Death by Green Bean

Help! I’ve been trying to remember more about a novel or short story in which a young housewife accidentally poisons her mother-in-law with botulism found in her poorly home-canned green beans. I can’t remember anything else at all, but that image has stuck with me for a long time. I’d love to can my own veggies and tomato sauce—my mother and grandmother still do it—but I’m too afraid to end up killing someone.

Why am I thinking about this? Thunder storms knocked out my power Friday afternoon, and when it still wasn’t restored Saturday morning, The Boy and I went to my parents’ to enjoy some light, heat, and television. We came back home yesterday afternoon, and I opened the fridge to discover fuzzy strawberries and the scent of death, as well as an exploded tube of Pilsbury cinnamon rolls.

In short, the paranoid maniac in me trashed just about everything in the fridge and freezer. Sigh. I’d feel better about having done that if I could go back and reread the botulism story.

On a happier note, though, we went to see Kick-Ass on Friday, partly in hopes that the power would come back on while we were gone. I didn’t care too much about Kick-Ass one way or another, but The Boy really, really wanted to go. It’s rated R, so I talked it over with his dad, and decided to take him (and another kid, actually, with his parents’ permission) as long as he understood that there might be things we needed to talk about when it was over.

It turns out that there wasn’t anything to worry about, but much to laugh at cheer for. The movie is two kinds of violent: One is as close as you can get to cartoon violence without animation, if that makes sense, and the other is realistic to the point of being cautionary. The boy who turns himself into Kick-Ass does so because he wants to help people instead of standing and watching or running away, and he gets beat up and nearly killed for his troubles. He’s afraid. His body has realistic limitations. And he cries. He shows what courage has to be for normal people, and the cost that courage brings.

The other violence in Kick-Ass is what seems to have so many critics feeling violent themselves, and that has to do with Hit Girl. Yes, the premise of a father who starts training his daughter as an assassin from the time she’s about five years old, is a terrible thing . . . in real life. But in the comics, which this movie most definitely is, it’s . . . not okay, but understandable and allowable.


Hit Girl is really eleven-year-old Mindy, who likes bowling, hot fudge sundaes, cocoa with marshmallows, and her dad. They have a close bond, and like him she wants to avenge her mother’s death and his wrongful imprisonment by bringing down the crime boss who plagues their city and caused it all. That’s a proper evolution story, and one that rightly troubles people in the movie—people who care about Mindy don’t like the idea that she’s Hit Girl, but it’s who she is. She’s smart, capable and earnest (what pre-teen girl isn’t?), and she’s a marvel to watch.

The best thing about her, though, is that she’s never, ever sexualized in any way. She kicks ass and deals blows and death and fear like all good comic book heroes, and quips her way into the hearts of those she doesn’t kill, but unlike any other strong comic book females I can think of, there’s not an ounce of sexy to be seen. And rightly so, of course, because she’s just a kid.

[Slight spoiler:] She ends up enrolled in school at the end of the movie, leaving viewers to hope against hope that she won’t lose her poise and confidence once the hormones kick in and boys begin to look at her without her costume and weapons.

The crack of her knuckles is promising.