-beliefs."
Instead of believing in beliefs, Vanda suggests that people should be more like a Starbucks chair: "Make one leg shorter than the other three so that you never get trapped in the rightness of one position."
And this is where her comedy comes into play. Apart from making people laugh, her passion is to make us think and wonder about our nature, our divinity and duplicity. As she told Beyond the Ordinary Radio, "No one should be a different way than the way they are: judgmental, petty, nasty, liars, cheats, thieves, whores (like myself). ... "
In other words, to be exactly who you are is about the limitless exploration of your own devices (and vices). Same goes for those following Goddessology.
"I had an inner goddess once, but she felt fat, insecure, depressed and couldn't decide what to wear," kids Vanda.
"No, seriously, I'm not too much a fan of the 'good' girl goddesses. I like 'bad' people and goddesses in general. I guess my archetypal female inspiration would be Kali, the creator and destroyer, although once I chanted to Lakshme, the Hindu Goddess of abundance, for a week and it really worked!"
Vanda experienced Lakshme's benevolence when she chanted, "OM SHREEM MAHA LAKSHME YAY SWA HAH" for abundance for a week — 240 lozenges later, she got the chance to turn down a Microsoft gig to go on tour with the Dixie Chicks as their yoga instructor. Furthermore, a long-lost car was found and the money landed in Vanda's lap.
"All this money came in from the best-paying yoga gig I've ever had, and a car that had been stolen years before that I had thought a lost cause," she says.
So much for manifesting money from Vandavangelisticism.
— — —
Anita Ryan-Revel is the creatrix of Goddess.com.au, a content-rich website aimed at helping you connect with your beautiful, sassy, intuitive, lovable, sacred and authentic self. She has incorporated her journey into hundreds of articles, countless websites and numerous books, one of which is "The Goddess Guide to Chakra Vitality." You can read more of her columns here. © copyright 2007 by Anita Ryan-Revel.
Unlike the more common variety of evangelism (defined by Wikipedia as "a Christian movement for emphasizing personal conversion and ... any other form of preaching or proselytizing," whatever that is), modern evangelistizing is morphing into modern strains such as Televangelism, Onlinevangelism and now Vandavangelism (which is anti-vangelism).
OK, I made that bit up. But I just like seeing how many syllables I can get into a subculture. So far I can get up to eight: Vandavangelisticism. Pretty good when you compare it with the relatively dull Goddessology.
Anyhoo, I digress. Which is something that Vanda likes doing too. She happened to be in the middle of an "I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this-at age-45 asana" yoga pose when she realized she wanted to become a quantum comic.
"It was weird," she says. "Not the idea of becoming a comic, but the yogic idea of NOT doing inversions during menses. ... If you research it, you find that there's no good reason for that. You see that a lot of that in yoga and in many religions and disciplines: regurgitated ignorance becomes doctrine."
And that, according to Vanda, is what is cute about us humans — "how we take ourselves and our dogma so seriously."
That's why Vanda had T-shirts printed with the anti-vangelistic message: Why do we need beliefs? Can't we just show up?.
"I mean, why do we need a narrative in our heads about the way things are? Why can't we just actually model the behavior we want kids to learn?" she asks.
To illustrate her point, Vanda told me about a time she was talking to some little girls in her neighborhood who were beginning to take on their parents' religious beliefs (even though, at that age they don't relate to their religion as a belief, they relate to it as a truth).
"I asked these Judeo-Christian indoctrinated girls, 'Is Heaven any fun?' and their mothers ended up telling them not to talk to me. It was threatening to their box-o'-beliefs."
Instead of believing in beliefs, Vanda suggests that people should be more like a Starbucks chair: "Make one leg shorter than the other three so that you never get trapped in the rightness of one position."
And this is where her comedy comes into play. Apart from making people laugh, her passion is to make us think and wonder about our nature, our divinity and duplicity. As she told Beyond the Ordinary Radio, "No one should be a different way than the way they are: judgmental, petty, nasty, liars, cheats, thieves, whores (like myself). ... "
In other words, to be exactly who you are is about the limitless exploration of your own devices (and vices). Same goes for those following Goddessology.
"I had an inner goddess once, but she felt fat, insecure, depressed and couldn't decide what to wear," kids Vanda.
"No, seriously, I'm not too much a fan of the 'good' girl goddesses. I like 'bad' people and goddesses in general. I guess my archetypal female inspiration would be Kali, the creator and destroyer, although once I chanted to Lakshme, the Hindu Goddess of abundance, for a week and it really worked!"
Vanda experienced Lakshme's benevolence when she chanted, "OM SHREEM MAHA LAKSHME YAY SWA HAH" for abundance for a week — 240 lozenges later, she got the chance to turn down a Microsoft gig to go on tour with the Dixie Chicks as their yoga instructor. Furthermore, a long-lost car was found and the money landed in Vanda's lap.
"All this money came in from the best-paying yoga gig I've ever had, and a car that had been stolen years before that I had thought a lost cause," she says.
So much for manifesting money from Vandavangelisticism.
— — —
Anita Ryan-Revel is the creatrix of Goddess.com.au, a content-rich website aimed at helping you connect with your beautiful, sassy, intuitive, lovable, sacred and authentic self. She has incorporated her journey into hundreds of articles, countless websites and numerous books, one of which is "The Goddess Guide to Chakra Vitality." You can read more of her columns here. © copyright 2007 by Anita Ryan-Revel.