Wow! I’ve never been this early in the queue. I second what Patti says about the strip being a lovely present — and I want to add particular thanks for the Shakespeare wordplay. It warms the cockles of my nerdy med/ren heart.
Yay a new DTWOF! And snow in December! There’s hope!
Toni’s definitely got a gleam in her eye… (but small compared to Raffi’s excitedly hopeful eyes, no?) Love Sid juxtaposed w/Paul in panel 5 – definitely a papa/daughter portrait.
Well, Clarice and Tony have that Lustful Lesbian Look about them… my bet is that they end up in the sack and whip up some eggnog. And maybe Raffi walks in on them, and with that great teenage nonchalance says, “Hi guys. Hey, when’s dinner ready?”
And Alison, it’s frightening how well you capture the Dubya’s dialogical quirks – “Things’re a tad bit better’n they were at their worst!” Gah! I can actually HEAR him saying that!
I just love sweaters with elbow patches. I wish everyone got this funny coming down with Alzheimer’s and the likes.
Thanks, Alison, for a great Xmas present, and I should add, for always providing excellent present ideas with the books you write – I always gift at least one out to family and friends in need of enlightenment.
Ahh the heartwrenching Lear quotes! … and the Hamlet “…pale cast of thought”. Thank you so much for this fascinating strip, Ms. B.
Merry Christmas &or happy hols to all, and may the coming year be full of love and peace, hope and good health. May we prosper.
For a big thrill, if there’s a break in the clouds, take a gander at brilliant Mars.
Now for a wee drop o’ soynog, and sweet dreams, all.
Great strip, as always. I have always loved how Mo & Jennifer bonded. But poor Jennifer, she’s looking tired. Syd & Mo must be close to the skids — Mo’s voluntarily drinking dairy & sugar!!! What’s next? Drowning her sorrows with a Happy Meal?
Love the Raffi/Clarice moments. As for Toni willing to give up the McLaughlin-Farkases’ open house, does this mean she & the beguiling Gloria are now socializing with them? I thought Elizabeth M-F would still be holding a grudge for the scandal they brought to on the Freedom to Marry group.
Oops…I was so excited that there was a new strip and I was able to post a comment fairly early I forgot my manners. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah, Blessed Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Boxing Day and Happy New Year all.
Thanks, as usual. The King Lear bit is excellent – English prof losing his mind to illness quoting Shakespearian king who has lost his mind. Scary (but accurate) how Raffi is turning into a man before our very eyes. Seems like only yesterday he was knee high…
Wow, I just found out I am pregnant on Friday–a solstice present–and we slept through Christmas Eve from early evening despite all of the fireworks and loud music at midnight and the family party we were supposed to go to at 11:00pm, since I live in Mexico.) I got up early, which is a way new thing for me which I enjoy, and decided to check this strip. Everything is silent, just the birds and no bus sounds or any other human activity. I love how I can feel that there is a new strip calling me: thanks for my first Christmas present, Alison! I am het, but this strip has felt like my community ever since I saw you talk at Haverford around 1991. We watched a tearful romance movie last night–Sleepless in Seattle–which causes me to doubt my sanity and happiness while my husband tears up. With your characters I get to feel how complicated and rich life actually is, and I feel comforted and accompanied and almost content to be a human living my life against the exhausting backdrop of logical war economic profits doublespeak.
Hey, I’m in Vienna too — and your strip makes me regret not going home even less.
But to the strip & comments — can’t we be glad Clarice finds out she’s still loved without thinking mommy and daddy are getting back together? I think it’s nice to see islands of love and happiness in a rough world, and an excellent metaphor for Christmas in America, regardless of our actual religions (or lack thereof).
This could be one of the last positive bonding times for Sydney and her Pa. Jennifer’s denial and drinking is scary — not to mention her ignorance of dementia. Dementia implies SHORT-term memory loss — Paul could remember Shakespeare until he forgets how to talk!
Anyway, great to see Clarice getting some hugs, and Paul and Sydney playing together. Even if the world’s not perfect.
Happy holidays everyone. I’ve actually borrowed power tools for the break and am reminding myself of Mo with her torch a few years ago…
“The Bishop’s Wife” is my favorite Christmas movie—I love it when they go ice skating…so romantic. Hmmm…
My Dad can still say the rosary in latin, but he can’t remember what he ate for dinner the night before. I guess this is what I have to look forward to.
Thanks, Allison! It is a great Christmas present! We atheists love our Christmas swag too, it’s the spiritual bond we share with Christians. And this is the spiritual gift of art.
Hariette, you have to understand that marriage cultists will forgive almost any scandal if you cover it up with a new marriage, or at least betrothal. (As Ellen Willis once noted satirically, marriage makes cheap teen sex into mature commitment.) I agree that it looks like Toni’s (already) getting ready to cheat on Gloria. As I’ve argued many times before, Toni’s and Clarice’s relationship is built on increasing boredom producing tension, leading to a crisis followed by a brief period of hot sex. It seems to take longer each time, and the crises get worse as they go: in this case, Toni’s affair, their separation, and Clarice moving out. An awful lot of trouble to go to, but to each her own. It was a foregone conclusion that the next step would be a passionate tryst while Gloria is at the McLaughlin-Farkas. As property creates theft, monogamy creates adultery.
To paraphrase Frost, “Family is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Enjoy what you’ve got when you’ve got it.
Teenagers need to go out and discover their own identities, but they need a home waiting on them when they return. I’m glad Raffi could ask for it directly.
Raffi looks adorable in the anti-panultimate panel. Teenagers are so weird that way, going from surly and monosyllabic one day to charming and brimming with glee the next…..Didn’t understand it when I was one, still don’t understand it now.
I know we’ve seen Sid’s dad before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed that Alison has managed to draw a family resemblance. that blows my mind.
thank you so much for the strip…I was actually delightfully surprised to wake up this morning and it be there…it is a breath of fresh air after spending the week with the family in a remote town on vancouver island. My poor niece is in a Raffi situation right now only her parents are not getting along so well…how well are Clarice and Toni getting along anyways?!?
