July 23, 2012 • 17 mins
Who invented the Cathy comic strip, and how does she compare to Cathy, the comic character? Does Cathy leave behind a positive or negative record for females in the comic industry? Listen in for the answers to these questions and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From how Stuff Works dot com? Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And as one
(00:21):
of our last now Summer Shorts episodes, we figured we
would talk about the Real Kathy Comic because I've noticed
that a we have started referring to Kathy Comics a lot,
because you say act, I have act moments. I feel
(00:42):
like I say blog, but that's a Liz Liz Lemon
says blurg, I say blog. So when I started watching
thirty Rock, I realized that I am Less Lemon. It's fine,
but Liz Lemon relates back to Kathy comics because she
even has a less Lemon moment where she goes chocolate
chocolate chocolo where she's clearly imitating Kathy comics. And I'm
(01:03):
gonna go ahead and tell listeners and you, Caroline right
now that this episode on the Real Kathy Comic is
appropriate because I'm having a Cathy kind of day. I've
got to confess I'm drinking a diet soda right now,
which I try not to do. I my my my muscles,
my arm muscles are sore because I exercised actually too much.
(01:27):
That's Kathy thing, isn't well. She's always doing some kind
of crazy aerobic routine. I am not wearing anything with
hearts on it that I know of. Are you holding
any cats? Um? I wish I were. It would make
things easier. I'm just feel a little a little Kathy. Yes,
you know where she She's sitting at her desk and
there's visible sweat. Yeah, oh no, praying on here. I'm
(01:49):
kind of hot today. I had on a robe earlier.
So the real Cathy comic is actually not me, folks.
It is a woman named Kathy, Guy's wife who was
quite a trailblazer. And we might not think of Kathy
the comic that we like to make fun of as
(02:12):
a trailblazer, but she was. Yeah, but Guy's wife, the
artist was. She actually has a very interesting she had.
She took an interesting route into comic strip making. She
she went to u of M University of Michigan and
graduated with a degree in English literature and was basically
her doodles were sort of just a little activity that
(02:34):
she draw on her letters. To her parents and everything,
and in nineteen six, at the encouragement of her mother slash, nagging, badgering, whatever,
Um ended up mailing some of her strips to Universal
Press Syndicate, but kept her day job. Universal Press Syndicate
got them. It was like, oh my god, you woman,
we want you. But she ended up keeping her day
(02:56):
job for four years and and stay it up till
three or four in the morning drawing these cartoons because
she said she didn't know how to draw, so it
took her a while. And Universal Press Syndicate liked this
concept of this Kathy comics so much because it's the
late seventies, the women's lib movement, it is in full swing,
(03:19):
and for the first time they were like, hey, you
know what, the the daily experience of women could be
something really interesting for us to look into. Because another
thing is Kathy was single. I mean, that's the hallmark
of the Kathy comic, you know, which is why some
people loved her and hated her because she was perpetually
(03:40):
single or you know, dealing with this kind of a
dolt of a boyfriend. And Kathy guys White herself was
single and in a rather embarrassing interview with Jane Polly.
Not embarrassing for Kathy Guys White, but embarrassing for Jane Polly.
It made me wonder if all women journalists were like
that in the seventies. Well, tell tell me about it. Well,
it was just awkward, Like Jane Paully was just like,
(04:01):
are you drunk? What's just suck? And then there was
a lot of like blonde hair flipping over her shoulder
and she was clutching this cardboard Kathy comic weirdness. I
don't know, the whole thing was weird, but anyway, they
touched on how she was a single woman, and I
think they were both twenty seven or twenty eight at
the time, and then I guess that was bordering on
(04:22):
spinstere at the time. Yea. Now, despite the awkwardness of
that interview you're talking about Kathy Guys, I did point
out the fact that what she was doing as a
syndicated female comic artist cartoonist was groundbreaking because she was
the first woman to ever do that. And when she
(04:42):
announced in two thousand and ten that she was retiring
the Kathy Comic strip, it had run for thirty four
years of daily strips in about daily newspapers um and
has spawned all of this merchandise on top of it. It
It was an empire that she had built off of,
off of gathy. But you know, she points out that
(05:04):
in that interview that cartoons are a field that women
haven't thought of, and she was right, the first, the
first syndicated female cartoonist. And she told Jane Paully that
she found herself actually floundering between the ideals of home
and motherhood and a new set of values of a stronger,
self sufficient woman. And so this is that whole, like
(05:27):
christ and said, women's lib movement being in full swing.
