ONE SHOE BLUES

STARRING B.B. KING
SANDRA BOYNTON
WORKMAN PUBLISHING CO.
9.23.09

With Disney sing-a-longs for Wii and coloring books for 5-year-olds’ iPhones, what kid doesn’t want to see a shitty music video about B.B. King and sock puppets paired with a 59-page book reiterating the brain fart we just saw?

Thank you, Sandra Boynton.

In what seems to be some sort of ad for Alzheimer’s disease, the aged blues legend, B. B. King appears to have wandered out of a nursing home into a kind of abandoned building and starts playing guitar. From here, things become a little hazy. He begins imagining that socks are singing to him, one of which is his dead mother named "Momsock," differentiated only by an afro and a purse. Sexist? Yes. Racist? Absolutely.

But the most frightening part is what it implies. Like an awake nightmare, we follow B.B. King’s slow descent into madness. Sock puppets pop in and out of drawers, play the saxophone and peer in on him from outside a window. Then we realize that this whole mindfuck started because he’s missing his shoe, which is on his foot. We shit you not.

There are two things we have deduced from this piece of discriminatory garbage: Susan Boynton hates B.B. King or Susan Boynton hates children. Or both. [DEBBIE DRISCOLL]