And also, nice Kara Walker lead in. We’ll be sure to check it out at the Whitney when the DTWOF characters are panoramically inserted onto the walls. Obscene.
I can’t believe how tall Raffi has gotten. I have to confess that I’ve gotten so used to the surly and angry Raffi that I almost don’t believe panel 8. But I’m glad to see some evidence that he loves Clarice and wants her around – I usually get the impression that he blames the breakdown of the relationship on her, or at least chooses to direct his anger toward her more than to Toni.
I’m worried about Jennifer. I know she’s a lot younger than Paul, but is she the same age as Mo and Sydney? She looks rather worse for wear right about now…
Why *gasp*,Jennifer is starting to look like Sydney’s mom,especially in the face,and to start imitating some of her annoying habits,like drinking too much. Her age has never been mentioned specifically,but recently in the past has been deemed hot enough to successfully flirt with some of Paul’s grad students (or a former grad student turned pizza deliveryperson). The first time Mo met Jen,she remarked to Syd on the drive home,”does she have her driver’s license yet?” Snarky,yes,but a sufficient retort to S’s complaints about Mo’s family.
All this is making me think about chocolate,and chocolate oranges,and the infamous Maoist Orange Cake. It’s been about a year now since all that discussion started.
This could be one of the last positive bonding times for Sydney and her Pa. Jennifer’s denial and drinking is scary — not to mention her ignorance of dementia. Dementia implies SHORT-term memory loss — Paul could remember Shakespeare until he forgets how to talk!
True, but the ability to make the electronics work is interesting. Plus he’s not just quoting Shakespeare but also punning off of quotes (though this is probably an old skill that he would lose late.) Maybe it isn’t alzheimer’s. Maybe he really is recovering from some sort of reversible delirium or even just depression (though Jennifer’s stressed look suggests otherwise.) We’ll just have to wait and see where AB is taking this I suppose…
I’ve never been a big fan of Sydney but I have to say that her response to the whole “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…” line is *exactly* the same one I always give my mother when she says that too me. I love the phonetic spelling on Dubya’s speech (‘nukular’ indeed!), and the background behind him is so subtle you almost miss it. Excellent strip!
I love the little silhouette (sp?). I thought it was a rorshach (sp?) test, and I panicked a little because it didn’t look like anything: not a bunch of flowers, not a crucifix, not a cheese danish, nothing.
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. For some reason, every single thing was closed in Princeton on Christmas Day except for the Starbucks (the nastiest Starbucks in all of Christendom, by the way. If I ever have a heart attack in there, I’m gonna crawl out onto the sidewalk so I can die in a nice, clean gutter) and the Wa-Wa.
God forgive me, I bought (and ate!) one of those Wa-Wa pretzels (the plain one, not the “stuffed” one).
I was travelling yesterday, and missed this. (Thus carefully avoiding spending Christmas with my mother, who can be a pretty decent sort, but freaks out around the holidays and tends to throw temper tantrums at my sister.)
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why are so many people so fixated on Toni and Clarice getting back together? Isn’t it enough that they can maintain an amicable relationship so that Raffi can have good relationships with both of them and not have to take sides? I don’t even think that Raffi would want them to get back together (and certainly not that he’d be scheming to get them alone)–hadn’t he actually told them to get a divorce already so that the tension in the home would diffuse?
I’m not a child of divorce but I do NOT believe that all kids with divorced parents somehow harbor this deep desire for them to reunite. Many remember too well how tense and painful it was to live with parents who were intensely unhappy, even if they weren’t outwardly at each other’s throats. It’s easier just to make the change and move on. I know for a fact that my stepdaughters feel like this. They didn’t want to live in a house where people screamed at each other all the time, or even stewed in silent resentment–it scared them–and when they’re with their father and me, they don’t. It’s way easier on them to listen to the occasional screaming fit on one side of a phone conversation than to be right there in the house for both sides, pretty much nonstop. I don’t think Clarice and Toni really got to the screaming part–at least, not that we saw–but the smoldering unhappiness is just as bad.
i think the parallel between king lear and sydney’s father is really really interesting – king lear, of course, went insane and rejected his daughter cordelia (“so young, my lord, and true”) who was the one of his three daughters who *really* loved him… and ultimately, she winds up being hanged for her father. paying for her father’s insanity, sort of. the parallel to sydney’s dad’s alzheimer’s…….?
“I’m not a child of divorce but I do NOT believe that all kids with divorced parents somehow harbor this deep desire for them to reunite.”
Oh gods, yes. Of course, long before the divorce I’d lost most respect for both parents, but the marriage was god awful. The whole “kids naturally desire their parents to be back together” bit was really common in pop psych in the eighties, yes? And there might even be a little truth to it, via cultural expectations if nothing else, for *young* children. But older ones? Phoo.
Oh, Alison. Thank you for this lovely holiday gift. The “serpent’s tooth… bite me” exchange made me double over with laughter. Yes, this is what Christmas sounds like at my family’s house. I’m not entirely certain that my mom and I haven’t had that very exchange at some time in the past. (Woodstock, are we actually sisters separated at birth?)
Anybody wanting some good laughs should check out clips from the BBC comedy Goodness Gracious Me on You-Tube. Sorry no link right now’ I’m away from my home computer so y’all will have to do a search. Be sure to check out these esp funny clips: Going out for an English,Typical Asian Parents,the Xmas series,and the one where the beloved son comes out to his Indian parents.
And for those of you wondering what happened to DTWOF in Funny Times,it’s back in the Jan. issue. I gave my nephew a subscription to this a couple of years ago,keeping the whole family amused as I keep renewing it.
“The whole ‘kids naturally desire their parents to be back together’ bit was really common in pop psych in the eighties, yes?”
