You find the wildest stuff at Whole Foods. Goji berry juice. Ancient Egyptian Kamut flakes. A dried “sea veggie” called agar agar. But the most intriguing thing I’ve ever had there was a frank and funny discussion about feminism with my friend Kimmie Dee.
A stand-up comedian, Kimmie is opening for outrageous comic Doug Stanhope on March 5 at Velvet Jones. We bumped into each other in the produce section, and she told me about the show:
“I’m gonna do it,” she said, glancing nervously at the female shoppers plucking perfect pomegranates from the bins behind us. “I’m gonna throw women under the bus.”
The phrase left me immediately, mischievously, exhilarated. There’s something about standing in a market full of shockingly conscientious goods that makes me want to be bad — and every woman knows that sedition to the sisterhood is bad bad bad. Women’s rights have come a long way, but have we yet earned the right to rag on other women?
But blunt, ballsy, and, in her own words, “shaped like a Bartlett pear,” New Jersey-born Kimmie Dee doesn’t give a flying Kamut flake. Women, as she sees it from her 4’11” vantage point, have become so narrowly focused on beauty that we’ve forgotten to use our brains.