Indirect Wedding Preparation Week
It would be easy to look at this week in For Better or For Worse and say, "Nothing happened this week." But what did we really have?
1. Deanna finds Grandma Marian's old dress in a crawl space and plans to take it to a dry cleaner and then put it in a box with a window. The natural conclusion to draw from this is that Deanna has gone mental and developed a strange obsession with wedding dresses. However, what we have instead is what has become a hallmark of why this strip is no longer of the same quality it once was. Lynn Johnston seems to have forgotten, "It's not the destination but the journey itself that's important." Just as she sets up strips in order to get to the desired punchline, she is also setting up aspects of Liz's wedding without considering the way to get there.
Case in point: The wedding dress. We want Elizabeth to have a wedding dress that is just as special as Deanna's wedding dress, except it can't have the taint of money about it. How that can happen is if the dress is an heirloom from an older character. There is no female character more revered than Grandma Marian, so she is the obvious choice. However, she got married just after the end of World War II, which means her wedding dress is over 60 years old. Straightaway, I am thinking there are going to be issues with dress preservation, and I don't even have to think hard about it. Anyone who has gone to a museum and seen old war uniforms or old dresses can tell immediately how fragile the material is. In order to Liz to wear Grandma Marian's old dress, someone would already have to have gone through the effort of preserving the dress with this expectation. I don't see anything wrong with the idea that Marian preserved the dress for Elly to wear and then Elly preserved it for Liz or April to wear. That way it gets worn, and there is not going to be any question about why Deanna didn't wear it. It's not Deanna's grandmother, after all.
However, someone got the idea that since the new focus of today's For Better or For Worse is Mike and Deanna, somehow they have to be included in the whole thing. And so we end up with this bizarre crawl space discovery sequence, which would have made a lot more sense if Deanna had been left out.
2. Rudy Dodd and Candace Halloran go to visit Elizabeth Patterson. Then the 3 of them try to talk about how wonderful their relationships are. Ultimately, Elizabeth shoos Rudy and Candace out of her apartment, and gives us every indication that they dropped in unexpectedly when she was trying to get work done for her job. The natural conclusion to draw from this is that Elizabeth was an excellent put-upon hostess and her friends need to call before they come over.
However, what we really had here was Lynn Johnston spending 3 strips reminding us who Candace and Rudy are and that they know Liz. So, later on, when they show up at her wedding or perhaps participating in her wedding, you can remember Rudy, who prior to this point had not had any part of the strip for the last 4 years. Lynn Johnston actually does not do that good a job with this, because not even once are we reminded that Rudy and Candace are old friends from her university days.
So there you have it. The week of nothing could be easily summarized as:
a. Elizabeth's wedding dress has family sentimental value.
b. These two in the wedding party are named Candace and Rudy
Join us next week when:
a. Mike and Deanna have a visit with Josef Weeder where we are reminded that he has taken pictures of weddings before.
b. Elly is cleaning her house and uncovers a series of bridesmaid dresses, still in perfect condition.
c. Elizabeth visits Lawrence Poirier who reveals that he has a side business of providing flowers at weddings.
d. Anthony Caine looks in a crawl space and discovers he has male friends there, who have been missing for 20 years, but are greatly excited about being in Anthony's wedding party, after a dry cleaner spruces them up a bit.
posted by howard at 9:57 PM
10 Comments:
Not only is this a rather obvious way to set up the wedding this August but it's also a great way for Lynn to answer her critics. From time to time, her staff hands her a list of our complaints which she rather clumsily answers. We've seen that:
a) Liz still lives in her own apartment.
b) Liz still has her teaching job.
c) Liz stll has friends her own age.
d) Liz still takes care of Shimsaa.
This is part of a pattern Lynn's gotten into. The strip wherein Elly swooped dowm and admitted she understood why the Housening might alarm April was her way of saying "See, they don't treat her like dirt." I'd say towards the end Mike might allow as how he was out of line with the whole "Lizardbreath" thing.
dreadedcandiru2,
Of course Lynn's answer doesn't answer my question, which would be, "What did that whole 'Let's go home, Anthony' line back last December" mean in the first place? Did it mean that Liz agreed to go home with Anthony so she could tuck little Francie into bed, and then go right back to her apartment? Nonsense.
Even if Liz was spending half her nights sleeping over Anthony's place, I would expect her to keep her apartment for appearances as she did with the "I'm living with Eric Chamberlain, but we have 2 bedrooms" stuff. Keeping the separate apartment also means that Shiimsa has to live there. If Shiimsa shifted locations, then that would give away her intimate relationship with Anthony. I also expect her to keep her teaching job. If she suddenly stopped that to become a full-time mom to little Francie, that would also give it away. What we have then, is confirmation of my expectations.