And a story from October on today dot Com from
The Today Show was talking about, you know, the end
of an era with this with this comic strip, and
the writer Stephanie Becker said that to her, to her generation,
it was absolutely groundbreaking and reflected the struggles that she
and her friends were going through at the time. Yes,
(05:50):
there's a quote where she says that Cathy's daily dose
of neurosis insecurity and anks pretty much reflected what we
were dealing with. Shoving our butts into tony bikinis, are
waiting for a boyfriend to call all or as a
result of known phone call trying to resist the temptation
of comfort food, to which I say, it's horrible. That
doesn't you know you don't want that to encapsulate, Like, Okay,
(06:11):
what is what is womanhood? It's being neurotic, hating your
body and waiting for a guy to call. Actually today
it would be waiting for him to text. Probably um.
So it's kind of funny that that Kathy is is
framed in this sense of Hey, it's in late seventies
and we're just single women living on lives for the
(06:33):
first time. But it's with this, you know, it's it's
a book ended with say, uh. The four guilt groups
that that Kathy encounters in the comic strip, which were
developed by Guy Swaiting, taken directly from her life. It's food,
(06:53):
you know, you gotta because actually the time, she was
working to drop fifty pounds, so she was doing the
whole thing of like exercising and trying to resist comfort food, food,
love of course, career and being the single daughter with
the harping mother, right. And she said that out of
everything in her comic strip, yes, it was obviously inspired
(07:14):
by her life, but she said that the thing that
was directly taken from her life experienced by experience was
the relationship with her mother, and she describes that as
a can of worms, and her mom was fine with it.
They've talked to her, interviewed Guy Swite's mom about it.
She's like, yeah, it's fine. I think she's just very
happy that her daughter was successful and took their advice
(07:34):
and sent those comics off to Universal Press Syndicate. But
maybe one of the most controversial moments that came during
the history of the Kathy comic occurred in two thousand
five when Kathy married Irving, her boyfriend of twenty eight years.
(07:55):
They were like the Ken and Barbie of the of
the cartoon world. I guess yeah. Well, prior to the wedding,
Guy's White portrayed Kathy as throwing out all of her
self help books, getting a grip and reading back over
her journal thin getting kind of grossed out at all
the self reflection and remembering all of her years of
you know, chocolate obsession and single lady cat cats single ladiness.
(08:20):
I mean, that's the thing you saw, chocolate cats are married.
But this was also a reflection of guys Wite's own
romantic path because for a long time she didn't expect
to have kids, are married, she didn't really want it.
She adopted a daughter while she was still single and
then got married when she was forty seven years old.
(08:41):
And she talks about when she met her husband, who
I think she's now divorced from. Uh, but she met
him and he was like, well hello, Kathy, she and
she just turned him down. I mean, she was not
interested in romance at all. But apparently fate had other ideas. Well,
(09:02):
you know, there were a lot of people I guess,
I guess, I mean, I guess that's why she said
this quote. But apparently there were a lot of people
out there who, like, we're a little got their noses
out to join about Kathy getting married, the cartoon getting
married and guys White said that I know there are
single women out there who feel abandoned to them. I
would say, I'm sorry, I just have to move on
to this next phase already, because she herself had said,
(09:22):
you know, like we can always depend on Kathy to
be single, but apparently not so. And if you can't
depend on Kathy to be single, like can you depend
on right? But the Washington Post pointed out that, um, like,
what's the big deal about this? This is kind of
you know, why is everybody paying attention to this? And
in a pole they asked their readers how the readers
(09:43):
themselves felt about this whole Kathy marriage thing, and most
people were like, I don't care because it's not funny. Yeah,
it wasn't funny. It wasn't relevant for the time anymore.
