Interview with S. Elizabeth from Skeletor is Love

Sarah Elizabeth: You know, as part of my (real life) job I interview people for a living and I always start out with that “tell me about yourself” question.  I find it flusters people, it trips them up because they just don’t even know where to start, I guess.  I’ll begin at the beginning!  I was born in the midwest and moved to Florida when I was pretty young.  I lived here until my late 20s at which point I moved to New Jersey for…reasons.  I am sorry New Jersey people, but your state did not agree with me at all.  Driving on the ice for the first time was terrifying, and I have to tell you, that’s not one of the things I have learned to laugh about now that it is over!  New Jersey didn’t work out for me, needless to say, so I moved back down south.  I think I am a weirdy swamp witch at heart. Florida with it’s alligators and soupy humidity and Florida Man running rampant all over the place just agrees with me somehow.  You just don’t get any stranger than this part of the country.  I love it.Additionally, my mother was an astrology enthusiast and my step father ran a rare/antique/occult book business, so I think the weirdness was indoors as well as outdoors as far as my upbringing was concerned.

SE: Hm, it is hard to stick with five. These particular five seem quite different on the surface (well, because I guess they are all fairly different) but all of them haunted me for various reasons afterward and continue to do so til this very day.  And you know, it is hard to say why exactly I like these sort of movies.  I think some folks enjoy scary movies because they find them cathartic some how.  Personally I have an intense curiosity and fascination with fright and with the unknown…and film seems like a pretty safe place to explore that, right?

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death

The Orphanage

The Mist

Suspiria

Cube

SE: My mother monitored our television viewing when I was young; as I recall it was no more than an hour a day. When you are a kid and want to watch every single cartoon available to you, one hour is definitely not enough.  That my sisters and I all agreed to spend a half an hour of that watching the same show – He-Man -definitely speaks to how we felt about it! I don’t remember being particularly sympathetic to Skeletor when I was younger  – to be honest, I found him rather frightening. Since I seem to have a fascination with things that frighten me though, I must have filed him away as something to mentally obsess about later on in life.

As to that other half hour of tv watching, I think we used it to watch The Golden Girls, of all things!

SE: I was at my desk one day, I think it was back in August 2012, and somehow I stumbled upon the Masters of the Universe live action movie -in it’s entirety!- on youtube.  I was mildly curious because I had never seen it, and remembering my fondness for the cartoon, I thought I’d watch a few minutes of it.  How bad could it be, right?  I think you know the answer to that.  Anyway, when I first glimpsed Frank Langella as Skeletor – wow. What a bummer.  He just seemed so profoundly mopey. I found myself musing “ what if someone had given Skeletor more hugs, more encouragement, more love?”  Would he have chosen a different path, perhaps become a more compassionate, well-balanced sort of guy?  I thought maybe someone should have let him borrow a book of affirmations, sort of like a “hey man, read some Louise L. Hay and get your head on straight” conversation.  It was this train of thought which led me to my sister who, as a mental health professional, actually has several of these types of books on her shelves.  I guess at that point I had a sort of “eureka!” moment.  Wouldn’t it be kind of hilarious, I thought, to pair some screen caps of Skeletor perpetrating some sort of villainy, along with some inspirational mumbo-jumbo?  I thought it would be funny, anyway.  I made a few and shared on my sister’s facebook wall to give her a laugh – she works in a really tough field, and sometimes if you don’t laugh, well then you’ll just break down and cry.

I guess what happened is that a few of her friends saw it, and a few of my friends saw it, and everyone got a chuckle out of it.  My brother and law and my boyfriend pushed me to make something a little more official with it, and after a few months I did start up a facebook page in February of 2013, with an accompanying tumblr and twitter account.  I later made an instagram account for it, which seems sort of frivolous, but hey – why not?  You have to find people where they are, right?

SE: Well, as I mentioned, I was limited in my exposure to cartoons and popculture.  I mean sure, I *knew* about G.I Joe and Transformers and Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and all of that, but since I didn’t watch them at all, I knew nothing about them and so of course couldn’t really relate to them. A lot of folks ask me what I’ll do when I run out of fodder for Skeletor Is Love (there are only two seasons to work with, after all) and they suggest doing something with Mummra or Cobra Commander or Starscream or whoever…but you know, that would feel pretty false to me.  I don’t know these guys, I have no history with them.  It just wouldn’t mean anything to me, so I doubt I’d have any fun with it.  And I have no interest in doing a Thing if the Thing I am doing does not make me happy.

