Strange visions can come to us late in the night. Yesterday I beheld a TV commercial that was so bizarre it felt like a dream. The scene was as follows: a woman was travelling on the moving walkway in an airport, looking robust, cheerful and confident — rather like the heroine of a Soviet propaganda film. She passed under an image of her own face when suddenly another woman ran up to her and declared:
WOMAN: You’re the colon lady!
COLON LADY (grinning from ear to ear): Diarrhea constipation gas bloating that’s me!
WOMAN: Can I tell you what a difference Philips Colon Health [1] has made?
And so on. The ad ended with the Colon Lady standing beside the image of her own face while handing out free samples not only to her new friend, but also an entirely random stranger arriving from behind on the moving walkway — before cutting to the stirring slogan:
Be good to your colon, and it will be good to you.
It was the naturalistic staging of this bizarre scene that made it seem so hallucinatory. But this was no dream. [2] I recognised the Colon Lady myself — not from a personal encounter, but from an ad I had seen during the daytime. Then too the Colon Lady (for she has no other name) had worn the same grimly purposeful expression, that same manic gleam flashing in her eyes as she held forth on the benefits of Philips Colon Health from a street stall. A true believer, an evangelist for healthy colons [3], she strides without shame through the world spreading relief to the human digestive system, valiantly striving to reduce bloating, gas etc with her message of daily support from a “probiotic supplement.”
Don’t get me wrong. If you’re having trouble with your colon, then you should definitely get it sorted out. Somebody needs to promote digestive health, and I’m glad the Colon Lady has found her niche. But to be stopped in an airport, and identified as the Colon Lady, to have your face eternally associated with that part of the anatomy which extracts water and salt from solid wastes before they make their ignominious exit from the body — surely we’d all balk a little at that. Perhaps even feel a little embarrassed. Not so the Colon Lady. Apparently she loves it, even when she’s off duty. So I’m worried for her, by the degree of her identification with the product. It’s unhealthy. Not even Billy Mays went that far.
Indeed, watching the Colon Lady can make a man feel like an alien in this country, just when he thinks he’s starting to get a handle on things. You can’t get away with such glassy-eyed sincerity, such unswerving dedication to the sale of products relating to embarrassing conditions, in the UK where I grew up. You’d at least have to sweeten the pitch with a joke, an ironic comment. Or alternatively, play it dead serious and call in the doctors to add some gravitas. But super keen enthusiasm? No. We are staring at a major cultural difference here. I mean, towards the end of her life Princess Diana regularly had her colon hosed down at the taxpayers’ expense. No doubt she would have recommended the treatment to us all, were more of us able to afford it — but she never identified herself as the Princess of Colons, preferring to stress her good work with orphans, the terminally ill and so on. As a princess, colons were beneath her, both literally and metaphorically. To start talking about them openly and with glee would have been a public relations disaster, an invitation to ridicule.
The Colon Lady has no fear of such a response in America, apparently. But then, perhaps that’s a good thing, because after all she is out to help us. She is on a mission to save our colons. I take back everything I just said. We should be grateful. We should not mock. Because when our colons start giving us trouble, it’s a Colon Lady we need, not a Princess of Hearts.
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Daniel Kalder [6]
Latest posts by Daniel Kalder (Posts [7])
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