I mean, I think for you and I were both
younger women were not of the Kathy generation, even though
we're still living on lives being single women back. But
(10:03):
it might not It probably doesn't resonate as much because well,
first of all, it's the there's a whole issue of
whether or not Cathy is a is some kind of
feminist trailblazer, because if you go to Mary Elizabeth Williams
over at Salon says, yeah, absolutely, you know, Kathy dealt
(10:23):
with the banal crap that most of us loves thanklessly
wrangle every day. So who cares you know she's trying
to fit into uh sweatsuit or bikini or freaking out
about something. She's a woman exactly. And Lindsay buyer Stein
over a Big Think totally rejects that she says that, yeah, sure,
Guy's White is a trailblazer for being the first syndicated
(10:45):
female cartoonist. Um, but there's She says, there's nothing feminist
or trailblazing about a character who spends thirty four years
on a diet, marking time at work while joylessly trawling
for a husband. She says the comic was personally inspiring
for her, if only because she really didn't want to
have a life that was completely defined by normative female anxieties.
(11:06):
Now she talks so on. I gotta say, I was
reading this commentary and this very strong dislike of the
idea of Cathy as a trailblazer because she spent so
long on a diet. Blah blah blah. I mean, do
we put that much stuck into Garfields and or Charlie
(11:29):
Brown just trying to find a football you can kick? Yeah,
now I realized the bigger picture that we're talking about women,
and that we're talking about this very specific one. But
that's exactly the same thought I had reading all this stuff.
It's like, yeah, you could argue that she's not a feminist.
I would, I'm not. I don't want to use the
word icon a feminist thing because of her constant concerns
(11:53):
about the superficial. But was she supposed to be No.
I think that, if anything, it was in the has
been pointed out in some of the kind of obituaries
for the Kathy comic that it's not so much about
the character, it's a it's a it's culturally relevant because
it was the first time that people were paying attention
(12:13):
to just the mundane, every day of the female experience,
and whether that experience matches up to yours or not
is sort of beside the point. Well, that's what Jessica
Wakeman at The Frisky pointed out. Um that, yeah, Cathy's annoying,
but she set a precedent in pop culture that the
lives of women, especially single career women, were worth exploring.
(12:34):
And we mentioned thirty Rock and Les Lemon earlier, but
Wakeman says that she also Kathy also paved the way
for Bridget Jones and Sex in the City, and while
she may not be cool enough to hang out with
the sex and the City girls, it's still that idea
of like the mundane, weird stuff that single women deal with.
Yeah and yeah, no, one were probably not aspiring to
(12:54):
become Bridget Jones or one of the Foursome insect to
the City, or even Liz Lemon, you know, like Liz
Lemon is wagadoo and we love her for it. But
it's also you also have to take into account, like
the satirical aspect of it. I don't think that Kathy
guys White was crafting a character for women to be,
(13:16):
you know, to as a role model for other women. Yeah.
I mean, you know, comedians talk about random, boring stuff
and it's funny. They just talk about like aspects of
their lives. It's the same kind of thing. Just made
me not um funny. Yeah, she's not all that funny.
I never really tickled my tickled my funny. But I
wonder if anyone idea. I wonder if anyone's going to
(13:39):
do with Kathy what they did with Garfield, you know,
like Garfield without Garfield. Those comic strips. Have you seen
that they take old Garfield comic strips and remove Garfield
so it looks like John is just insane and talking
to himself. Or there's one where they leave Garfield in
but take out his bubbles, so John is just like
having an entire crazy conversation with a cat. It's just
(13:59):
gonna be talking to itself. Comic Kathy just sitting there,
frame by frame, sweating, with little sweat bullets flying off
of her. Well apparently the in the in the early strips,
she does have like a kookie, very seventies feminist friend, Andrea,
Andrea who's always like, you don't need no man. So anyway,
(14:20):
I think we've talked a lot about Kathy, and this
is supposed to be a short episode, so we need
to cut it off. But folks out there, what do
you think about Kathy comics? I mean, is it are
we putting? Do we put too much stock in these
kinds of things? Do you miss Kathy? Older women out there,
who do you remember those early Kathy comics? And was
(14:40):
it some kind of revolutionary thing? Yeah? Did the comics
are resonate with you at all? Or were you just
like I can't finn a bikini either, I don't want
to read this. Yeah, let us know your thoughts. Mom.
