Why we love Hank.

Because he likes beet salad. And because this story is such a stitch:

Felipe Rose, the Indian dude from the singing group the Village People, presented the National Museum of the American Indian with a framed, gold 45-rpm single of the disco group’s 1978 megahit “Y.M.C.A.” on Wednesday afternoon.

And the museum happily and ceremoniously accepted it (a Lakota prayer was sung first, then everyone danced to “Y.M.C.A.”), on the precept that sooner or later they might need such an artifact of a bygone era, perhaps to flesh out a future exhibit on the folkloric value of disco, and native cultural responses to it. (No, you shut up. It could happen. Why not? There are only so many ceramic pots, war bonnets and kachina dolls that people can stand to look at, and so when the day comes that someone asks, Hey, what about the Indian dude from the Village People? the Smithsonian, as ever, will be ready.)

And not to change the subject too abruptly, but perhaps to point out that our readership here is truly diverse and …catholic (small c, please), my neighbor Michael Dubruiel (aka Mr. Amy Welborn), asked me to plug his Lenten retreat in Indianapolis. I regret I won’t be there. But I’m happy Michael still thinks my soul is worth saving, and that NN.C might help round up a sheep or two.

Posted at 11:17 pm in Uncategorized |
 

One response to “Why we love Hank.”

  1. alex said on January 15, 2005 at 6:19 pm

    When the populace tires of kachina dolls and the like, the Smithsonian will be ready with a new installation titled “Gay America in the Dark Ages: Public Peeks at Private Lives Before the Great Cultural Revolution of 2008.” It’ll be chock full of all the Broadway lyrics, sitcom and cartoon characters, closet queens like public intellectual William F. Buckley, etc., that sailed right over everybody’s head in more innocent, less enlightened times. It will be funded by a public humanities grant and championed by William Jefferson Clinton as part of his duties as First Lady.

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