Oh, I still hear it NOW. And my stepkids’ mother still tries to claim it’s what the kids want. They’re nine and seven, and their parents have been divorced for close to five years. I’m sure neither of them can remember a time when their parents were happy, since their marriage was pretty terrible for quite a long time before he got the courage and the resources to leave her, and I’m absolutely sure the girls know how miserable their parents can make each other. Can’t imagine why they’d want to go back to that. For that matter, I can’t imagine why SHE would want to, since she clearly can’t stand him or anything he believes in, and he’s been happily married for more than three years. I guess she’ll just go on showing them the wedding video and sighing over the past. What a wonderful life.
Hey Feminista, you could wish all us Canucks that happy Boxing Day, too, as we also observe it — mostly by lining up for hours at all the electronics stores for the traditional Boxing Day sales. It’s complete retail insanity — Boxing Week (as it has become) is more dreaded by the retail staff than pre-Xmas shopping.
Loved the panel in the strip with Raffi hugging/wrestling Clarice. My son as a teenager used to express affection just like that — a hug would quickly turn into a headlock.
Merry merry, happy happy felicitations of the season to everyone!
P.S. Feminista, thanks for the mention of Goodness Gracious Me. Friends from England were just telling me about this show, but I never thought to look for it on Youtube. I just checked it out, it’s wonderful. There’s an Indo-Canadian standup comedian called Russell Peters who has a similar perspective. He’s on Youtube as well, and well worth watching.
Good lord, what’s with the constant expectation that Clarice & Toni are on the verge of getting back together every time they happen to have an amicable conversation? Toni & Clarice have a long history together, a great deal of respect and affection for each other, and neither one of them is the china-flinging type. Of course there will be good moments between them. Probably even some meaningful ones. That’s how couples who have lost their spark for each other make the transition to being friends. It’s a healthy transition, millions of couples make it, and Clarice and Toni are certainly grown-up enough to pull it off. And AB is portraying it just right — not dropping hints at a reunion.
Of course, maybe with the next episode AB will prove me all wrong.
I want Clarice and Toni to have new girlfriends and Raffi to get a new honey and for Stella to get a new honey and for Ginger to get a new dog and Sparrow to take in some bunnies (vegan pets!). I want AB’s world to grow ever larger and ever more interesting and fun!
I don’t see lust or anything in Clarice and Toni’s eyes. It just looks like two old friends casting about for a pleasant way to spend the afternoon while their young charge checks out Halo at a neighbor’s house.
I don’t see anywhere in the strip that Gloria was going to be at the multi-Elizabeths’ gathering. Did you infer that? Or am I just not being observant?
goodness gracious me on youtube! who knew? i once rented out the video from a little shop on valencia / sf for a night with cousins n’ friends, only to rack up a ridiculous amount in fees in the course of a week (ok, maybe ten days)… this’d be much better.
feminista, that’s not by any chance you, S., of the blog (of similar name)?
Glad some of you have enjoyed Goodness Gracious Me.My niece,nephew and I were laughing our bloody asses off last night; previous nights we enjoyed watching Monty Python DVDs. And Happy Boxing Day to Canadians,Australians and New Zealanders,too.
Duncan, you put it much more strongly than I would with regard to “property leads to theft; monogamy leads to adultery” (for many), but word.
As for wanting Clarice and Toni to get back together, add me to the group who doesn’t particularly (unless it’s in the context of a *gasp* real open relationship).
Finally, my parents got divorced when I was thirteen and I was *relieved*. Thank god it was over, there was no more fighting and angst. My siblings (all younger), except for the 4-year-old, felt the same way. I’m sure we would have been way more screwed up if the divorce didn’t happen when it finally did.
Kids stuck in the middle of crappy marriages or other relationships have complex feelings that cannot be boiled down to whether they want their parents to get back together or not. Speaking from my own childhood experience, which included many years of incessant fighting that occasionally got physically violent – and separations that lasted days or months – I can attest that it could go either way or even both ways at the same time. Children may be praying for their parents to divorce, or they may be praying for their parents to somehow magically transform to normal people that don’t fight and get along and live happily together. Even in the worst relationships there have been times of happiness. Children can have wild imaginations and selective memories that can focus on these moments or they may fear that they will have to be separated from one of the parents. I had wanted my parents to get divorced for most of my childhood, but my sister (younger) usually did not, because she was very close to my father and she worried she would never see him again. Then, after one of the long separations when we were in our teens, I remember myself not being so sure anymore that I wanted them to divorce; I was starting to hope that they would get back together. I think this had to do with the fact that as we go through adolescence our families become so much less important for our everyday social contact, whereas they acquire a stabilizing background role. Thus, a little bit of denial combined with a sudden realization of the social dimension of coming from a “broken home” did the trick.
My parents did get back together and, of course, it was as bad as before. In fact, they never got divorced! As they grew old, they mellowed out a bit and stopped caring so much, so they fought less. My father died in 1994. By then they were empty nesters, almost companionable, like a cat and a dog that have worked out their territory.
I also have a stepson and have seen him struggle with similar issues. I would not venture to guess his real hopes and fears, since I am obviously an interested party. I would like to imagine that, at some level, he is at peace with the fact that his parents are divorced and able to enjoy being part of a new family (he now has a younger half-sister), but I know it cannot be as simple as that. As we grow older, our lot is mellowing out too… so his mom, dad, sister, and I are now all friends, and we sometimes do things together (like Christmas).
Not sure what the moral is here, but I guess my point is that kids’ feelings about their parents’ relationships are really complicated.
I feel so sorry that my english literature knowledge doesn’t include any Shakespeare… maybe someone out there should provide an annotated version of DTWOF? I did manage to look up eggnog on wikipedia, though.
I think Raffi is happy to have both his parents around for Christmas: he’s smart enough to notice that they have a better relationship now because they’re not partners anymore. IMHO.