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
your letters, and we have a letter to share here,
(15:02):
Yes we do. It's about age gaps. This is from Emma.
She says she has some comments for us about her
own experience, and she says, in short, the Lifetime movie
network owes as a cut because half of their movies
have been inspired by my family. Smiley face. When I
was sixteen, my barely turned eighteen year old brother ran
off with our forty two year old next door neighbor.
(15:25):
Perhaps this wouldn't have been such a dramatic thing if
it were not a small town I had grown up in,
and had this woman not been our married mother to
our three friends, one of whom was still being homeschooled
by her, one of whom used to babysit my brother
and me, youth group leader, and my mom's best friend
who was about to celebrate her twenty five wedding anniversary.
You can also add to the list that she was
(15:45):
a substitute teacher at my high school, and she used
to change our diapers when we were kids. It may
come is no surprise that she and my mom were
no longer best friends, but this was back in and
what had at one time ripped apart to family says
now united them as they are still together and at
the old age of thirty three, I am a great
aunt several times over. He is still in his thirties
(16:07):
and she is in her sixties now, she's a year
older than my mom. But in all honesty, they are
an amazing couple and I can't imagine my life without
my amazing sister in law in it. I guess you
could say I'm grateful with the grateful for the heart
wrenching ripple effect their union created, because after both of
our families survived it, we have what we have today,
a delightfully dysfunctional, definitely unconventional, but very loving family. Wow. Wow,
(16:35):
that's thank you, Thank you for that story. Wow. Yeah,
you can send your stories are way. Mom Stuff at
discovery dot com is where you can send us a letter,
or you can find us on Facebook, follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff podcast, and you can see what
we're writing during the week over on our website. It's
(16:56):
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From how Stuff Works dot com? Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And as one
(00:21):
of our last now Summer Shorts episodes, we figured we
would talk about the Real Kathy Comic because I've noticed
that a we have started referring to Kathy Comics a lot,
because you say act, I have act moments. I feel
(00:42):
like I say blog, but that's a Liz Liz Lemon
says blurg, I say blog. So when I started watching
thirty Rock, I realized that I am Less Lemon. It's fine,
but Liz Lemon relates back to Kathy comics because she
even has a less Lemon moment where she goes chocolate
chocolate chocolo where she's clearly imitating Kathy comics. And I'm
(01:03):
gonna go ahead and tell listeners and you, Caroline right
now that this episode on the Real Kathy Comic is
appropriate because I'm having a Cathy kind of day. I've
got to confess I'm drinking a diet soda right now,
which I try not to do. I my my my muscles,
my arm muscles are sore because I exercised actually too much.
(01:27):
That's Kathy thing, isn't well. She's always doing some kind
of crazy aerobic routine. I am not wearing anything with
hearts on it that I know of. Are you holding
any cats? Um? I wish I were. It would make
things easier. I'm just feel a little a little Kathy. Yes,
you know where she She's sitting at her desk and
there's visible sweat. Yeah, oh no, praying on here. I'm
(01:49):
kind of hot today. I had on a robe earlier.
So the real Cathy comic is actually not me, folks.
It is a woman named Kathy, Guy's wife who was
quite a trailblazer. And we might not think of Kathy
the comic that we like to make fun of as
(02:12):
a trailblazer, but she was. Yeah, but Guy's wife, the
artist was. She actually has a very interesting she had.
