Aackt 8: Guisewite Shut

In the final episode of Aack Cast, Jamie speaks with Cathy Guisewite and contemporary feminists about where Cathy fits in history, and where we go from here. You have been aack pilled.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cathy is frazzled as she's stuck in traffic. She thinks
to herself, I'm too busy to be going out for lunch,
too busy to chit chat, too busy to deal with
any food that isn't just handed to me through a
drive through window. Kathy is still frazzled as she walks
into a cafe. I have a million things to do
at work, a billion things to do at home, a

(00:21):
zillion thanks to do for the holidays. I'm too busy
for lunch. Too busy, too busy. Kathy then gets to
a cafe and sits at a table with her friend,
looking stressed. Hi Kathy, what's new? Nothing but an extremely
busy nothing. And if that's not a thesis statement for

(00:44):
the life of the Kathy character, I don't know what is.
Hi everybody, and welcome to ac cast. I'm your host,
Jamie Loftus, And in our last episode today, we're going
to peek our little heads out of the fourth ring
of the Kathy Inferno and to can look at what
we've learned from both the character and the creator. The

(01:04):
comic by creator Kathy guys Wide, its own admission is
about four things love, work, food and Mom, and for Mom,
I'll just subden relationships to women in general, as that's
kind of an overarching theme as well. And after spending
almost six months with Kathy's work, her generation, her humor,
and the many different reasons this character was so loved

(01:26):
and hated, the clearer it is to me that Kathy
comics are a masterful examination of effort and failure. And
I don't mean that in a negative way at all,
because when it comes to talking about failure, Kathy is
a huge success. I don't think that the idea of failure,
especially failure over time, is discussed often enough in popular media,

(01:48):
and when it is discussed, it tends to be a
little melodramatic or tragic or overly goofy. Failure is relegated
to over long art movies or or HBO comedies. Failures
that are examined in deep and empathetic detail are usually
the failures of men, and they often elicit some kind

(02:09):
of sympathetic response, even when the characters aren't particularly likable.
This falls under the umbrella of the male anti hero
that has been so popular in media over the past
twenty years. But when those same qualities, those same failures,
those same lapses of judgment are applied to anyone but
a man, and usually a white man at that people

(02:31):
often turn on them. And in the Funny Pages where
Cathy lived, when characters fail, they would ordinarily succeed in
some way by the end of the strip, or they're
framed as a sympathetic hero. Think how Dilbert became this
iconic in cell whose hatred of his office job made
him a hero to gen X cubicle heads. Fuck. Think
about how Charlie Brown's existential dread turned into not just

(02:54):
a billion dollar industry but one of the most popular
characters to root for in spite of their failure years
of all time. The Kathy character up ends that trend
in almost every way. Not only was she actively rooted
against by many people in a way that's certainly never
followed Charlie Brown, by the end of many of Kathy
Guys Wives comic strips, her character was failing harder than

(03:17):
when the strip began. Here's an example of what I'm
talking about. This is from the late nineties and Irving
is about to lay Kathy off from her job of
over twenty years. I couldn't get you laid off, Cathy,
I still have a job. Oh, thank you, Irving, thank you,
but I couldn't exactly keep you here either. Excuse me.

(03:39):
The company isn't letting you go, but it also isn't
making a full commitment to you. Am I employed or not.
You won't be at this office, but you will be
working someplace near and dear to your heart, act I'm
being transferred to fake Phil and you may remember that.

(04:00):
In this storyline, Kathy eventually does lose her job thanks
to the man who will one day be her husband,
and she then has to start her own consulting business
from home to support herself before being hired back a
year later. For thirty four years, Kathy failed almost every
single day in the daily sense. She fails knowingly. She

(04:21):
looks in a mirror and doesn't like what she sees.
She steps on a scale and doesn't like what she sees.
She walks into a date and she doesn't like who
she sees or how they see her. And then there
are these longer term failures that she doesn't see because
she couldn't possibly see them coming. No one wants to
think that the issues they have with self image in
nine are just different versions of the same problems that

(04:45):
they'll have. That's like the definition of a bad hang.
But very often that's true, and while it may contradict
itself in a fictional character, it happens very often in
real life. Kathy is full of contradictions. She flux, but
she still ends up with irving. She tries every avenue

(05:06):
she can, often going into debt to do so, to
love herself, but she's still insecure. At the close of
every single comic, she dresses for the job she wants,
but she never gets that job. And even when she
succeeds at what she thought she was supposed to want,
the merit to the career, and in the final strip
of the series, the pregnancy, it's unclear to people who