It’s true that you never know how kids will react. My parents divorced when I was 25 and already on my own. I was thrilled. They should have done it when I was 9. I have a friend who is 30, lives in CA while his folks live in MO, and he is pissed off as ever that his parents are splitting up. He figured they almost made it 40 years, they should have stuck it out. Now his dad has a new love and he is pissed about that. I think he is acting like a two-year-old, but he doesn’t like to hear me say that!
S.E., look up King Lear and Hamlet. Paul is casting himself as Lear and Hamlet. Sydney briefly takes the part of Cordelia. “HD, or not HD” is a pun on the first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be”.
I’m afraid that Jennifer may be right that Paul is depressed, but wrong that it’s only a little. I hope somebody figures out what’s going on. (I mean a character in the strip, not one of us kibbitzers.) Paul is one of my favorite minor characters.
I agree with Martinet completely. Maybe there is some kind of individual threshold that needs to be reached for a child to unequivocably wish his parents would divorce, but that feeling (of unequivocableness) is definitely attainable for some children.
I Googled the Shakespeare references and was able to get answers for all of them. But I didn’t catch the HD or no HD reference – the most obvious one!
Thanks Alison, for increasing my literary knowledge, one of the many reasons I enjoy your work :).
1. Divorce and kids’ feelings on it. I think it isn’t that they are relieved their parents get back together or relieved that their parents get divorced. I think it’s that they are relieved that the issue is finally resolved.
2. Paul might not have Alzheimer’s. He could have a partially blocked carotid artery, so he’d still be functional, but a little sluggish mentally. Of course, it could be that he really gets electronic doo-dads and Shakespeare, so those skills are remaining even while his other faculties are declining.
3. I notice Jennifer seems to have raced through the booze. But it’s possible that the huge swig of liquor in Paul’s glass is the cause of that.
@Alex the Bold’s comment on the indecipherability of the little silhouette, I feel compelled to point out that if it weren’t so anal-retentively miniscule, I might have done a better job.
@EJ’s comment about Kara Walker. I wish this had been an intentional reference to her work. I meant to go see her exhibit when I was in NYC, but didn’t make it. I had never heard of her stuff before.
@Deena, No! I never said Gloria was going to the McLaughlin-Farkases. It was interesting to see how people assumed that she and Toni must be going together. That’s not to say that they weren’t planning it. God knows what these people get up to, as I’ve said before, when I’m not looking.
I didn’t get the sillouette until hours later. I’m usually good at stuff like that, but without a point of reference, this time I was lost.
I got the Hamlet references, and am sufficiently familiar with Lear to know you were referencing Lear, but I’ve never actually read that one. There’s a version on my Netflix queue. Maybe I’ll move it closer to the top, once i’ve finished catching up with Lost.
I don’t think that it’s that the silhouette was drawn poorly; rather, it’s more that I’m stunned I didn’t realize what it was a silhouette of until much later.
My dream of a white christmas has been mercilessly crushed by a mild winter here in Norway. So this christmas present sure brightened my holidays.
Sidney’s dad’s dementia is comically sad, although I was surprised with his handling of the Television set.
It is strange to see a happy Raffi in place of the constantly annoyed one, but it is just as charming, which somehow adds another level to the embarrasment over my crush on a comic strip character.
Happy new year everyone! And especially to you, Allison.
You’ve made this year a good one for me.
Damn! Stuart has stolen my idea. If you put a shot of B&B in a glass of vanilla soy milk and sprinkle nutmeg on top you’ve got yourself a very tasty drink. I call it a Brandy Alexsoynder. Makes menopause fun!
I loved Sidney’s interaction with her dad. And Raffi hugging Clarice and leaving with an excuse to leave her and Toni alone was very tender. Loved this one.
Concerning Clarice and Toni, it’s probably too late for them now, but when they were together I somehow felt they would last forever. I was actually shocked when they broke up, and not just because I was attached to their being a couple, but because I felt that Clarice, Toni, and Raffi were doing a lot to combat that awful stereotype many straight people hold that LGBT couples cannot be conventional and monogamous over the long term.
77 Responses to “DTWOF episode #518”
Goodness, first comment? Well, I will just say, THANK YOU Alison for my lovely Christmas present. A new DTWOF strip. Hurray!
Wow! I’ve never been this early in the queue. I second what Patti says about the strip being a lovely present — and I want to add particular thanks for the Shakespeare wordplay. It warms the cockles of my nerdy med/ren heart.
My thought exactly, “what a great Christmas present”
hey, this is early, isn’t it? Thanks! Festive Greetings!
I LOVE DTWOF! Thank you Alison. Merry Christmas/Solstice/Whatever to all! Dykes Rock! Nukular! Ha!! You are the best.
so…what’s up with the clarice and toni???????????
Happy day. Whatever day it is…I love DTWOF!
with love, kate the kid
opps, and i also like the look from mo with mom pouring some XXX into her eggnog cup.
with love, KTK
Interesting choice of “The Bishop’s Wife.” Will Clarice return to her flock?
Yay a new DTWOF! And snow in December! There’s hope!
Toni’s definitely got a gleam in her eye… (but small compared to Raffi’s excitedly hopeful eyes, no?) Love Sid juxtaposed w/Paul in panel 5 – definitely a papa/daughter portrait.
Thanks for a great year, Alison. You’re the best!
God, Raffi is so cute! He’s such a good son! I’m rooting for Clarice and Toni!
Well, Clarice and Tony have that Lustful Lesbian Look about them… my bet is that they end up in the sack and whip up some eggnog. And maybe Raffi walks in on them, and with that great teenage nonchalance says, “Hi guys. Hey, when’s dinner ready?”
And Alison, it’s frightening how well you capture the Dubya’s dialogical quirks – “Things’re a tad bit better’n they were at their worst!” Gah! I can actually HEAR him saying that!
Merry merry, everyone!
What a nice surprise to see my favorite strip early! Things bode well for Toni,Clarice and Raffi. I agree with Andi’s prediction above.