She took an interesting route into comic strip making. She
she went to u of M University of Michigan and
graduated with a degree in English literature and was basically
her doodles were sort of just a little activity that
(02:34):
she draw on her letters. To her parents and everything,
and in nineteen six, at the encouragement of her mother slash, nagging, badgering, whatever,
Um ended up mailing some of her strips to Universal
Press Syndicate, but kept her day job. Universal Press Syndicate
got them. It was like, oh my god, you woman,
we want you. But she ended up keeping her day
(02:56):
job for four years and and stay it up till
three or four in the morning drawing these cartoons because
she said she didn't know how to draw, so it
took her a while. And Universal Press Syndicate liked this
concept of this Kathy comics so much because it's the
late seventies, the women's lib movement, it is in full swing,
(03:19):
and for the first time they were like, hey, you
know what, the the daily experience of women could be
something really interesting for us to look into. Because another
thing is Kathy was single. I mean, that's the hallmark
of the Kathy comic, you know, which is why some
people loved her and hated her because she was perpetually
(03:40):
single or you know, dealing with this kind of a
dolt of a boyfriend. And Kathy guys White herself was
single and in a rather embarrassing interview with Jane Polly.
Not embarrassing for Kathy Guys White, but embarrassing for Jane Polly.
It made me wonder if all women journalists were like
that in the seventies. Well, tell tell me about it. Well,
it was just awkward, Like Jane Paully was just like,
(04:01):
are you drunk? What's just suck? And then there was
a lot of like blonde hair flipping over her shoulder
and she was clutching this cardboard Kathy comic weirdness. I
don't know, the whole thing was weird, but anyway, they
touched on how she was a single woman, and I
think they were both twenty seven or twenty eight at
the time, and then I guess that was bordering on
(04:22):
spinstere at the time. Yea. Now, despite the awkwardness of
that interview you're talking about Kathy Guys, I did point
out the fact that what she was doing as a
syndicated female comic artist cartoonist was groundbreaking because she was
the first woman to ever do that. And when she
(04:42):
announced in two thousand and ten that she was retiring
the Kathy Comic strip, it had run for thirty four
years of daily strips in about daily newspapers um and
has spawned all of this merchandise on top of it. It
It was an empire that she had built off of,
off of gathy. But you know, she points out that
(05:04):
in that interview that cartoons are a field that women
haven't thought of, and she was right, the first, the
first syndicated female cartoonist. And she told Jane Paully that
she found herself actually floundering between the ideals of home
and motherhood and a new set of values of a stronger,
self sufficient woman. And so this is that whole, like
(05:27):
christ and said, women's lib movement being in full swing.
And a story from October on today dot Com from
The Today Show was talking about, you know, the end
of an era with this with this comic strip, and
the writer Stephanie Becker said that to her, to her generation,
it was absolutely groundbreaking and reflected the struggles that she
and her friends were going through at the time. Yes,
(05:50):
there's a quote where she says that Cathy's daily dose
of neurosis insecurity and anks pretty much reflected what we
were dealing with. Shoving our butts into tony bikinis, are
waiting for a boyfriend to call all or as a
result of known phone call trying to resist the temptation
of comfort food, to which I say, it's horrible. That
doesn't you know you don't want that to encapsulate, Like, Okay,
(06:11):
what is what is womanhood? It's being neurotic, hating your
body and waiting for a guy to call. Actually today
it would be waiting for him to text. Probably um.
So it's kind of funny that that Kathy is is
framed in this sense of Hey, it's in late seventies
and we're just single women living on lives for the
(06:33):
first time. But it's with this, you know, it's it's
a book ended with say, uh. The four guilt groups
that that Kathy encounters in the comic strip, which were
developed by Guy Swaiting, taken directly from her life. It's food,
(06:53):
you know, you gotta because actually the time, she was
working to drop fifty pounds, so she was doing the
whole thing of like exercising and trying to resist comfort food, food,
love of course, career and being the single daughter with
the harping mother, right. And she said that out of
everything in her comic strip, yes, it was obviously inspired
(07:14):
by her life, but she said that the thing that
was directly taken from her life experienced by experience was
the relationship with her mother, and she describes that as
a can of worms, and her mom was fine with it.
They've talked to her, interviewed Guy Swite's mom about it.
