Posted 25 November 2003 - 06:26 PM
Hey,
While I agree with everyone that Crowe's remarks, out of context and in the news, sound downright stupid, I'm pretty sure he meant he liked to smell infants, not newborns, all covered in blood and afterbirth. So give him some credit there. I also agree with everyone that this story was not news.
In placenta news, I have a friend whose ex-wife was into midwifery. While she was taking her class, her sister had a baby. Well, my friend's then-wife wanted to show the placenta to the people in her class. See, she was studying that pseudo-pagan, earth-goddessy kind of midwifery that worships the life essence of motherhood, where they try to bury the placenta under a sapling or, worse, feed it to the new mother in an effort to restore her lost energy. So, like, not the midwifery that just doesn't like the clinical and dehumanizing process of the hospital, but the whole quasi-religious kit and kaboodle.
So, the wife asked her sister for the placenta, and the sister, naturally having no need for it, consented. So there it went on a show and tell to the midwifery class, and people oohed and ahhed and said "blessed be." Afterwards, she brought the thing home (in a freezer bag) and not wanting to throw it away, she stored it in the freezer! With the food!
What with one thing and another, that marriage didn't work out, and she moved away and then he needed a place to stay that was less expensive than where they'd been living. I said he could stay with me, which is when I learned that the placenta was still in the freezer. Well, no way was that rotting casket of biological waste coming to my house (all detractors note, it had been taken to class and carted about before being frozen, so probably they'd frozen it rotting). So there we were, in the middle of a move, with a landlord breathing down our necks about my friend's short notice and the threat of withheld damage deposit, and we don't know how to appropriately dispose of this mess.
So my friend threw it in the alley behind the house, along with some other things he decided he didn't need. It was like a modern art installment piece: "ruins of a broken marriage, with placenta." Damn. It sounds awful now, but for months I couldn't think about that placenta display without cracking up.
Thought I'd share.
Mike.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).