SE: Well, at first they came straight off the pages of Louise L. Hay.  I’ve used some Eckhart Tolle and even , once.  Every once in a while I will paraphrase someone, maybe Dr. Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln or even the .  I think I even quoted Ru-Paul, and then at some other point, a random person on twitter whose moniker I could not remember later, which I still feel badly about.  One even came from a personal ad.

Nowadays though, I mostly just .  It could be inspired by something a friend is experiencing, or something in the news or Sometimes I get really worked about about something and that might make its way into an affirmation. It’s funny though – no matter where the inspiration comes from there’s always someone who says “perfect timing” or “hey man, I really needed that today”. It’s gratifying and humbling and really sort of wonderful to see that whatever it is I am posting that day, it’s resonating out there with someone.

SE: Oh, Evil-Lyn, Teela, and The Sorceress to be certain.  As a young, impressionable girl, it was awesome for me to be aware of these bad-ass warrior ladies fighting along side and making a difference with the rest of the team.  So when She-Ra came on the air, as you can imagine -I was all over that.  On the other hand – to this day I really do think Orko is the worst thing to ever happen to anyone, ever.  Definitely not a favorite.

SE: With regard to the Isla Vista shooting, I think I had a bit of a mini-mental meltdown.  And for a strange reason.  It occurred to me how very lucky I have been in my experiences as a woman.  I am surrounded by men with very healthy, very enlightened thoughts and attitudes on women and women’s issues and these are the type of guys I deal with on a day to day basis. As someone who works from home, I never have to deal with harassment on the subway or on a bus, and on top of that I am already a homebody who doesn’t go to clubs or bars or that sort of thing, so I’ve never had to deal with that sort of fear or conflict. I know it exists and I am certain that statistically I must have experienced some form of it, but it must be so far back in my past it doesn’t even register any more. So I am thinking about this and how lucky I’ve been…but perhaps , worse, how sheltered and naive I am about all of this sort of thing.  “Yes it happens, but it will never happen to me” sort of thinking -nand just how ignorant and how dangerous that is. These thoughts extended to the folks who have liked the facebook page or the tumblr page…how for the most part these seem like a great group of people, but just…how do you really know?  Which ones are the women-hating terrorists/misogynist extremists and which ones have harassed someone or assaulted someone or raped or killed or, or, or…? On and on.  I hate that this is where my thoughts went, but there you go.  And all of that is very hard for me to articulate to a close friend, let alone 267,000 people with different thoughts and opinions and attitudes. And having written it all out just now…I am not even sure that is everything…or *anything* I wanted to say on the subject!  I think it would have been a great place for my thoughts on it if 1. I could parse out exactly what my thoughts were and 2. if I were a better writer and could articulate them eloquently and succinctly.

You were not alone in your thoughts that the SiL page would have been a perfect place for such thoughts – several people wrote to me and even commented on the page to say just that.  On the flip side, those hateful people came out of the woodwork, those people that I had worried about, and they commented with some vile remarks and stirred things up.  Part of me wonders if I posted that day just to see if these individuals would out themselves and prove to myself that the things I’ve been lucky to avoid have really been under my nose the whole time.

SE: Well, as I mentioned, at the very beginning, it was just something to make my poor, overworked sister laugh. When the facebook and the tumblr went live, I very quickly began to get messages from people who would said that I helped with their depression, or their sobriety or any number of issues.  These realizations coupled with the fact that the very person I made it for worked in the mental health field made it clear to me that this was less of a laughing matter than I originally intended it for,  and so I did try to shift the tone a bit.  Yes, I do try to keep an absurdity and humor in mind when I pair each affirmation with an image, but it really is secondary to whatever the message is.  If someone thinks it is funny, well that is great.  If it helps someone get out of bed in the morning, or to call their sponsor instead of taking that drink, or whatever – *that* is even better. I do try to put my money where my mouth is in this regard.  This past May, my sister and I took part in the NAMI Walk (NAMI= National Alliance on Mental Illness) and we raised over $1200 for the cause.  I think that surprised some people, that this was actually something I did as part of SiL, but the support and encouragement from the SiL community was really overwhelming.

I think it meant a lot to people yes, while I make things to make people laugh on the internet, I am also an actual human being who tried to go out and make a difference in the community for which I’ve become an advocate. I’d like to continue and do more in this vein, but truthfully, I am a layperson.  I’ve got no training in the mental health field other than living in a family full of depressed alcoholics.  And while that might give me some personal life experience, it is certainly not enough to help anyone else.  So I will do as much as I can, in my small way to contribute – and hope that I am in some way making a difference.

PC: Thank you so much for your time!