I gotta be honest here. I underestimated Mo. With a name like Revolution Pink and the hand-drawn, pink-highlighter-colored lipstick on the cover and a handwritten introduction in chicken-scratch ... I was fully ready to cringe and grit my teeth through the entire 28 pages. I was ready to toss this thing aside with great force and lament the $2 that I was out.

After the first few pages, though, Mo explained that she's a singer-songwriter, and instead shows us some of her tongue-in-cheek, folksy lyrics about Barbie that made me crack a smile and made the knots of fear loosen a little. Her article on Christmas trees (as a young, Jewish lesbian, Christmas is an issue) wasn't hard-hitting journalism or a well-thought-out opinion piece, but it was solid, entertaining fluff. Not particularly well-done fluff, mind you. But pretty good, bi-girl-song-writing-"Josie-and-the-Pussycats"-gone-Vegan type fluff.

Then, WHAM! Mo's article on trans acceptance hits with all the subtlety of a brick concealed in a sock. Thump. Right upside the head. And you realize that this girl -- this fluffy little thing with bad handwriting -- has a brain. And a tough one. Suddenly, the rest of the zine took on a different hue -- one of a very smart, wily girl, hiding her intelligence behind recipes for making cookies in the shape of vulvas.

I realized just what a judgmental bitch I really am from this experience. I'm reminded that you really can't judge a book by its cover, or a zine by its first few pages. Handwriting doesn't make a person stupid, and just because someone writes songs about Barbie sleeping with Midge doesn't mean she doesn't have anything valuable to say.

And in Revolution Pink, Mo's saying quite a bit, without having to say much at all. Pay her the $2. Get this zine. Use it to open your eyes on issues you didn't know you had, and to make some great vegan vulva cookies. E-mail Mo at tahitimo@aol.com.

[ by Elizabeth Badurina ]
Rambles: 11 May 2002