(05:28):
have been there the whole time whether she's achieved what
she was told she wanted or what she actually wanted
for her life. But unlike these complicated characters who struggle
with personal relationships and the way they view themselves, the
famous failure character canon, Kathy was rarely met with sympathy.
If you've been listening to this show, you're aware that

(05:49):
the character's failures were only fuel for further antagonism. Here's
an excerpt from the comic Journals Juliette Khn to this
point from Cathy was and is a liability. She reveals
us as victimized. She reveals us as creatures that do
not exist for men. She reveals our effort. Sometimes we

(06:10):
are sad because we ate with a heedlessness we are
not allowed. Sometimes we are angry because our bosses kept
cornering us after hours, and so we must repudiate her.
There has always been a problem of continuity in feminism,
a tendency stoked by the patriarchy. We swim in to
slash and burn our past. How often do I hear

(06:32):
of people who describe themselves as feminists recall rob burning
that never happened, positively or negatively. How often do we
reinvent the wheel because whoever did at the first time
has faded into some boring old lady who we must
not become, who we surely will avoid becoming if we
just ignore her as hot as we can. Kathy, whatever

(06:53):
her origins, has become that woman. And beyond everything I
have just argued, it comes down to at Cathy is old,
and old women are expendable, and even we feminists are
in a hurry to be rid of them. And I
love how Juliet Khan emphasizes effort here, because the only
thing that is a bigger candidate for being torn to

(07:15):
ship by the general public than failure is failure that
has clear, enormous effort attached to it. Think of how
bad American idol auditions become huge. Think of how bad
movies that are sincere are really fun to watch. It's
that idea of Schaudenfreude, because I think I said that
right in Cathy's case, it's human nature with a season

(07:36):
eight of misogyny to find annoyance or cruel pleasure and
watching her fail. Traditionally, and certainly in Kathy's time, beauty
and femininity are supposed to look effortless. We're trained to
see effortlessness as sexy, as ideal. Think of traditionally feminine
sports like figure skating in ballet. In her day, Cathy's

(07:58):
clear effort was a source of ridicule. But to her
effort meant hope and discipline. She believes that she can
be the person that her culture is telling her to be,
and so she makes an effort by disciplining her body,
spending her money on trends, trying and trying again when
the latest rigged fad fails. And it was never a

(08:20):
secret that the Cathy strip, for all of its avoidances
of specific cultural events, was political simply by existing. Cathy
said this to Hogan's Magazine in as the comic was ending.
I feel like a lot of the time my strip
made sort of political comments about the state of women,
their expectations, the state of women in the office, being harassed,

(08:43):
being held back, being utterly confused by the mixed messages
we get from everything from what size to be, how
to feel about ourselves, how to look to me. That's
all sort of political. A lot of what I wrote
about was the woman's place in the world and the
pressure were under to be a certain way, to think
certain things, to have or not have certain opportunities. I

(09:07):
spoke about this with Kathy guys White recently, right as
she was in the middle of digging through her own
archives to assemble the forty five anniversary collection of her
comic strip. Here we are talking specifically about the two
times the strip touched on Kathy's harassment in the workplace,
first when Mr Pinkley harassed her in the eighties, then
again when the Product Testing Incorporated offices went into sensitivity

(09:31):
training in the nineties. I can't exactly remember when I
did those strips, but there was a lot of new
conversation around the Anita Hill hearings and if if I
did those strips at that time, it seems like probably
I did, you did, but frankly I couldn't remember if

(09:51):
I did. So that was if I did, Oh, well,
that would be appropriate that Yes, this was a conversation
that was starting to be had for the first time
ever in my universe. So when I did that series,
I had a lot of support from I got a
lot of mail, you know, appreciating the fact that I

(10:12):
had done the series, and then I got a lot
of mail not appreciating the fact that I didn't ended
in any triumphant way. You know, the storyline just kind
of stopped. But obviously it wasn't comfortable. I mean, if
I had done that storyline in the later years of
the trip, it would have been it would have had

(10:33):
a much longer and much more um all acquainted ually say,
ending to this story. But that just kind of the
storyline just kind of went away. But at least the
subject was brought up in this strip and it was
definitely something that a lot of women were experiencing. And

(10:54):
then after that period, then a lot of offices, when
it had were forced to go into sensitivity training for
for the male workers and uh, you know, equality training.
I can't exactly enlightenment training for everybody. All the officers
were doing that at a time where men were having

(11:15):
to learn not to you know, pat their peers on
the butt and look down their blouses and you know,
insist they were shorter skirts, google and them in meetings.
All of that was that was perfectly um in the
kind of just what happened before it was men were

