Patricia Krentcil is not only a laughably easy target for this blog, she’s as disoriented as a Kansas pig with farm fever. So we’re not gonna slam her too much, but we are gonna ask: are these really our values? Is Krentcil’s nutso body image and clearly low self-esteem just about being batshit crazy, or is it more and more typical of Americans constantly subject to predatory marketing? And just how ugly do we think we are if this is seen as an improvement?
Police say Pat Krentcil was arrested and charged with child endangerment after she allegedly snuck her daughter into the tanning booth she uses to make herself look like a carnival freak circa 1928.
ABC News reports that Krentcil hasn’t denied allowing her fair-skinned, redheaded five-year-old to accompany her to the tanning salon, but she does describe the incident as “a misunderstanding,” calling the girl’s burn and rash a regular sunburn.
It’s hard enough to look at this woman, but listening to her distinguish between a tanning booth and actual solar activity is too much. Her daughter told an alarmed school nurse that she’d gone into the tanning booth with her Oompa Loompa mother, and I’m going with her word over that of Carrots the Birthday Clown.
Salon employees told the cops they saw nothing, which reminds me of the those Penn State football A-holes who failed to notify authorities of child abuse so they could protect their own interests. Again, I can’t help but wonder where our societal values are.
And what’s with Krentcil’s own grossly unhealthy self-perception? Has she convinced herself that turning UV orange is somehow empowering? If so, what’s stopping her from imparting more of this “wisdom” to her impressionable young daughter? Little girls are known to respond to the magic-wand-will-turn-me-into-a-princess shtick. (At least there’s no Disney princess the color of a traffic cone with which she can further identify.) With enough positive reinforcement from mom at so precarious an age, this kid can grow up seeing the tanning booth as a good way to improve her own self-image and social standing among her peers, thus advancing a comically misguided practice to piss-poor emotional problem solving! (Yeesh. I’m no psychologist, but my Conjecture Kung Fu is all over the map on this one.)
What’s gonna happen when little Anna Krentcil gains a few pre-teen pounds? We’ll need a new magic wand for that one! Will mom then have to sneak her into a back-alley liposuction clinic set up in a Serbian goat-meat factory, only to claim later her child’s weight loss was the result of an intestinal condition?
But here’s the real question: are we just as culpable, guilty, or stupid by looking the other way, say, to the television where idiots like Patricia Krentcil thrive and become famous? Sure we make fun of burnt sausage-colored kooks like Krentcil and we feel better about our own lives as a result, but by parading ’em up and down the reality show pantheon of normalcy aren’t we actually reinforcing such moronically impulsive and self indulgent life skills?
Will we find out tomorrow that, like Balloon Boy’s parents or the “Human Barbie” mom who gave her daughter the $11,000 liposuction gift card, that Patricia Kentcil burned her daughter in a tanning booth just for the attention and notoriety??
Scary shit, people.
Patricia Krentcil: Please Just Go to Hell
I definitely needed to adjust my medication for this one.