Make Cincinnati Weird!

“We call her Big Girl,” explains Big Girl owner Andy Scheurer, who is always happy to talk about Big Girl. “She’s been a source of humor and a bit of mystery, but she’s also a timely piece of pop art. She’s lovely, and as the leaves fall off the trees in the winter, she literally slows traffic.”Big Girl is throwback to the ’60s, when Muffler Men, Uniroyal Gals (which is what Big Girl is) and other giant fiberglass statues stood as roadside attractions for businesses – usually holding tires – in the pre-highway days. (Except now, Clifton’s Big Girl is armless. How she got that way Scheurer is unsure, but he also calls her Jackie DeMilo, after Jackie O and Venus DeMilo).

Big Girl is 17.5 feet tall and is sort of creepy – she’s very pale and appears too large against the backdrop of her Clifton backyard home. Yet she’s beguiling in her femininity, with her classically ’60s flip hairdo, her white V-neck T-shirt and red, form-fitting knee-length skirt.
She holds the look of a woman who knows something you do not.

“That’s why she’s a piece of art rather than a kitschy piece of crap,” Scheurer says. “Her context is in a formal yard. It’s the oldest standing house in Clifton, and you expect stone walls and flowery crap and sculptures. To find her in this context is jolting. She is made to drive by on the highway. And indeed, she has her own dose of creepiness.”

Clifton has been Big Girl’s home since Scheurer’s brother found her abandoned in a park in the late ’70s or early ’80s. Before that, she stood at the old F & M Steakhouse in Northern Kentucky.

More on Uniroyal Gals from Roadside America.

via Tominabox