Holly Rios’s recent show at Harrington Art Studio left an impression: images erased, reprinted, re-seen. Her work, informed by Playboy, with its infamous Bunny logo, had me thinking about how eternal symbols refuse to fade. Maybe that’s why I’ve been caught on another loop: the sound of Run, Rabbit, Run, recorded in 1939 by the British comedy duo Flanagan and Allen.
The popular World War II song was written for wartime morale—bright and lilting. After Germany’s first air raid on Britain in 1939, locals joked that the only casualties were two rabbits; RAF pilots picked up the tune and rewrote the lyrics: “Run Adolf, Run Adolf, run, run, run.” The B-side, We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line, quickly joined it as a national favorite.
We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line
We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
Have you any dirty washing, mother dear?
We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
’Cause the washing day is here
Whether the weather may be wet or fine
We’ll just rub along without a care
We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
If the Siegfried Line’s still there
The humor was absurd, its tone breezy, even flirtatious. That mix of sex and violence—the soldier’s wink—made it both funny and unsettling, a morale booster that never let the reality of killing drift too far away. The Siegfried Line (known in Germany as the Westwall) stretched nearly 400 miles from the Netherlands to Switzerland—an interlocking system of bunkers, tank traps, and concrete obstacles built in the 1930s to hold the Allies back.
Although Run, Rabbit, Run was recorded before the Blitz began, its ironic brightness soon met a grim reality. From September 1940 to May 1941, the German Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign—known as the Blitz—killed more than 43,000 British civilians and injured nearly 140,000. What had started as a joke about rabbits became a darkly resonant refrain, echoing through shelters, pubs, and barracks as London burned.
I was never a big fan of the rabbit as a Playboy symbol, but I can’t help but fall a little in love with the rabbit itself—the contradictory emblem that’s survived every reinvention. Prey and mascot. Comic and casualty. It keeps running, and every generation, someone chases.
Rios is also co-curating Perspectives of Women in Print with Carlissa Whells, opening November 17, 2025, at Finch Lane Gallery in Salt Lake City.
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