There have been a lot of things going on in the world lately that have made me shake my head and shout, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore!” The presidential election, slutty Big Bird Halloween costumes—actually, all slutty Halloween costumes—the price of gas and the fact that I have two large written assignments due this week that I haven’t even looked at yet. However, none have made me shriek more than the existence and unrelenting popularity of Alana Thompson. Oh, I’m sorry. You don’t know who I’m referring to, do you? Despite the fact Alana Thompson is her thumb-given name (more on that later) you know her as Honey Boo Boo. That’s right, that little baby.
Honey Boo Boo stumbled into our hearts during her first episode on the critically acclaimed and educationally enriched show “Toddlers and Tiaras.” I remember the first time I saw the clip of her saying her now-famous line about “dollars making her holler” from a friend who posted it on my Facebook wall. I wasn’t entertained then and I’m not entertained now.
Part of me feels sorry for her.
I have even more sympathy for all those little girls forced to prance around on mini stages in full makeup and flippers. Little pageant girls have always given me the heebie-jeebies. They’re too tan, too made up and wear outfits that are too skimpy. They usually lose their innocence quicker than their teeth in the backwoods of whatever unspeakable area of the South these pageants take place in.
I try to avoid Honey Boo Boo at all costs, but between the clips of her on “The Soup” and the people I come in contact with on a daily basis who swear she’s the greatest entertainer since Celine Dion, there’s no escape.
She’s everywhere. Even in the solace of our beloved campus, I can’t escape her. She haunts me wherever I turn. I have a professor who starts almost every class period (we meet three times a week) with some sort of Honey Boo Boo related meme or video clip. There was even a question on our first exam that was HBB related (every time I type out her name I feel like I lose a brain cell). While my professor’s love for HBB knows no bounds and it is absolutely no reflection on my deep, undying appreciation for the utter brilliance and perfect teaching of this professor, I want to pull my gorgeous hair out of my head every time I sit down in class.
I’ve never seen her show, but the few clips I’ve seen remind me why the rest of the world hates the U.S. so much. My mom has a degree in child development and I was told—having grown up with young siblings and being the go-to neighborhood babysitter—you’re not supposed to acknowledge inappropriate behavior from a toddler. All they want is attention. This country has given her enough attention to last a lifetime and it’s only going to manifest itself into ways unimagined by all until now.
Cut to: HBB 25 years later.
She looks just like her mother—a human thumb, as Joel McHale calls her—and has waded through all her royalties from her show. To financially stay afloat, she’s doing a small club circuit in Alabama (she’s banned from her home state of Georgia after the rest of the U.S. failed to excommunicate the state from the Union for the embarrassment placed on the rest of the country) where Honey Boo Boo—she has legally had her name changed—lip-synchs to Dolly Parton and finishes her set with a weird trick she does with her belly. “Go Go Juice” has now turned into six parts vodka, three parts Everclear and one part Mountain Dew.
June still claps orders from the side of the stage and her appearances only net $35. Glitzy has since died by neglect of June and HBB. Since then, things have never been the same between the two of them. A mother and daughter so at war, but so dependent on each other, that their dysfunction breeds a perfect business relationship.
It’s a horrible fate indeed and it’s up to the remaining sane people in this world to stop this from happening. Because nobody—not even Alana Thompson—deserves to experience such intolerable circumstances as the picture I just painted. If you don’t want to stop proliferating her “success” for her sake, do it for the sake of this country, because if Honey Boo Boo continues to stay on the air, the terrorists win.
