Jenny Marx's Email Forward

When was the first forwarded survey? When did the first smartass fill in "sex: yes please!" and "favorite album: an album of family pictures I have" to universal mirth of his friends (the earth being young, and humorous humor not having been invented yet)? I would have guessed sometime in the early 70's, soon after the invention of email.

The Redcloud parents, however, while conducting their Cthulu research in some of their musty old books, found something that looks startlingly like an email-forward survey dating from the 1860's, written, oddly, by Karl Marx's daughter Jenny. This is true: she really wrote this, and made all her famous commie friends and relations take it. Some of her questions ("Your maxim") have a slight old-timey feel, but several ("favorite color", "your idea of happiness") seem just as modern and banal as anything you'd see in your in-box.

In order to keep this 150-year-old forward going, we L&E writers are all going to take the survey and email it to everyone we know. You should too! As an added bonus, next week we'll publish Marx's and Engels's survey answers, which are tons cooler and funnier than ours. (Engels listed his motto as "Take it aisy." Engels is the fucking man.)

The Anonymous Blonde's Answers to Jenny Marx's Questions

1. Your favorite virtue: Murmurousness

2. Favorite virtue in man: Being able to procure hooch.

3. Favorite virtue in woman: Being able to peel and eat an apple.

4. Your chief characteristic: I'm a firecracker.

5. Your idea of happiness: Being locked in a closet with a real, certified postman who has got to "deliver de letter de sooner de better," and it's a real letter, and I'm wearing a negligee and we're both drinking cherry cokes.

6. Your idea of misery: Being locked in a closet with Sir Francis Drake and Anais Nin, and I'm wearing a smelly overcoat, and the Spanish Armada is trying to get in using nail files.

7. The vice you excuse most: Making ladies dressed like nurses step on bugs for you. (Actually, I don't know if I excuse that vice, but it's fascinating!) Also: rambling.

8. The vice you detest most: Shooting abortion doctors. It's terrorism too!

9. Your chief aversion: People like the late/great Ann Landers, who go on and on about how they don't smoke and have never had a sip of liquor in their life, but have always had lots and lots of satisfying and healthy sex. There's just something creepy about people who think of sex as good vegetables, instead of as a good old-fashioned vice.

10. Literary or historical characters you most like: Spenser's Errour; Anne Boleyn; Quentin Compson; Zuleika Dobson; Stacey McGill

11. Your favorite occupation: Using my fingernails to carve a pumpkin with the image of a voodoo-style guy from the game "Operation."

12. Your favorite hero: Oh, one with a lot of vegetables, some sea salt, a little olive oil and vinegar and some hot mustard. (Oh la!)

13. Your favorite heroine: She-Ra

14. Your favorite writer: Eliza Haywood, who wrote one of the first romance novels--not only did it contain a bed trick and some Ovid, but it also contained a poisoned letter.

15. Your favorite flower: The one I lost in the back of Bobby Reynolds' Chrysler.

16. Your favorite color: Jade-green.

17. Your favorite dish: Hooch, and jammy cookies.

18. Your maxim: "Never cut what you can bite."

19. Your motto: "If all the Fruit by the Foot in the world were laid foot-to-foot, I wouldn't be surprised."