Goddess bless us,everyone! Enjoy your turkey,tofurkey,Chinese food, loca(l)vore grub,or _____. Be kind to your family,friends,and family of friends.
I just love sweaters with elbow patches. I wish everyone got this funny coming down with Alzheimer’s and the likes.
Thanks, Alison, for a great Xmas present, and I should add, for always providing excellent present ideas with the books you write – I always gift at least one out to family and friends in need of enlightenment.
Ahh the heartwrenching Lear quotes! … and the Hamlet “…pale cast of thought”. Thank you so much for this fascinating strip, Ms. B.
Merry Christmas &or happy hols to all, and may the coming year be full of love and peace, hope and good health. May we prosper.
For a big thrill, if there’s a break in the clouds, take a gander at brilliant Mars.
Now for a wee drop o’ soynog, and sweet dreams, all.
Happy Christmas Alison, all!
Thank you for posting the strip. it’s beautiful.
Great strip, as always. I have always loved how Mo & Jennifer bonded. But poor Jennifer, she’s looking tired. Syd & Mo must be close to the skids — Mo’s voluntarily drinking dairy & sugar!!! What’s next? Drowning her sorrows with a Happy Meal?
Love the Raffi/Clarice moments. As for Toni willing to give up the McLaughlin-Farkases’ open house, does this mean she & the beguiling Gloria are now socializing with them? I thought Elizabeth M-F would still be holding a grudge for the scandal they brought to on the Freedom to Marry group.
Oops…I was so excited that there was a new strip and I was able to post a comment fairly early I forgot my manners. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah, Blessed Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Boxing Day and Happy New Year all.
excellent christmas day strip
from rainy london town thanks for a great year of the blog AB
Yay, thanks Alison. Merry Christmas to everyone from Oxford. I wonder what Clarice and Toni will get up to while Raffi’s out… 😉
Thanks, as usual. The King Lear bit is excellent – English prof losing his mind to illness quoting Shakespearian king who has lost his mind. Scary (but accurate) how Raffi is turning into a man before our very eyes. Seems like only yesterday he was knee high…
Wow, I just found out I am pregnant on Friday–a solstice present–and we slept through Christmas Eve from early evening despite all of the fireworks and loud music at midnight and the family party we were supposed to go to at 11:00pm, since I live in Mexico.) I got up early, which is a way new thing for me which I enjoy, and decided to check this strip. Everything is silent, just the birds and no bus sounds or any other human activity. I love how I can feel that there is a new strip calling me: thanks for my first Christmas present, Alison! I am het, but this strip has felt like my community ever since I saw you talk at Haverford around 1991. We watched a tearful romance movie last night–Sleepless in Seattle–which causes me to doubt my sanity and happiness while my husband tears up. With your characters I get to feel how complicated and rich life actually is, and I feel comforted and accompanied and almost content to be a human living my life against the exhausting backdrop of logical war economic profits doublespeak.
Happy Fesitivus to all.
Merry Christmas from Vienna
Thank you for the newest Episode.
Hey, I’m in Vienna too — and your strip makes me regret not going home even less.
But to the strip & comments — can’t we be glad Clarice finds out she’s still loved without thinking mommy and daddy are getting back together? I think it’s nice to see islands of love and happiness in a rough world, and an excellent metaphor for Christmas in America, regardless of our actual religions (or lack thereof).
This could be one of the last positive bonding times for Sydney and her Pa. Jennifer’s denial and drinking is scary — not to mention her ignorance of dementia. Dementia implies SHORT-term memory loss — Paul could remember Shakespeare until he forgets how to talk!
Anyway, great to see Clarice getting some hugs, and Paul and Sydney playing together. Even if the world’s not perfect.
Happy holidays everyone. I’ve actually borrowed power tools for the break and am reminding myself of Mo with her torch a few years ago…
“The Bishop’s Wife” is my favorite Christmas movie—I love it when they go ice skating…so romantic. Hmmm…
My Dad can still say the rosary in latin, but he can’t remember what he ate for dinner the night before. I guess this is what I have to look forward to.
Merry Holiday to everyone!
Thanks, Allison! It is a great Christmas present! We atheists love our Christmas swag too, it’s the spiritual bond we share with Christians. And this is the spiritual gift of art.
Hariette, you have to understand that marriage cultists will forgive almost any scandal if you cover it up with a new marriage, or at least betrothal. (As Ellen Willis once noted satirically, marriage makes cheap teen sex into mature commitment.) I agree that it looks like Toni’s (already) getting ready to cheat on Gloria. As I’ve argued many times before, Toni’s and Clarice’s relationship is built on increasing boredom producing tension, leading to a crisis followed by a brief period of hot sex. It seems to take longer each time, and the crises get worse as they go: in this case, Toni’s affair, their separation, and Clarice moving out. An awful lot of trouble to go to, but to each her own. It was a foregone conclusion that the next step would be a passionate tryst while Gloria is at the McLaughlin-Farkas. As property creates theft, monogamy creates adultery.
To paraphrase Frost, “Family is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Enjoy what you’ve got when you’ve got it.
Teenagers need to go out and discover their own identities, but they need a home waiting on them when they return. I’m glad Raffi could ask for it directly.
Raffi looks adorable in the anti-panultimate panel. Teenagers are so weird that way, going from surly and monosyllabic one day to charming and brimming with glee the next…..Didn’t understand it when I was one, still don’t understand it now.
I know we’ve seen Sid’s dad before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed that Alison has managed to draw a family resemblance. that blows my mind.
The strip (and the thumbnail) isn’t coming up for me. Dread! Is something not loading, or am I doing something wrong? Anyone else have this problem?
thank you so much for the strip…I was actually delightfully surprised to wake up this morning and it be there…it is a breath of fresh air after spending the week with the family in a remote town on vancouver island. My poor niece is in a Raffi situation right now only her parents are not getting along so well…how well are Clarice and Toni getting along anyways?!?
