Sorry Lady Gaga—Katy Perry is more interesting than you'll ever be

As much as she’s not likely complaining about her lot in life, one has to wonder if Katy Perry sits around asking herself what the hell she’s doing wrong.

The artist known to her old Sunday school teachers as Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson is hands down the most fascinating creature currently working in pop music. You want crazy? That would be Perry‘s upbringing, where her Bible-thumping parents evidently had a major beef with their kids listening to anything that didn’t fall under the umbrella of hypersanitized Christian music.

Sit back for a second and think about all the teenage rites of passage that little house rule caused her to miss out on. There was no giving herself whiplash banging her head to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” while bombed on Gilbey’s Lemon Gin. No outraging Pepsi shareholders by acting like the whore of Babylon while dancing in front of burning crosses to the strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”. No torching Norwegian churches while a shitty ghetto blaster blared Bathory’s Under the Sign of the Black Mark. And no dressing up like Beelzebub’s mistress and road-tripping to Holy Land USA in a Gremlin, doing goat-blood shooters while playing air guitar to Cradle of Filth’s Dusk… And Her Embrace.

And let’s not even get into the fact that, despite Perry looking like she’s ripped off everything she knows from the insanely foxy Veronica Lodge, Archie Comics were strictly forbidden fruit in the Hudson household. One of the downsides of being the daughter of evangelical pastors is, evidently, that you’re either reading the Bible for entertainment at the breakfast table or you’re reading the back of the Cap ’n Crunch cereal box.

The weirdness doesn’t stop there. How many other pop princesses—that horrid troll Avril Lavigne aside—started out targeting the shitkicker market? That’s right: Perry may spend her downtime smoking bowls with Snoop Dogg these days, but her first kick at the can had her taking aim at folks who aren’t happy unless a song contains a dead dog, a broken-down pickup truck, and a wife who—to the chagrin of her husband, children, dead dog, and broken-down pickup truck—just can’t seem to keep her cheating heart in her pants.

That‘s not enough for you? Well consider that Perry finally broke through, to the horror of her Christian parents, with a song that celebrates slipping the tongue to another chick who tastes like Cherry ChapStick, which, admittedly, sounds more appealing that tasting like freeze-dried coffee, granulated garlic, and Rosie O’Donnell.

Creative Space and Time: Collage Obsessions -Elizabeth Bathory

&Nbsp;from Dian,  who bears a similarity to a portrait of Bathory. One of the problems of using portraits is that the resolution is difficult to work with, so in this case the portrait has been altered to represent Bathory. Google images of women in Caravaggio paintings, especially the hair from "Medusa", one that I have in my library from a previous challenge and a Cassatt painting.

The Dracula book

Slovakia in Pictures

The vampire film, from Nosferatu to Bram Stoker's Dracula

Encyclopedia of the Vampire, The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture

Dracula, the un-dead