CSotD: Marmee Dearest
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The mother's smile absolutely makes it in today's Rhymes With Orange.
Twenty years later, she remains oblivious to the horrors she inflicted on her poor child.
No, wait: The little inset of the school picture makes it. Gaah!
Wait, no, it's the fact that the now-adult kid is still obsessing over it all.
This is a very funny cartoon and I don't know where to begin, so let's talk about wallabies.
Back in my reporting days, I covered (and inflamed) a situation where a local pet stores was selling a baby wallaby and had approached the paper for coverage of "The Pet of the 90s!"
Being not a huge fan of exotic pets, I managed to cover it such that the existence of a law preventing the sale was uncovered and things got kind of interesting, with the result that little Tookie ended up at a sanctuary in Texas, whose director explained why exotic pets seem cute and fun for such a limited time:
"When wallabies or lions or tigers or anything else would still be young enough to be dependent on their mothers, they're very tame. The human surrogate mother will be followed and the animal will make no attempt to hurt them or run away from them," he explained.
"But they become antisocial as they become older, almost universally. In most cases, when the animals are at an age where they would be independent of the parent, they become overly aggressive towards humans because they have no fear or respect for them. Tigers are a prime example, and monkeys (also) start to assert their rights to a place in the dominant heirarchy as adolescents, at which point, if someone tells them 'no,' they are very likely to attack."
Having been both a parent and a child, I can say that, while I've certainly seen human adolescents who follow that pattern, I've never heard of animals manifesting the human variation, the one where they go along placidly, but then, several years later, the now fully grown lion/tiger/monkey/wallaby approaches its parent and says "Remember that time ….?"
"Remember that time we caught an antelope and I wanted to chew on the left hind leg, but you made me stay up by the neck and all I got were ears and meanwhile Uncle Simba ate all the hind leg meat?"
Of course, Hilary Price is stacking the deck a bit here, harking back to school pictures. School pictures are such an enduring horror that Lincoln Peirce has a school-picture-taker as a recurring character in "Big Nate" who is there to annoy and terrify the kids.
As my mother has downsized her living arrangements in the past couple of years, she has passed along to us various things that she hasn't got space or need for but would feel guilty about tossing out, including, in the last move, a bunch of my old school photos.
To which my reaction was "You'd feel guilty tossing them out now? I wanted to toss them out the day I brought them home, but you wouldn't let me!"
I'll bet that, whenever Nick Nolte sees that infamous DUI mug shot floating around the Internet, he probably says to himself, "It could be worse. They could have gotten hold of my seventh grade school picture."
And I'll double-down with a bet that, if you saw the mug shot and the school picture side-by-side, you'd agree with him. And that his mother would not.
Incidentally, one of the best parts of going to Hilary's annual open studio event in the fall has been meeting her mother, a delightful and very funny lady who I'm sure never — even unintentionally — did or said anything that traumatized her daughter. Except, you know, for the inevitable. Which usually turns out to be most of it.
I'll plug that open house here as soon as details are announced, but, right now, if you are in the Midwest or anywhere near it, you should drop what you're doing and head for Wisconsin.
At the end of the month, you will have the chance to meet not just Hilary Price, but a host of noted and talented cartoonists, thanks to Anne Hambrock, who not only mounted the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning but ran a successful Kickstarter campaign so she could afford to make the events free and open to the public.
(And if your kid says this looks interesting, then you really need to go, or else it will end up on the "Remember that time …" list along with the dorky clothes you insisted on for School Picture Day. Only, in this case, the kid will be right. Like the time you were driving home from something and you wouldn't let him listen to a hockey game on the radio and 30 years later he got around to telling you that it was Game Seven of the Stanley Cup and his team was in it. Not that I even remember that.)
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