And also, nice Kara Walker lead in. We’ll be sure to check it out at the Whitney when the DTWOF characters are panoramically inserted onto the walls. Obscene.
I can’t believe how tall Raffi has gotten. I have to confess that I’ve gotten so used to the surly and angry Raffi that I almost don’t believe panel 8. But I’m glad to see some evidence that he loves Clarice and wants her around – I usually get the impression that he blames the breakdown of the relationship on her, or at least chooses to direct his anger toward her more than to Toni.
I’m worried about Jennifer. I know she’s a lot younger than Paul, but is she the same age as Mo and Sydney? She looks rather worse for wear right about now…
Why *gasp*,Jennifer is starting to look like Sydney’s mom,especially in the face,and to start imitating some of her annoying habits,like drinking too much. Her age has never been mentioned specifically,but recently in the past has been deemed hot enough to successfully flirt with some of Paul’s grad students (or a former grad student turned pizza deliveryperson). The first time Mo met Jen,she remarked to Syd on the drive home,”does she have her driver’s license yet?” Snarky,yes,but a sufficient retort to S’s complaints about Mo’s family.
All this is making me think about chocolate,and chocolate oranges,and the infamous Maoist Orange Cake. It’s been about a year now since all that discussion started.
This could be one of the last positive bonding times for Sydney and her Pa. Jennifer’s denial and drinking is scary — not to mention her ignorance of dementia. Dementia implies SHORT-term memory loss — Paul could remember Shakespeare until he forgets how to talk!
True, but the ability to make the electronics work is interesting. Plus he’s not just quoting Shakespeare but also punning off of quotes (though this is probably an old skill that he would lose late.) Maybe it isn’t alzheimer’s. Maybe he really is recovering from some sort of reversible delirium or even just depression (though Jennifer’s stressed look suggests otherwise.) We’ll just have to wait and see where AB is taking this I suppose…
Loving the creative use of Shakespeare.
I’ve never been a big fan of Sydney but I have to say that her response to the whole “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…” line is *exactly* the same one I always give my mother when she says that too me. I love the phonetic spelling on Dubya’s speech (‘nukular’ indeed!), and the background behind him is so subtle you almost miss it. Excellent strip!
I love the little silhouette (sp?). I thought it was a rorshach (sp?) test, and I panicked a little because it didn’t look like anything: not a bunch of flowers, not a crucifix, not a cheese danish, nothing.
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. For some reason, every single thing was closed in Princeton on Christmas Day except for the Starbucks (the nastiest Starbucks in all of Christendom, by the way. If I ever have a heart attack in there, I’m gonna crawl out onto the sidewalk so I can die in a nice, clean gutter) and the Wa-Wa.
God forgive me, I bought (and ate!) one of those Wa-Wa pretzels (the plain one, not the “stuffed” one).
Oh my gosh, Raffi is so huge! Great strip– thank you!
Yay!
I was travelling yesterday, and missed this. (Thus carefully avoiding spending Christmas with my mother, who can be a pretty decent sort, but freaks out around the holidays and tends to throw temper tantrums at my sister.)
Ah, Clarice, Toni, don’t do it.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why are so many people so fixated on Toni and Clarice getting back together? Isn’t it enough that they can maintain an amicable relationship so that Raffi can have good relationships with both of them and not have to take sides? I don’t even think that Raffi would want them to get back together (and certainly not that he’d be scheming to get them alone)–hadn’t he actually told them to get a divorce already so that the tension in the home would diffuse?
I’m not a child of divorce but I do NOT believe that all kids with divorced parents somehow harbor this deep desire for them to reunite. Many remember too well how tense and painful it was to live with parents who were intensely unhappy, even if they weren’t outwardly at each other’s throats. It’s easier just to make the change and move on. I know for a fact that my stepdaughters feel like this. They didn’t want to live in a house where people screamed at each other all the time, or even stewed in silent resentment–it scared them–and when they’re with their father and me, they don’t. It’s way easier on them to listen to the occasional screaming fit on one side of a phone conversation than to be right there in the house for both sides, pretty much nonstop. I don’t think Clarice and Toni really got to the screaming part–at least, not that we saw–but the smoldering unhappiness is just as bad.
i think the parallel between king lear and sydney’s father is really really interesting – king lear, of course, went insane and rejected his daughter cordelia (“so young, my lord, and true”) who was the one of his three daughters who *really* loved him… and ultimately, she winds up being hanged for her father. paying for her father’s insanity, sort of. the parallel to sydney’s dad’s alzheimer’s…….?
“I’m not a child of divorce but I do NOT believe that all kids with divorced parents somehow harbor this deep desire for them to reunite.”
Oh gods, yes. Of course, long before the divorce I’d lost most respect for both parents, but the marriage was god awful. The whole “kids naturally desire their parents to be back together” bit was really common in pop psych in the eighties, yes? And there might even be a little truth to it, via cultural expectations if nothing else, for *young* children. But older ones? Phoo.
Oh, Alison. Thank you for this lovely holiday gift. The “serpent’s tooth… bite me” exchange made me double over with laughter. Yes, this is what Christmas sounds like at my family’s house. I’m not entirely certain that my mom and I haven’t had that very exchange at some time in the past. (Woodstock, are we actually sisters separated at birth?)
And a ‘appy Boxing Day to all our British mates!
Anybody wanting some good laughs should check out clips from the BBC comedy Goodness Gracious Me on You-Tube. Sorry no link right now’ I’m away from my home computer so y’all will have to do a search. Be sure to check out these esp funny clips: Going out for an English,Typical Asian Parents,the Xmas series,and the one where the beloved son comes out to his Indian parents.
And for those of you wondering what happened to DTWOF in Funny Times,it’s back in the Jan. issue. I gave my nephew a subscription to this a couple of years ago,keeping the whole family amused as I keep renewing it.
“The whole ‘kids naturally desire their parents to be back together’ bit was really common in pop psych in the eighties, yes?”
