Ellen Rosenholtz: Strawberry Girl

by Bruce Schimmel

It’s easy to fall in love with Strawberry Girl: She’s sleek, demure and full of smarts. But what I like most about her is that she doesn’t have a head.

Dressed in a classy striped sweater, a miniskirt and calf-high suede boots, Strawberry Girl is a visual sundae topped with a luscious, ripe strawberry.

The comic book character is the brainchild of artist Ellen Rosenholtz, who's been drawing her fictional alter ego for several years, and recently made her the star of an oversize zine called Strawberry's Rosenbacchanal.

Strawberry's Rosenbacchanal was commissioned to celebrate and put a face on one of the city's more intimidating institutions, the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Located in a tony residential DeLancey Place neighborhood, the Rosenbach is a cultural Valhalla -- but first you have to know what you're looking for.

The museum houses original illustrations from artists William Blake and Maurice Sendak, first editions of Alice in Wonderland and Moby Dick, along with the handwritten manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses, which chronicles the 20th century's most famous pub crawl.

Rosenholtz uses Ulysses to launch her own drunken cultural excursion, which begins in a fictionalized Philadelphia pub -- based on Fergie's -- and which she hopes will transport readers toward the treasures of the Rosenbach.

The drinking party of Strawberry's Rosenbacchanal is peopled with fictionalized versions of Rosenholtz's friends, whose heads have also been removed and replaced with animal and bird heads to protect the guilty. Vain, horny, even fascistic, they -- like most of us -- are far more interested in their next shot and squeeze than in Strawberry's erudite sermonettes.

It makes for an hilarious show. Strawberry's witty queries, like, "Have you ever thought about possessing enough wealth that you saw yourself as a force in shaping cultural interests?" are met mostly with snorts, huh?s and snores as characters wander off or simply pass out.

High cultcha is a tough sell, even to the deliciously disaffected.

Whether crowds will throng to 20th and DeLancey because of this spiffy zine is hard to say. The museum has printed 10,000 copies, and it's worth a trip there if only to pick up your free copy. Go there, get one. How often do museums give away their little masterpieces?

Hear an interview with Ellen Rosenholtz at www.schimmel.com/rosenholtz_ellen.mp3.