Ramona Cash is a cute, punky looking brunette you’d expect to see modeling skirts and bikinis in a skateboard fashion catalog. Over coffee in downtown Santa Cruz, she parts a section of her professionally highlighted hair to reveal an inch-wide heart-shaped bald spot from where her friends precisely ripped the hair from her scalp.
“The pictures are even worse,” says Cash’s cohort Audra “Darling Clementine” Clemons, pulling out her iPhone to show a photo of the raw and bloody scalp heart. “After I pulled her hair out, we had a big hug.”
Such is the life of a Rad Girl.
Cash, Clemons and Lindsay “Munchie” Morrison are in town promoting season three of their outrageous television series on Mav TV, Rad Girls, and they made sure to stop by the Weekly office to chat. Usually described as a female version of MTV hit show Jackass, the show features the three girls doing everything from drinking urine, to waxing their genitals with an automobile and strip of tape, to being choked out in public by the daughter of pro wrestling star Rowdy Roddy Piper. All three of the girls met in Santa Cruz, and though they live in Hollywood now, they routinely make it back to film episodes, catch up with old friends and test the limits of local authorities. Some see the trio as disgraceful to women and to humans in general. Others see them as empowering – true feminists that push back on the idea that only guys can be gross. Most of their fans, however, simply see them as hilarious.
“Being women we can get away with a lot more than men can while we do it,” says Morrison, who says she got her nickname “Munchie” because she’ll eat anything, no matter how foul. “We seem to catch flak for it later, once (the show) airs – mostly from other women.”
The idea for Rad Girls was hatched in 2005, Cash says, with the help of mutual friend turned executive producer Jason Martinez. On a shoestring budget, the girls filmed a pilot episode with pranks like throwing a “slumber party” inside Gottschalk’s department store in Capitola Mall and dressing a friend up like a prostitute to wander the streets with a large, unsightly stain where such a professional would rather not have one. It wasn’t long before Fuse TV, a music-oriented network bought the show and instantly increased their budget to around $1 million, the girls say. Since then, the show has been moved to the slightly less extravagant MavTV, with the first episode of season three premiering Jan. 29.
“Season three is awesome,” says Cash. “Clementine dresses up like a bearded topless woman, she also puts her tongue in a mousetrap. We also do the ‘tampon tea’ episode, which we filmed just a few nights ago with a bunch of Westside surfers here in Santa Cruz. We definitely go all out for this season.”
RAD GIRLS airs on Mav TV Friday nights at 6pm PST. Check out videos of the controversial trio at www.mavtv.com and at www.radgirls.tv.