Oh, I still hear it NOW. And my stepkids’ mother still tries to claim it’s what the kids want. They’re nine and seven, and their parents have been divorced for close to five years. I’m sure neither of them can remember a time when their parents were happy, since their marriage was pretty terrible for quite a long time before he got the courage and the resources to leave her, and I’m absolutely sure the girls know how miserable their parents can make each other. Can’t imagine why they’d want to go back to that. For that matter, I can’t imagine why SHE would want to, since she clearly can’t stand him or anything he believes in, and he’s been happily married for more than three years. I guess she’ll just go on showing them the wedding video and sighing over the past. What a wonderful life.
Hey Feminista, you could wish all us Canucks that happy Boxing Day, too, as we also observe it — mostly by lining up for hours at all the electronics stores for the traditional Boxing Day sales. It’s complete retail insanity — Boxing Week (as it has become) is more dreaded by the retail staff than pre-Xmas shopping.
Loved the panel in the strip with Raffi hugging/wrestling Clarice. My son as a teenager used to express affection just like that — a hug would quickly turn into a headlock.
Merry merry, happy happy felicitations of the season to everyone!
P.S. Feminista, thanks for the mention of Goodness Gracious Me. Friends from England were just telling me about this show, but I never thought to look for it on Youtube. I just checked it out, it’s wonderful. There’s an Indo-Canadian standup comedian called Russell Peters who has a similar perspective. He’s on Youtube as well, and well worth watching.
Good lord, what’s with the constant expectation that Clarice & Toni are on the verge of getting back together every time they happen to have an amicable conversation? Toni & Clarice have a long history together, a great deal of respect and affection for each other, and neither one of them is the china-flinging type. Of course there will be good moments between them. Probably even some meaningful ones. That’s how couples who have lost their spark for each other make the transition to being friends. It’s a healthy transition, millions of couples make it, and Clarice and Toni are certainly grown-up enough to pull it off. And AB is portraying it just right — not dropping hints at a reunion.
Of course, maybe with the next episode AB will prove me all wrong.
I want Clarice and Toni to have new girlfriends and Raffi to get a new honey and for Stella to get a new honey and for Ginger to get a new dog and Sparrow to take in some bunnies (vegan pets!). I want AB’s world to grow ever larger and ever more interesting and fun!
I don’t see lust or anything in Clarice and Toni’s eyes. It just looks like two old friends casting about for a pleasant way to spend the afternoon while their young charge checks out Halo at a neighbor’s house.
(Can JR get a bunny – pleeeeeeeez?)
Duncan,
I don’t see anywhere in the strip that Gloria was going to be at the multi-Elizabeths’ gathering. Did you infer that? Or am I just not being observant?
goodness gracious me on youtube! who knew? i once rented out the video from a little shop on valencia / sf for a night with cousins n’ friends, only to rack up a ridiculous amount in fees in the course of a week (ok, maybe ten days)… this’d be much better.
feminista, that’s not by any chance you, S., of the blog (of similar name)?
– s., too
Glad some of you have enjoyed Goodness Gracious Me.My niece,nephew and I were laughing our bloody asses off last night; previous nights we enjoyed watching Monty Python DVDs. And Happy Boxing Day to Canadians,Australians and New Zealanders,too.
d/f: No,I’m not S.
Duncan, you put it much more strongly than I would with regard to “property leads to theft; monogamy leads to adultery” (for many), but word.
As for wanting Clarice and Toni to get back together, add me to the group who doesn’t particularly (unless it’s in the context of a *gasp* real open relationship).
Finally, my parents got divorced when I was thirteen and I was *relieved*. Thank god it was over, there was no more fighting and angst. My siblings (all younger), except for the 4-year-old, felt the same way. I’m sure we would have been way more screwed up if the divorce didn’t happen when it finally did.
Kids stuck in the middle of crappy marriages or other relationships have complex feelings that cannot be boiled down to whether they want their parents to get back together or not. Speaking from my own childhood experience, which included many years of incessant fighting that occasionally got physically violent – and separations that lasted days or months – I can attest that it could go either way or even both ways at the same time. Children may be praying for their parents to divorce, or they may be praying for their parents to somehow magically transform to normal people that don’t fight and get along and live happily together. Even in the worst relationships there have been times of happiness. Children can have wild imaginations and selective memories that can focus on these moments or they may fear that they will have to be separated from one of the parents. I had wanted my parents to get divorced for most of my childhood, but my sister (younger) usually did not, because she was very close to my father and she worried she would never see him again. Then, after one of the long separations when we were in our teens, I remember myself not being so sure anymore that I wanted them to divorce; I was starting to hope that they would get back together. I think this had to do with the fact that as we go through adolescence our families become so much less important for our everyday social contact, whereas they acquire a stabilizing background role. Thus, a little bit of denial combined with a sudden realization of the social dimension of coming from a “broken home” did the trick.
My parents did get back together and, of course, it was as bad as before. In fact, they never got divorced! As they grew old, they mellowed out a bit and stopped caring so much, so they fought less. My father died in 1994. By then they were empty nesters, almost companionable, like a cat and a dog that have worked out their territory.
I also have a stepson and have seen him struggle with similar issues. I would not venture to guess his real hopes and fears, since I am obviously an interested party. I would like to imagine that, at some level, he is at peace with the fact that his parents are divorced and able to enjoy being part of a new family (he now has a younger half-sister), but I know it cannot be as simple as that. As we grow older, our lot is mellowing out too… so his mom, dad, sister, and I are now all friends, and we sometimes do things together (like Christmas).
Not sure what the moral is here, but I guess my point is that kids’ feelings about their parents’ relationships are really complicated.
I feel so sorry that my english literature knowledge doesn’t include any Shakespeare… maybe someone out there should provide an annotated version of DTWOF? I did manage to look up eggnog on wikipedia, though.
I think Raffi is happy to have both his parents around for Christmas: he’s smart enough to notice that they have a better relationship now because they’re not partners anymore. IMHO.
