2/15/10
Kermit the Frog Is a Terrible Boyfriend

Julie Klausner’s new memoir, I Don’t Care About Your Band, is one of the funniest books about dating we’ve ever read. And this is coming from two women who are kind of sick of (a) memoirs and (b) books about dating. Her book will remind you that dating can always get worse — but fortunately, the worse the date, the better the story it’ll eventually make. (If nothing else, you’ll be comforted by the fact that your blind date was never arrested for kidnapping.) Here’s an excerpt in which she compares Kermit to skinny hipster bad boys/bad boyfriends:

As a little girl, I wanted to be exactly like Miss Piggy. I connected to Miss — never “Ms.” — Piggy; the comedienne extraordinaire who’d alternate eyelash bats with karate chops, swoon over girly stuff like chocolate, perfume, feather boas or random words pronounced in French, then, on a dime, lower her voice to “Don’t fuck with me, fellas” decibel when slighted. She was hugely feminine, boldly ambitious, and hilariously violent when she didn’t get her way, whether it was in work, love, or life. And even though she was a pig puppet voiced by a man with a hand up her ass, she was the fiercest feminist I’d ever seen.

I took my cues from Piggy, chasing every would-be Kermit in my vicinity with porcine voracity and what I thought was feminine charm. I was aggressive. I never went through a “boys are gross” phase — I’d find a crush and press my hoof to the gas pedal. I wasn’t the girl who couldn’t say no — I was the one who wouldn’t hear it. I left valentines on the desk of my first-grade crush, Jake Zucker, weeks into March. I cornered Avi Kaplan in the hallway and tried to make him kiss me. I begged my mom to tell Ben Margulies’s mom about my crush on him in second grade, in hopes she’d put in a good word for me, like that has ever worked.

I didn’t think of myself then as I do now, in retrospect; as a pigtailed, red-faced mini-Gulliver, clomping around in Keds and a loud sweater, my thunder thighs tucked into stonewash casing. I’d catch the scent of “a MAAAAAAAN!” and want to club a cute boy I liked on the head and drag him by the hair to a cave, where I could force him to like me back. But at the time, I thought of myself as a pig fatale. Miss Piggy wanted what I did, which was to be famous and fabulous and to be loved by her one true frog and occasionally Charles Grodin. But looking back, I realize Kermit was, for lack of a better term, just not that into her.

Read the rest of this excerpt on SUNfiltered

Buy I Don’t Care About Your Band on Amazon.com