Maria Bamford's Dad Doesn't Use Soap
Anyone who's ever seen Maria Bamford's act or web show knows that she comes from a decidedly eccentric family. But we only ever glimpse her relatives through her own impersonations of them… until now. Turns her old man is a doctor who is campaigning against soap. Yes, soap. He runs a website called Dr. Bamford's No Soap, and he recently appeared with Maria on the Dork Forest Radio podcast to extol the virtues of soaplessness. Here's what The Bammer had to say about her pop in a recent interview:
Don't use soap. Soap is drying, irritating to the skin. If you need
to wash your skin, pat pat pat with a wet washcloth. Air dry. Air dry.
Don't use soap. My dad in fact has an entire website based on that
philosophy, and it's called SoapAlternatives.com .
And it's very funny in an extremely confusing and elliptical manner.
What you do, it's this long website that tells you all about how not to
use soap, and what he does– because people always want to use soap.
They go, "I gotta use soap, isn't there some sort of special
something–" "No, don't use it, don't use it," so now he started making
these bars of wood in his basement workshop that are shaped like bars
of soap. And he says, "Why don't you try this?" And they say, "That's a
bar of wood. Won't I get splinters?" And he says, "Yeah. Better not use
it." So he has about a hundred of these wooden bars, and he will sell
one to you, but what you need to do– it's not an actual sale– what
you need to do is donate I believe twenty-five dollars to a
skin-related charity, send him the receipt that you donated to that
charity, then within nine to fourteen weeks, you will receive a bar of
wood in the mail. But it does have "Dr. Bamford's No Soap" burned onto
it with a laser thing. So check it out. No one has gotten one yet, and
the site has been up for I want to say a year and a half.I think my dad feels a bit depressed about that and yet energized by
it. That is the beauty of my dad, it's this thing that's happening but
not happening. It's the joy in the not doing. He had these bars
forever, and then he wouldn't tell anybody about them. And then he
would get kind of mad that nobody wanted one. I went, "Have you told
anybody?" He says, "No." So he finally got the website up, and then he
got all anxious that people would see it. So he didn't want me to put
the link up on my website. I said, "How the hell are people going to
see it?" And he's like, "I don't know." So finally I put the link up on
my website, but he hasn't gotten any hits.
The rest of that interview can be found on writer Ben Karakh's website. Though I should warn you, much of it is completely unrelated to soap.
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