Of M*A*S*H and mushrooms

The curious case of a puffball named for a famous pair of TV lips.

There are many things I don’t know about fungi, but one thing I know for sure: it’s crucial to get a positive identification. Taxonomy is of the ultimate importance. Especially when the guidebook (Geoff Ridley’s A Photographic Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi of New Zealand) says “the name is derived from a character in the television comedy series M*A*S*H.”

Fungal networks are complex and deep. I find Liv Sisson, author of Fungi of Aotearoa, through the complex network of Instagram (where everyone should look at her amazing photos of fungi and fingernails), and she tells me about the importance of naming. “Yeah, I think naming is an interesting thing, both on the common and taxonomic sides, especially in New Zealand.

I had the opportunity to work with expert mycologists like Jerry Cooper and Peter Buchanan, who have great knowledge around the scientific names and the taxonomy of what we have here in Aotearoa. But interestingly, even with the scientific names – which are often seen as like bible truth, right? –  in New Zealand especially, sometimes it’s a bit of a grey area because we’ll have species that are introduced. Oftentimes what’s been introduced looks really, really similar to what’s seen overseas. So it’s assumed that it’s the same, and so you would use the same scientific name, but in many cases it’s probably actually slightly genetically distinct.”

This is fascinating. And Liv’s book is beautiful. It does feature the hotlips puffball, but she doesn’t mention M*A*S*H, so neither of us are any the wiser as to the connection. Unless…

The hotlips puffball is scientifically called Calostoma rodwayi. This comes from the Greek words kallos (mouth) and stroma (beauty). It has a round fruit body covered in a rough, scaley, scurfy layer that falls away in time to gift us with lips. (Also brown warts. Which, fine.) The lips get redder and redder and when it comes time for puffing, the spores are released in one huge, forced mass.

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If you’re not someone who watched any of the 256 episodes of M*A*S*H or the resulting spinoff movies, you might not make the immediate character connection here. (Which, also, fine. Life choices.) M*A*S*H was a not-unproblematic USA TV war comedy (ha ha) featuring the stories of some guys called things like Brad and Chad and John and Paul and George and Ringo and also, and unforgettably, Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan, who was for a moment in a film version played by Sally Kellerman but for the purposes of this fangirling let’s be clear that she was mostly played by Loretta Swit, who never necessarily wore red lipstick like the puffball version of herself. But still. She was devastatingly, attractively scurfy. 

It’s not just me who thinks so. In the late seventies, the New Zealand public was, by all accounts, just as obsessed. The Press called her “one of the most unpredictable and explosive talents in TV.”  In 1978, Radio 4ZB flew Swit out to be the main attraction at a street festival in Dunedin. She also visited Oamaru, Queenstown and Gore but scandalously bypassed Christchurch. 

“This blonde is no dummy,” The Press wrote in 1979. “The other day, for instance, when a reporter at a press conference innocently asked: ‘What do you wear in bed, Loretta?’, she marched out, tossing her sun-kissed locks with such fury that no-one would have been surprised if they had burst into flames. Later, when she had calmed down a bit, she explained: ‘Just because I’m a blonde it certainly doesn’t mean I’m dumb. I never get asked for my views on M*A*S*H* which is much more than a comedy. Consider the sheer absurdity of it. Here are a bunch of men in the battle line with the job of stitching up the wounded simply so that these same wounded can go back into battle and get hurt again.’”

The same article also mentioned that Swit would rather hang out with her dogs Pief, Sheba, Precious and Jelly Bean than with Alan Alda (which, relatable). But none of this gets me any closer to resolving my taxing taxonomy questions. Until.

I send Geoff Ridley a message through the message box at Manaaki Whenua, where he works and am delighted to receive a reply.  “I began learning about the larger fungi in the mid-1980s,” Geoff writes. “The go-to books were Marie Taylor’s (published in 1970 and 1982).”

Being much more familiar with ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan than Marie Taylor, I look Marie up. I find that she wrote and illustrated a stunning book, Mushrooms and Toadstools, as part of the Mobil New Zealand Nature series (O, the days when petroleum companies were nature lovers and war sitcoms were funny) which is very much in demand and out of print.

Geoff started going to the annual NZ Fungal Forays when they started in 1986 and met Marie there. He picks up the story. “So, at some time in the late 1980s -1990s Calostoma was collected, and Marie would have talked about it having these thick red lips, then someone said the ‘hotlips fungus’ but I don’t remember who. At the time everyone in New Zealand had watched M*A*S*H because there were only two TV channels, and M*A*S*H had been repeated several times and everyone knew the character Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan. Now what I can’t say is that this originated in New Zealand as we had many American and Australian mycologists on these forays, so it may have come from that source as well, as they all knew M*A*S*H too.”

Fungal networks. See. Complex and deep.

Liz Breslin