WAX MUSIC
Apply Salve Before Sampling YouTube's 'Chapstick' Girl
I'M SITTING AT MY PARENTS' HOUSE WHEN I CHECK MY FACEBOOK. I have a wall post from my roommate, Andy. “This makes me SO uncomfortable,” it reads. Below it is a hyperlink to YouTube. I click on the blue link and my world is changed forever.
I meet a pimply-faced, rotund teenage girl. Her bulbous frame, clad in a red T-shirt, fills the computer screen. Her face rests gently on her left hand, and she emits a Napoleon Dynamite-esque sigh. She rubs her lips, and declares that they hurt.
“Where’s the chapstick?” she asks herself. And then, precisely 11 seconds into the video, it dawns on her -- it’s song time. For the next 90 seconds I'm entranced by high-pitched beat boxing punctuated by “Where’s the chapstick?!,” and then finally “I found the chapstick!!” in a goofy-as-shit voice.
The girl, aptly named Gabby, also makes these bizarre hand motions that seem to be a combination of turning dials and pantomiming puzzlement in a Vaudeville show. I can’t get it out of my head.
This was the first of my many encounters with Gabby, a.k.a. CrazyTrumpeterG1, who describes her videos as “something you would eat, then throw up, and then eat again because it was good the first time you ate it.”
Her other videos range from being amusing (Eye Dance) to mind-numbing (Who Needs TV...) to perplexing (You’ve Got Possibilities!). Her post Invasion,” which features her banging the ground and what appears to be a shed with a broom and an empty water-cooler jug and screaming “invasion,” makes me question her sanity, but I accept her nonetheless.
Although some of the comments on “Where’s the Chapstick?!?” are encouraging (i.e. “You’re the next Snoop Dogg.), there are some that are flat-out mean. “You’re a fat whore, you whale bitch...You think you’re funny but you’re not. People like you suck on YouTube.”
(And yes, I made that shit read grammatically correct, as it was almost un-readable due to the “ur”s and “ppl”s. The [sic] would have taken over the quote had I not.)
Yet, Gabby remains resilient, if only through the guise of YouTube. On her page she writes, “If you think negative comments get me down, dream on! They are actually fun ‘cause if you notice, the more popular and famous someone gets on YouTube, the more negative comments they get!”
I say, good for her. She’s an overweight, Dr. Pepper addicted band-geek who is growing into herself and having a good time. And if she can improvise a ditty about chapstick that’s that hilarious, fine by me. “Someday,” she writes, “the world will finally hit rock bottom and my videos will rule the world.” Mildly delusional is okay when you’re funny.
I’d also like to tell her that Carmex, her balm of choice, actually dries her lips out more. But who am I to correct the Chapstick girl?
Sophia Ulmer, a creative writing major at Columbia College in Chicago, writes about YouTube for CrabbyGolightly. She enjoys drinking copious amounts of wine, riding her vintage bike, and snuggling with her kitty-cat named Gretta. You can check out her cooking blog at feckinfranchtoast.blogspot.com.Permalink
Posted February 3, 2009
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