Tag Archives: Flaming batons

It’s a hell of a mishap when a flying pole with burning rags wrapped around both ends gets away from the majorette. It might cause the football field to catch fire, as Buck Bedlow can tell-not-show you. Which is a funnier circumstance than that of a girl forced to spend her teenage years hiding hideous, painful deformity to please her twirler mom. Oh, and the spelling you want in panel 2 would be “trouper.”

At least in this case we know that the red blur in the picture isn’t a ball of fire.  It’s Holly, in her classic Scapegoat majorette uni. I don’t know what’s worse: a “fireproof” garment that leaves your extremities exposed, or one that’s made out of material that can potentially cause cancer. Why not both?

beckoningchasm
September 12, 2021 at 10:36 pm
Interesting that the only color we see on the photos is blotchy red. Are these photos of shooting victims?

J.J. O’Malley
September 13, 2021 at 10:37 pm
…[A]ll the photos appear to black and white with occasional splotches of red. Was Fun…er, Holly taking pictures at a screening of “Schindler’s List”?

billytheskink
September 13, 2021 at 10:24 am
Given all of the red smears on the photos…I’m guessing most of these “old” photos date back to Holly’s days as a red-and-white clad high school majorette…

December 3, 2013

Kudos to the above-quoted snarkers  whose beady, nitpicking eyes were drawn to the red splotches in nearly all of Holly’s photos. Those are all great (and funny) guesses, but apparently the pictures depict teenage Holly engulfed in flames.

The flaming baton gag dates back to the Act I days, and it is amusing to imagine it going horribly awry. It’s a little less amusing to imagine it causing disfiguring burns. And it becomes horrifying when we learn that her mother’s response was to schedule Holly’s yearbook photos accordingly. Also, disfiguring burns aside, Holly needn’t be so modest about her “skill” with a flaming baton. After all, she was still good enough, years later, to show a Xenon warrior just how it’s done.

Try saying “Twirling Tots” five times fast, I dare ya! Holly has settled into her ponderous pandemic picture project and is actually enjoying a little quality mother-daughter time. I don’t think I noticed until just this week that Melinda is drawn with the same weird, wide cartoony eyes that Holly had in her majorette days, and even when she was still a “Tot.”

Holly has been pictured in this outfit before. She’s wearing this uniform and boonie hat in her picture that hangs on  Montoni’s Wall of Fame. I started searching the archives to find the strip that shows this, but quickly became flustered, and I soon found myself sitting cross legged on the living room floor, being comforted by my mother. I’m going to need another pandemic to find it, har! har! har!