The only flaw here is the bit with "Liz still has friends her own age." That may have been what Lynn Johnston intended, but it did not work. We see Liz telling them to leave because she has work to do, and then we see her thought balloon about the inconvenience of their visit. Oops! This means that Liz's friends came over uninvited. This means that the visit was not the planned get together of friends who regularly get together. This mean Liz resented the fact they came over. In fact, since Candace pumped Liz with questions about her relationship with Anthony, it means that Liz does not keep Candace current on her relationship with Anthony. In other words, these are not really friends at all, but a couple of people Liz knew back in university who dropped in unexpectedly. If they were really friends, we would see:
a. Liz go to their place sometime
b. Liz and Anthony interacting with them
c. Liz not complaining about them after they visited.
The story she told Candace and Rudy this week about how she and Anthony are taking it slow is normally something Candace would challenge. Yet, this time around Rudy did it, although quite indirectly. Rudy said that his relationship with Candace was like the relationship Liz described with Anthony. However, when you think about that, what that means is physically intimate without being married.
True enough. FIrst off, Liz has got to keep up appearances for what she thinks is her family's sake. John and Elly probably wouldn't really care too much if she gave up her job and became Mrs. Anthony Caine in all but name but she thinks that they might. There might be some furrowed brows at the Tiny Train House but they wouldn't stop her from doing exactly what they sort of want. Besides, they might think that she did the same cute thing Dee did and had a marriage for the heart last December to prepare for the marriage-for-showing-off this August. As for her having friends, Pattersons generally don't have them. They have acquaintences, however.
As for her having friends, Pattersons generally don't have them. They have acquaintances, however.
Not entirely true. The way I view it, a Patterson friend will show up regularly over the years. For example, Connie Poirier has been a continual presence in Elly’s life and Josef Weeder has been a continual presence in Mike’s life. Becky used to fit this role with April, but since April has recently separated from all her friends, I don’t know about her anymore. By this standard John, Deanna, Robin, Merrie, and Elizabeth are all friendless; but this has more to do with how Lynn feels about the characters. She clearly likes Mike and Elly the best, so they get the friends.
Ah. That seems just about right, The more she likes someone, the more friends that person has. That being said, your proposal yesterday that Anthony would have a truckload of undiscovered friends seems fairly plausible.
Great point about how ridiculous it is the pidgeonhole Dee into the wedding-dress story. It would have made more sense for Elly to come across the dress, lovingly preserved, back when she was still in the Pattermanse, organizing the garage and basement.
I love your line about Anthony discovering friends in his crawlspace. Back in high school, he did have male friends he hung out with (this became a sticking point with Liz--that Anthony wanted to spend time with his friends). But by now, they've clearly moved on, having never been developed as characters.
I remember in this letter:
Liz's Letter, August 2007
Apparently Mason, the best man, has a bit of a medical problem - he's on some medication that impairs his liver function and so the few glasses of wine he had at the reception hit him harder than he'd expected. He felt horrible for falling asleep, but the groom's brothers ended up taking over the MC duties and so the reception went fairly well in the end.
So we learned that the guy with the microphone in this strip was one of the groom’s brothers. I suspected at the time, that Milborough may have a rental service for such occasions, so maybe Anthony can employ “rent-a-brother for a wedding” to fill out his list of groomsmen.
april patterson:
It would have made more sense for Elly to come across the dress, lovingly preserved, back when she was still in the Pattermanse, organizing the garage and basement.
That it certainly would have. We could even have Elly marvel at how closely it might fit Elizabeth if she were ever interested in waring it. If, last summer, we'd switched between wistful dreams that a sheet-shaver thought would come true years later, if at all, and Antbreath's stroll through the roses, we could have sseen a wrap-up by Christmas.
Yes, Liz and Anthony both seem friendless and even their "friendship" was ridiculous. They never talked (even before the marriage) or made any special effort to see each other. Always liked the one visit they might have during summer when Liz was at college with a "we've been busy" line. And then after Granthony's divorce, he never contacted Liz. That had to be done through the family.
And most of Anthony's time with "his friends" in HS, seemed to revolve around looking at cars before they got their licenses. I always pictured him as being the dork that is a hanger-on. Pretty much like "Toad" in American Graffiti. Anthony's "friendships" in high school was based solely on guys getting together to look at cars
famous wedding ceremony readings may be useful for you http://www.weddingreads.com/readings/
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