The Rhubarb Lady

So I was planning to spend this week discussing the nature of literary deconstruction and why we torment ourselves by becoming invested in characters who we know will meet tragic fates. Then, as I was sitting in on a relatively slow English class at the high school for my teaching license program yesterday, a student mentioned that she knew the cop who tasered the rhubarb lady. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she showed me the five-minute viral video of two women arguing over rhubarb-patch rights that apparently captivated the nation back in 2013, so much so that Conan O’Brien even did a re-enactment. 

None of this would have mattered all that much were it not for the street where the action went down, which seemed strangely familiar to me. I asked around the class (who all seemed deeply invested in the rhubarb drama) and found that, yes, the rhubarb lady was definitely a Grinnellian.

Watching the video again with that in mind, the whole thing seemed so perfectly Grinnell. In case you don’t have time to watch it, it’s mostly a confrontation between a screaming, swearing, potentially violent rhubarb thief (the eponymous rhubarb lady) and the owner of the rhubarb patch, who stands behind a fence and gently tries to assert her rhubarb ownership. 

Here’s a list of all the distinctly Grinnellian elements of the video:

1. The wonderful Midwestern niceness of it all. Yeah, the rhubarb lady wasn’t particularly cheery, someone off-scene used the R-word, and the cameraman sort of egged her on in a mean-spirited way. But the hero of this drama, the kindly woman behind the fence who owned the rhubarb patch, took the it all with good patience of a distinctly Midwestern variety. Her response has a sort of helpfulness that borders on delusion: she always seems to think that the rhubarb lady is simply mistaken, and will pack up and leave once she realizes that the rhubarb isn’t hers.
2. The quaintly archaic homophobia.
3. The way that a crowd of disapproving bystanders forms, but no one is bold enough to actually stop her from stealing the rhubarb.
4. The centrality of rhubarb to this whole sordid tale.

Given that someone who only knows America through popular media would think that the only thing between the coasts is one small town Ohio where every child has to go on a journey of self-discovery and/or face an eldritch abomination before graduating high school, I’ve always been sort of starved for media set in places that I recognize as home. Aside from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank, in which the final scene is shot a block from my grandparents’ house, I’ve never really found it. As I’ve explored before, people tend to think of places they’ve never been as archetypes. People who know Waco know it as the town with the cult fiasco, the fertilizer plant explosion, the biker shootout, and the economic revitalization driven by homophobic fundamentalists who fix up old houses. Edina doesn’t even get distinct events in the cultural memory, just a vague aura of entitlement and pretension. Neither of those are wrong, but neither are the full story either. In-between our periodic town-wide disasters, Waco had a lot going on, and I knew plenty of people in Edina who broke the mold of vapid wealth. 

I can’t really complain, of course. If I demand that people know the real Edina or Waco or Grosse Pointe or Grinnell, then for things to be fair, I’d have to get to know the real Cleveland, Honolulu, Saskatoon, and so on, and I really don’t have time for that. But it’s still nice when some place that I know and love breaks out of its Midwestern anonymity and gets real recognition across the world. Not many people knew that Grinnell was the home of the infamous rhubarb lady, but still, a random Grinnell street appeared on screens across the nation, and I’m happy for that.
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Sidenote: My brother Micah and I borrow/steal from each other's writing so often that it's hard to pinpoint when I'm copying him or copying something he copied from me, but this post seems especially indebted to his blog. Click here to read my personal favorite post of his, in which he reveals the horror that Luigi's Mansion visited on his subconcious.