Bloodred Beauty: A Meditation on Mel Gibson's Midlife Allure

Mel, lean toward then on and into the full length and breadth of my in-the-bodyness, closer than most people think that close can ever be.

The late post-Classic Maya and the Aztec symbolically associated human blood and chocolate. This is possibly because both the somewhat similarly shaped heart and cacao pod produced precious substances.[22] The Aztec army ate chocolate as war rations; chocolate was a metaphor of sensuality and luxuriousness for the Aztec; and they and the Maya added the dried and ground powder of chili peppers to their chocolate drinks, creating chilcacahuatl, which, unlike our cocoa, was cool.[23] In one of his songs, the Aztec poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl, called chocolate "flower of the cacao tree," and the Aztec spiced their chocolate with various powdered flower petals.[24] Seeds from the tree called achiote or annatto probably colored chocolate drinks reddish, and according to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, reporting during the Spanish conquest of Nicaragua, natives' mouths, lips, and whiskers turned red, as if they'd been drinking blood, after they had drunk chocolate containing achiote.

Mel, delectable as chocolate

Bloodrich as the heart from which it comes,

I cannot determine the extent of your ravel of reds.

It does disorient me from the sidewalks that I follow every day

But I am ready for more revelry

Tempt me more, flowering chocolate Mel,

Test my lipstick

Chili is its name

By leaving its imprint from your lips

Where my mother's gamets touch my skin

Mix us Chilcacahuatl, burning, bitter

But sugar me with tweaks and teasings of our gender

Inspire us to be as darkly pretty as the maroon petals of

Chocolate Coreopsis and cymbidium

And as fierce as the reds of births and deaths and mothers often are

While we suck truffles until they melt

Sit beside me

While we mourn the short-lived beauty of the chocolate-red

Tall bearded iris unfolding

In the vase on the same table that holds the candy box.

Iris was my mother's favorite flower

Joanna Frueh's most recent book is Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (University of California Press, 2001). She is currently writing a memoir. A History of Chocolate, Including Action Heroes and Fairy Men. She teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Photos: Russell Dudley and Joanna Frueh.

(1.) Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 101.

(2.) Wallace died at age thirty-five.

(3.) The song precedes Barbara Kruger's photographic use of the slogan, "We don't need another hero," in 1986.

(4.) Kathleen M. Higgins, "Beauty and Its kitsch Competitors." in Peg Zeglin Brand, ed., Beauty Matters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). defends beauty against the deficiencies in kitsch and glamour (as well as flawlessness).

(5.) Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Americon Man (New York William Morrow, 1999). 38, compassionately understands that a "maternal conception of manhood' characterized by "the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice" under-girded men's bonding and community in an industrial society. Her argument throughout the book relies, to a great extent, on the idea that men's maternal femininity is both useless and not respected in our contemporary society of consumption and service.