Thursday, November 02, 2006

Becky Made the Wrong Choice

I remember as a freshman in college at the University of North Carolina back in the 1980s, seeing the band Mother’s Finest play. For reasons not entirely clear to me I managed to get front row tickets and I invited a very pretty girl to the concert with me, and I think she accepted primarily because it was front row tickets, but it’s hard to say. I was a naive young man compared to this girl, thanks to my overwhelming homeliness, which kept my social life to a minimum in high school. As we were enjoying the show, she leaned over to me and pointed out that one musician in particular was quite high. In my naïveté, I said, “How can he be high and still play all those songs?”, because no one in the band seemed to be particularly disturbed by his musicianship at all, including me. My date informed me that she had seen many high people in her lifetime, and the guy was definitely high. And certainly being on the front row we were close enough to see the man’s face and physical movement clearly. I probably still would not be able to recognize such an appearance even today, but when today’s strip came up and the lead guitarist for Becky’s band was listed as being drunk; I remembered that concert from years and years ago.

My second up close experience with a drunken group of musicians was my wife’s stepfather’s band. When I first met my wife, her stepfather played in a country-western band in the Dallas area, and they performed gigs usually at the same sequence of 3-4 bars with dance floors, so they had employment on weekend evenings. All of the musicians had regular jobs during the week. When I went with my wife to see them play, I enjoyed the music, but speaking to the band members, I realized that in general, they were all nicely buzzed and had a little of the slurred speech and lack of focus in conversation that I normally associate with people who have been drinking.

Today in For Better or For Worse, the strip shows a man lifting his guitar in an unnatural position and then pulling on a string of his guitar, like he is trying to pull it off. The result is some horrible sound. I know Lynn Johnston leads a sheltered life up in Corbeil, so sheltered she seems to be either blissfully unaware of what a rock band setup would actually look like, or she is simply too lazy to find a picture and copy it. However, it seems incredible to me that she would be unaware of how much alcohol someone would have to consume to make them act this way.

I was trying to research for Constable Paul Wright what are the dividing lines between being a functional alcoholic and a nonfunctioning one and discovered even more gradations, where one of the crucial points is alcoholism that keeps you from doing your job. The lead guitarist in Becky’s band is a severe alcoholic. He has had so much alcohol that in real life, not only would he lose his job with Becky, but he would find it difficult to get gainful employment as a musician with anyone. And yet, Becky has taken this person on in her band. It suddenly occurred to me that the punch line of today’s strip “Maybe they wanted to be good…waaay too bad!” means that Becky hired a talented, but troubled lead guitarist with the hope that he would improve the band, while intentionally ignoring his alcoholism.

In order to understand what Lynn is trying to tell us, we have to look at this whole sequence starting from Tuesday July 12, 2005 after the Grade 8 grad. In this strip, Becky ditches 4Evah and says, “You’re good enough but not for me.” Becky wants a better back up band because she wants to “Be somebody some day.” Now a year and 4 months later, we finally get to see Becky with her back up band. Now Becky is somebody. She is Rebecca or Rebeccah, and she is no longer Becky. Now we get to see if Becky really did get a backup band that was better than 4Evah.

Her sound goes wrong, because the evil Jeremy Jones didn't show up to do the audio. (I have to retcon that one. Crud! I hadn't counted on that.) Her lead guitarist goes crazy on stage from drinking or 2 of her band are stoned (who knows?), something the kids of 4Evah would never, ever do. The moral of the story is that Becky made the wrong choice in bands. She wanted to be good…waaay too bad! It’s hard to understand this unless you go back to Tuesday July 12, 2005, and compare the dialogue. And then Becky goes to cry in the washroom, where she will be comforted/scolded by Eva/Becky.

It strikes me that the story arc with Becky being boy crazy was played in just the same way. Becky wants boys. She hikes up skirt. She only talks about guys. This goes on for months. Then Jeffo Bray humiliates her, she cries in the washroom, April comforts and scolds her and that’s it. We have not seen Becky with a guy since. That story is done. Her companions are now all nerdy girls, who do her homework for her. The moral of the story was: Premarital sex is bad.

As I read this band story and I see Becky’s comeuppance is now very clearly focused on the grievance of having chosen the wrong band, I suddenly realize that there is yet another Becky comeuppance to come, and that has to do with the schoolwork. We are not yet finished with evil Becky. Becky will learn that career ambitions are not worth losing friends over. Then she must also learn that she must do her own schoolwork and not rely on people to do it for her.

There is hope for the future. The snarkfeast has been good and plentiful this week, but there is more to come. Rejoice, snarkers! Rejoice!

2 Comments:

Blogger April Patterson said...

Ugh. :)

4:39 PM  
Blogger howard said...

Ugh?

5:16 PM  

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