She's like, yeah, it's fine. I think she's just very
happy that her daughter was successful and took their advice
(07:34):
and sent those comics off to Universal Press Syndicate. But
maybe one of the most controversial moments that came during
the history of the Kathy comic occurred in two thousand
five when Kathy married Irving, her boyfriend of twenty eight years.
(07:55):
They were like the Ken and Barbie of the of
the cartoon world. I guess yeah. Well, prior to the wedding,
Guy's White portrayed Kathy as throwing out all of her
self help books, getting a grip and reading back over
her journal thin getting kind of grossed out at all
the self reflection and remembering all of her years of
you know, chocolate obsession and single lady cat cats single ladiness.
(08:20):
I mean, that's the thing you saw, chocolate cats are married.
But this was also a reflection of guys Wite's own
romantic path because for a long time she didn't expect
to have kids, are married, she didn't really want it.
She adopted a daughter while she was still single and
then got married when she was forty seven years old.
(08:41):
And she talks about when she met her husband, who
I think she's now divorced from. Uh, but she met
him and he was like, well hello, Kathy, she and
she just turned him down. I mean, she was not
interested in romance at all. But apparently fate had other ideas. Well,
(09:02):
you know, there were a lot of people I guess,
I guess, I mean, I guess that's why she said
this quote. But apparently there were a lot of people
out there who, like, we're a little got their noses
out to join about Kathy getting married, the cartoon getting
married and guys White said that I know there are
single women out there who feel abandoned to them. I
would say, I'm sorry, I just have to move on
to this next phase already, because she herself had said,
(09:22):
you know, like we can always depend on Kathy to
be single, but apparently not so. And if you can't
depend on Kathy to be single, like can you depend
on right? But the Washington Post pointed out that, um, like,
what's the big deal about this? This is kind of
you know, why is everybody paying attention to this? And
in a pole they asked their readers how the readers
(09:43):
themselves felt about this whole Kathy marriage thing, and most
people were like, I don't care because it's not funny. Yeah,
it wasn't funny. It wasn't relevant for the time anymore.
I mean, I think for you and I were both
younger women were not of the Kathy generation, even though
we're still living on lives being single women back. But
(10:03):
it might not It probably doesn't resonate as much because well,
first of all, it's the there's a whole issue of
whether or not Cathy is a is some kind of
feminist trailblazer, because if you go to Mary Elizabeth Williams
over at Salon says, yeah, absolutely, you know, Kathy dealt
(10:23):
with the banal crap that most of us loves thanklessly
wrangle every day. So who cares you know she's trying
to fit into uh sweatsuit or bikini or freaking out
about something. She's a woman exactly. And Lindsay buyer Stein
over a Big Think totally rejects that she says that, yeah, sure,
Guy's White is a trailblazer for being the first syndicated
(10:45):
female cartoonist. Um, but there's She says, there's nothing feminist
or trailblazing about a character who spends thirty four years
on a diet, marking time at work while joylessly trawling
for a husband. She says the comic was personally inspiring
for her, if only because she really didn't want to
have a life that was completely defined by normative female anxieties.
(11:06):
Now she talks so on. I gotta say, I was
reading this commentary and this very strong dislike of the
idea of Cathy as a trailblazer because she spent so
long on a diet. Blah blah blah. I mean, do
we put that much stuck into Garfields and or Charlie
(11:29):
Brown just trying to find a football you can kick? Yeah,
now I realized the bigger picture that we're talking about women,
and that we're talking about this very specific one. But
that's exactly the same thought I had reading all this stuff.
It's like, yeah, you could argue that she's not a feminist.
I would, I'm not. I don't want to use the
word icon a feminist thing because of her constant concerns
(11:53):
about the superficial. But was she supposed to be No.
I think that, if anything, it was in the has
been pointed out in some of the kind of obituaries
for the Kathy comic that it's not so much about
the character, it's a it's a it's culturally relevant because
it was the first time that people were paying attention
(12:13):
to just the mundane, every day of the female experience,
and whether that experience matches up to yours or not
is sort of beside the point. Well, that's what Jessica
Wakeman at The Frisky pointed out. Um that, yeah, Cathy's annoying,
but she set a precedent in pop culture that the
lives of women, especially single career women, were worth exploring.
