Black is the New Orange

Last year, when ‘Wonder Woman’, the movie, finally came out, Saffy spent months fantasizing about changing her name to Diana. She even got Barney Chen to digitally superimpose her face over the real Princess of Themyscira in full battle drag as she charged across No Man’s Land.

            “That’s the look I want for Halloween,” she told Barney at the time.

            “No, you can’t,” Barney growled, his voice like a row of coffin lids slamming shut at the same time. “Because I’m going as Wonder Woman, and there’s not enough room on Paradise Island for the two of us!”

            To which Amanda quipped that this was probably the first time anyone had called Singapore, Paradise Island. “Someone needs to call STB!” she cackled.

            “Don’t they have antibiotics for that sort of thing now?” Saffy said, returning to this universe from a parallel world in which she was deflecting bullets shot at her by Nazi scum, back into a conversation from which she’d briefly checked out.

            Silence descended on the room as we mentally rewound the soundtrack of the last few minutes. I stared hard at the ceiling and frowned.

            “Oh,” Amanda sighed. “Singapore Tourism Board, Saf. Not STD.”

            “Oh,” Saffy and I said at the same time.

            As it turned out, Saffy ended up going to Halloween as her usual avatar, Sadako Yamamura, the freaky ghost from ‘The Ring’.

            “Really, I’m so lazy. The whole idea of getting all dolled up as Wonder Woman just gave me the hives. Just doing the hair would have taken me all day,” she told Sharyn in the lift up to the party at Barney Chen’s. She inspected herself in the mirror through the thick veil of her own long hair, which she’d just basically pulled over the front of her face.

            Her best friend nodded. “Hannor! And den, hor, you just need to wear your long white nightgown, so easy!” she said, also inspecting herself in the mirror. She was dressed in a high-collared fat suit that had been sewn into a bright green cheong-sam. For additional effect, she pasted a big brown mole over her right eye.

            Saffy – face obscured by her long hair – paused, and turned to Sharyn. “Remind me, again. Who are you going as?”

            “My mudder-in-law, lor! She very scary, mah!”

            Saffy’s obsession with Wonder Woman – despite her truly horrific appearance as Sadako at Barney’s party, during which one woman literally fainted when she walked into the bathroom and found Saffy, hair over her eyes and wearing her white nightgown, standing very still in the corner – pretty much continued for the rest of the year. It was finally replaced last week when she and Amanda finally watched ‘Black Panther’ on Apple iTunes.

            “Oh. My. God,” she moaned at the first scene of the all-female royal guard, resplendent in their tribal uniforms and totally next level fierce.

            By the time the second end credit scene had run, her favourite icon was no longer a pasty white woman in a battle kilt, bullet-deflecting bracelets and a glazing lasso, but the fabulous tall, toned, glistening, bald, spear-wielding, completely bad-ass African amazon, Okoye.

            “Seriously, that woman…!” Saffy gasped as she got up from the sofa to rush to the bathroom to pee. “I want to be her!”

            Amanda raised an expensively manicured eyebrow. “I think you’re a few DNA strands away from being an African warrior princess! I did love their outfits and accessories, though!”

            Meanwhile, Barney Chen announced that at the next Halloween, he was going as the Queen Mother Ramonda. “I am living for Angela Bassett’s head-dress! Don’t you think I would so rock that outfit?”

            “You like, ah?” Sharyn said. “I tot dat head dress look like the super tree at Garden by the Bay, leh!”

            “On you, it might do,” Barney rumbled, his biceps flexing absurdly beneath his tight tee-shirt. “But you just wait for my entrée!”

            Sharyn looked confused. “Hah, what entrée? Where are we going for dinner?” she said, a comment that Barney later said made him wonder, and not for the first time, just how she and Saffy could possibly be best friends.

            Meanwhile, Saffy has ramped up her obsession with ‘Black Panther’ to the point she’s actually learning Wakandan.

            “N’cos, Taifa Nagao!” she said to the char kway teow lady at our local hawker stall who snapped back, “Siow, lah, you!”

            “‘Thank you, Shield of the Nation’?!” Amanda said, looking up from her Google Translate.

            Saffy’s pneumatic breasts inflated. “Well, I don’t think Wakandan has a word for ‘bad tempered noodle-frying hawker lady’!”

            “I can’t wait for your next obsession,” Amanda murmured.