It’s true that you never know how kids will react. My parents divorced when I was 25 and already on my own. I was thrilled. They should have done it when I was 9. I have a friend who is 30, lives in CA while his folks live in MO, and he is pissed off as ever that his parents are splitting up. He figured they almost made it 40 years, they should have stuck it out. Now his dad has a new love and he is pissed about that. I think he is acting like a two-year-old, but he doesn’t like to hear me say that!
Anyway, Happy New Year everyone…this blog rocks!!
S.E., look up King Lear and Hamlet. Paul is casting himself as Lear and Hamlet. Sydney briefly takes the part of Cordelia. “HD, or not HD” is a pun on the first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be”.
I’m afraid that Jennifer may be right that Paul is depressed, but wrong that it’s only a little. I hope somebody figures out what’s going on. (I mean a character in the strip, not one of us kibbitzers.) Paul is one of my favorite minor characters.
I agree with Martinet completely. Maybe there is some kind of individual threshold that needs to be reached for a child to unequivocably wish his parents would divorce, but that feeling (of unequivocableness) is definitely attainable for some children.
I’m surprised Mo didn’t bring a carton of (vegan) Silk Nog. It’s good stuff. Westsoy’s Holly Nog isn’t bad either.
Straight European,
I Googled the Shakespeare references and was able to get answers for all of them. But I didn’t catch the HD or no HD reference – the most obvious one!
Thanks Alison, for increasing my literary knowledge, one of the many reasons I enjoy your work :).
In no particular order:
1. Divorce and kids’ feelings on it. I think it isn’t that they are relieved their parents get back together or relieved that their parents get divorced. I think it’s that they are relieved that the issue is finally resolved.
2. Paul might not have Alzheimer’s. He could have a partially blocked carotid artery, so he’d still be functional, but a little sluggish mentally. Of course, it could be that he really gets electronic doo-dads and Shakespeare, so those skills are remaining even while his other faculties are declining.
3. I notice Jennifer seems to have raced through the booze. But it’s possible that the huge swig of liquor in Paul’s glass is the cause of that.
@Alex the Bold’s comment on the indecipherability of the little silhouette, I feel compelled to point out that if it weren’t so anal-retentively miniscule, I might have done a better job.
@EJ’s comment about Kara Walker. I wish this had been an intentional reference to her work. I meant to go see her exhibit when I was in NYC, but didn’t make it. I had never heard of her stuff before.
@Deena, No! I never said Gloria was going to the McLaughlin-Farkases. It was interesting to see how people assumed that she and Toni must be going together. That’s not to say that they weren’t planning it. God knows what these people get up to, as I’ve said before, when I’m not looking.
Alison – hee! You are so great. 🙂 🙂 🙂
ps Got the sillouette at the very first glance – no prob., fwiw.
I didn’t get the sillouette until hours later. I’m usually good at stuff like that, but without a point of reference, this time I was lost.
I got the Hamlet references, and am sufficiently familiar with Lear to know you were referencing Lear, but I’ve never actually read that one. There’s a version on my Netflix queue. Maybe I’ll move it closer to the top, once i’ve finished catching up with Lost.
Alison,
That’s an incredibly good drawing of a penny! 😉
I don’t think that it’s that the silhouette was drawn poorly; rather, it’s more that I’m stunned I didn’t realize what it was a silhouette of until much later.
Perhaps I’ve got a touch of whatever’s got Paul.
Yikes that’s tiny. How is the carpal tunnel?
(miniscule! I’m not the only one! …dangerous qwerty proximity be damned. *ahem*)
Yum! Soy Nog!
I just enjoy your strip so much.
Ah, my favourite moment in King Lear when Cordelia’s character rings out like cut crystal when you tap it with a knife.
What a weird time Christmas is – well summed up in this strip.
Well drawn, my lord, and true
What a great year of DTWOF…
I especially love reading all the observant comments and going back to the strip to appreciate all the subtleties I’d missed before.
My dream of a white christmas has been mercilessly crushed by a mild winter here in Norway. So this christmas present sure brightened my holidays.
Sidney’s dad’s dementia is comically sad, although I was surprised with his handling of the Television set.
It is strange to see a happy Raffi in place of the constantly annoyed one, but it is just as charming, which somehow adds another level to the embarrasment over my crush on a comic strip character.
Happy new year everyone! And especially to you, Allison.
You’ve made this year a good one for me.
Thank you. Sincerely.
Can you have a motion-picture drama that’s made up of still images? Yup, apparently so! Wonderful slice-of-life strip, AB!
Oh, I just finished reading “The Fun Home”. First book I’ve paid retail for in a long time, and worth it!
Happy New Everything to everybody here!
Wow, is that a chocolate dollar up above ? Yum !
( I’ve just finished eating the chocolate coins I was given for Christmas. )
Great strip… Isn’t Raffi looking grown-up ?
Happy New Year to All !
Damn! Stuart has stolen my idea. If you put a shot of B&B in a glass of vanilla soy milk and sprinkle nutmeg on top you’ve got yourself a very tasty drink. I call it a Brandy Alexsoynder. Makes menopause fun!
I loved Sidney’s interaction with her dad. And Raffi hugging Clarice and leaving with an excuse to leave her and Toni alone was very tender. Loved this one.
p.s.: Bush looks as stupid in HD as he looks in non-HDTV cartoons… = )
p.p.s.: Now I remembered to write my name…
Heh, high definition. What do I need
high definition for? It doesn’t make
me see anything clearer than before.
http://EncoreSeraphine.com
Concerning Clarice and Toni, it’s probably too late for them now, but when they were together I somehow felt they would last forever. I was actually shocked when they broke up, and not just because I was attached to their being a couple, but because I felt that Clarice, Toni, and Raffi were doing a lot to combat that awful stereotype many straight people hold that LGBT couples cannot be conventional and monogamous over the long term.