(12:34):
And we mentioned thirty Rock and Les Lemon earlier, but
Wakeman says that she also Kathy also paved the way
for Bridget Jones and Sex in the City, and while
she may not be cool enough to hang out with
the sex and the City girls, it's still that idea
of like the mundane, weird stuff that single women deal with.
Yeah and yeah, no, one were probably not aspiring to
(12:54):
become Bridget Jones or one of the Foursome insect to
the City, or even Liz Lemon, you know, like Liz
Lemon is wagadoo and we love her for it. But
it's also you also have to take into account, like
the satirical aspect of it. I don't think that Kathy
guys White was crafting a character for women to be,
(13:16):
you know, to as a role model for other women. Yeah.
I mean, you know, comedians talk about random, boring stuff
and it's funny. They just talk about like aspects of
their lives. It's the same kind of thing. Just made
me not um funny. Yeah, she's not all that funny.
I never really tickled my tickled my funny. But I
wonder if anyone idea. I wonder if anyone's going to
(13:39):
do with Kathy what they did with Garfield, you know,
like Garfield without Garfield. Those comic strips. Have you seen
that they take old Garfield comic strips and remove Garfield
so it looks like John is just insane and talking
to himself. Or there's one where they leave Garfield in
but take out his bubbles, so John is just like
having an entire crazy conversation with a cat. It's just
(13:59):
gonna be talking to itself. Comic Kathy just sitting there,
frame by frame, sweating, with little sweat bullets flying off
of her. Well apparently the in the in the early strips,
she does have like a kookie, very seventies feminist friend, Andrea,
Andrea who's always like, you don't need no man. So anyway,
(14:20):
I think we've talked a lot about Kathy, and this
is supposed to be a short episode, so we need
to cut it off. But folks out there, what do
you think about Kathy comics? I mean, is it are
we putting? Do we put too much stock in these
kinds of things? Do you miss Kathy? Older women out there,
who do you remember those early Kathy comics? And was
(14:40):
it some kind of revolutionary thing? Yeah? Did the comics
are resonate with you at all? Or were you just
like I can't finn a bikini either, I don't want
to read this. Yeah, let us know your thoughts. Mom.
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
your letters, and we have a letter to share here,
(15:02):
Yes we do. It's about age gaps. This is from Emma.
She says she has some comments for us about her
own experience, and she says, in short, the Lifetime movie
network owes as a cut because half of their movies
have been inspired by my family. Smiley face. When I
was sixteen, my barely turned eighteen year old brother ran
off with our forty two year old next door neighbor.
(15:25):
Perhaps this wouldn't have been such a dramatic thing if
it were not a small town I had grown up in,
and had this woman not been our married mother to
our three friends, one of whom was still being homeschooled
by her, one of whom used to babysit my brother
and me, youth group leader, and my mom's best friend
who was about to celebrate her twenty five wedding anniversary.
You can also add to the list that she was
(15:45):
a substitute teacher at my high school, and she used
to change our diapers when we were kids. It may
come is no surprise that she and my mom were
no longer best friends, but this was back in and
what had at one time ripped apart to family says
now united them as they are still together and at
the old age of thirty three, I am a great
aunt several times over. He is still in his thirties
(16:07):
and she is in her sixties now, she's a year
older than my mom. But in all honesty, they are
an amazing couple and I can't imagine my life without
my amazing sister in law in it. I guess you
could say I'm grateful with the grateful for the heart
wrenching ripple effect their union created, because after both of
our families survived it, we have what we have today,
a delightfully dysfunctional, definitely unconventional, but very loving family. Wow. Wow,
(16:35):
that's thank you, Thank you for that story. Wow. Yeah,
you can send your stories are way. Mom Stuff at
discovery dot com is where you can send us a letter,
or you can find us on Facebook, follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff podcast, and you can see what
we're writing during the week over on our website. It's
(16:56):
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry.
It's ready, are you
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