Episode 1: Harrisonburg's Bearded Lady

Harrisonburg is like a little kid with pigtails jumping rope in the street, who when you wave kindly at them, flicks you off. There are pockets of meth-heads, Russians left over from the immigration in the 80s and whole back roads which get more traffic from rollerblading Mexican children than they do from automobiles.


Not that I mind this. On contrare, it’s very interesting. However, when it enters our comfortable little world at The Fatalistic Farmer I have a tendency to balk. To stand aside and listen and record, and hope that someone picks up my conversational slack.

So when The Bearded Lady came knocking at our door, two weeks after we moved in, it’s no wonder that I stood aside and let Isaac take over, the great listener and conversationalist, who will one day get paid for his curiosity as a biologist. The only reason I came out of my room at all was in hopes that it was a religious solicitor that I could confuse by saying, “Hold on just a minute” and then never coming back to the door. However, this visitor was a bit more promising.

“I’m sorry to bother yall,” she said through the storm door. “But someone done broke in my house and stole my purse. Yall haven’t seen it, have you?”

“Uh—no,” Isaac said. “I’m-I’m sorry, wow. How did this happen, ma’am?”

I sat down tentatively on the stairs where I could see them, while Isaac went out to join her. Always on the look-out for the infamous meth-heads-who-come-off-I81, I watched the woman’s body language for signs of strange tics, but there were none. This was a woman devoid of body language, standing with her huge chest poked out and her pudgy hands hanging limply at her sides. The strangest thing about her was the likely unwanted beard, and equally unwanted bald spots on top of her head. I vowed to later google which kind of narcotics makes you have hair where you don’t want it, and none where you do.

“I don’t know,” The Bearded Lady answered, still using the same loud voice as if she knew there were six more of us in the house, and was speaking to each one. “Someone just done broke in when I won’t there, and took it. It’s not about the money,” she said, as if reading my meth-head suspicions. “It’s just that I had all stuff in there, you know? All my stuff that means something to me, like my I.Deeees, and my pictures of my kids, and my all my things and whatnot in there. It’s just such a pain in the ass to get that stuff back you know?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Isaac said, sitting down on the stoop. “So you have kids? Do they live around here? Do you live with them?”

“Aw, no, you know, I’m orig’nally from North Carolina, that’s where I was born and raised, right? Most people can tell from my accent…”

What followed was a lengthy story which I avoided by creeping off to go find at least one more roommate to bear witness to this. This turned out to be Pryanka, who, at 4’11” and drop dead Indian, is undoubtedly the cutest of us. Being Isaac’s girlfriend, she was not incredibly interested to learn that he was grilling a complete stranger, but curious about the beard, nonetheless.

We tiptoed back to the door, and unfortunately, the woman spotted us.

“Well, hi there honey,” she said, looking Pryanka up and down.

“Ha ha, hi,” Pryanka said, opened the door just a crack, with that paralyzed smile that she gets whenever old people or transvestites hit on her. Sure enough, that was obviously the bearded lady’s pick-up line.

“Honey, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you sure are a pretty woman. Now, I don’t swing that way, but if I were a lesbian, you’d be the first one I’d go after.”

Pryanka laughed and said “Well, nice to meet you!” before giving me a look that obviously blamed me for this encounter, before going inside.

The Bearded Lady turned back to Isaac. “So you haven’t seen it, huh?” she repeated, and continued on without a reply. “It’s not about the money, you know? It’s really not. It’s just that some things are irreplaceable.” She paused, apparently to allow us time to marvel at this hefty word and wonder as to its meaning, before proceeding to define it as ‘stuff you just wouldn’t give away, not for ten million dollars’. Well, sure, that made sense now. Things like old pictures of times before the beard.

She paused and eyed Isaac for a minute. “Would you mind giving me a cigarette?” she asked, in the tone of someone who’d just lost their job and then asked their boss if they could make a phone call from the office. You’d have to be a little shit to say ‘no’.

“Yeah, sure,” Isaac said, because that’s what Isaac says, who by no means is a little shit.

“Thank you, honey, thank you,” the woman said, before continuing her story about the purse, a sermon which, due to length, repetition and ragingly Southern catch-phrases, might as well have been a Jehovah’s Witness sermon anyway.

This may not seem like a strikingly memorable story, and perhaps would not have been if the Bearded Lady had not returned on at least four other occasions, searching for such variously mysterious and odd possessions as keys, a cat, and even once a friend, more irreplaceable things for which she would not accept a million dollars.

Finally, though, Dutch pointed out the rather dismaying trend of her requests for cigarettes.

“Just say no, man.” Dutch snapped at Isaac one day, sounding rather disturbingly reminiscent of an anti-drug commercial. “What’s she gonna do? Scratch you with her beard?”

As I have already identified Isaac by the fond title of ‘not a little shit’, you can imagine Isaac’s understandable inability to refuse her. So Decisive Dutch donned his D² cape, and instructed us that the couches, cigarettes and lesbian-converting behinds would now be porch monkeys on the back porch rather than the front.

Sometimes, from the safety of the back porch, we hear her bellowing out a story of a currently missing item at a random stranger, and we speculate on her motives. Is she hoping for a handout?

Whatever her motives, I’ve found that the only way to make sense of this woman is to do what I always do when I can’t categorize a person—use them in a metaphor. This woman is like the Harrisonburg version of an ice cream truck. And now, the sounds of her bellows are like the tinkling tunes of said Dessert-mobile, inviting little children to run towards her with generous hands full of quarters.