(11:37):
needing to learn that that was not okay. To illustrate
guys White's point, here's a brief history of the Kathy
character's career. She began in the seventies as a door
to door saleswoman for Product Testing Incorporated. Was then promoted
into low level management in their office, was forcibly kissed
by her boss, and nothing happened to discipline him. She

(11:59):
stated that job for twenty years, while occasionally winning a
small salary increase but never pay equity. She gets laid
off by Irving and replaced by a twenty two year
old when the dot com bubble bursts in the nineties,
then brought back for a couple more years, right in
time for the two thousand eight recession to hit the company.
She isn't passionate about her work, but she's determined to

(12:21):
succeed at it and be the well rounded woman that
it's her goal to be. And I don't want to
imply that the enormous effort that goes into Cathy's day
to day doesn't occasionally result in success. In Catharsis, Cathy's
brief victory has proved very popular among fans of the strip,
but in the long term never really led her anywhere else.

(12:42):
Even when Cathy is blisteringly aware of how unfairly she
is being treated, even when she gets up the courage
to say so and not just think it or tell
it to her friend, it rarely, if ever, results in
things actually changing. More often than not, the issue isn't
that the person that she's complaining doesn't know the problem
is happening. It's that they have nothing to gain by

(13:03):
fixing it, and Cathy's effort and anger in the face
of people like this often make her look unreasonable, whiney,
fruitless hysterical. Here she is making her case for the
expenses related to being a working woman in the early nineties.
To look office acceptable, a man needs a two hundred

(13:24):
dollar suit, sixty dollar shoes, a thirty dollar shirt, five
dollars of underwear, and a ten dollar haircut. To look
office acceptable. A woman needs a two hundred dollar suit,
eighty dollar shoes and ninety dollar blouse, thirty five dollars
of lingerie, a forty five dollar haircut, five dollar pantyhose,
forty six dollars of makeup, a ten dollar manicure, two

(13:45):
hundred dollars of jewelry, and a thirty dollar purse containing
nine dollars of emergencies. Applies to maintain or professional look
throughout the day. Thus on behalf of all women. I
demand a year and refund for each of us, plus
ten dollars per hour for all the extra shopping time
require fired. It all evens out with the extra aspir
and men have to buy. Medicine is in a different category.

(14:06):
Shall I begin with our therapy bills. Cathy's advocacy for
herself didn't come naturally, as we're repeatedly reminded by the
comic The concept of Cathy seeing herself as a career
woman instead of an aspiring wife and mother gave Kathy's
mother extreme pause. The character who pushes her towards her
career was her friend Andrea, a second wave feminist whose

(14:30):
effort and failure were treated very differently in the comic
from Kathy's. It was instead received as and occasionally framed
as the abrasive kill joy attitude that people who advocate
for themselves are often labeled as guys. White and I
discussed Andrea's origins. How did you conceive of the Andrea character.

(14:52):
I just think I wish I was pulling from more
clear feminists that I saw on TV and about and
also truthfully and the part of myself that was in
agreement with that. You know, there's that, there's I always
I think that there was always a part of myself
that you believed completely was also the voice of Andrea.

(15:15):
But there was the other part that had my name
on it, that was the voice that was the voice
of Kathy. So but you know there, I mean, I
read Miss Magazine, I understood, I watched I watched the
Strong Women and was proud of that and wanted to

(15:36):
be part of that, and but um, it was just
so much more complicated than any woman today, any young
woman today can possibly comprehend. It was. It's not that
it was complicated for everybody, because of course it wasn't,
but for a big tonk of us, you know, it

(15:58):
was complicated. We were an dating relationships in a completely
different way than then are mother's had. And that's certainly
that our grandmother's had, you know, they're all the all
those books came out sort of during my dating years
about understanding the male brain and and you know, men

(16:19):
are from Mars, that women are from women are Men
are from Mars, women are from Venus. And there was
that whole culture of books about trying to understand the
male brain and trying to figure that out. And there
was a generation of women like me who studied those
like like the Bible, you know, and prayed to God

(16:41):
that we would have some clue for how to deal
with these losers who were, you know, not wanting to
go out with us. If we you know, if they
imagine like that we made more money than they did,
that was that that relationship over, you know, So there
was that's like I said, it's just like you can't

(17:03):
you could not comprehend it. So Kathy Guy's White carefully
constructed Andrea to be the feminist motor of the series,
especially during the early years of the Trip, where Kathy
was still wrapping her head around the wave of middle
class boomer women making a hard commitment to their careers
over motherhood and domesticity in their twenties and thirties. But

(17:26):
in the late eighties, Andrea's life also created contradictions within
her character. Once Kathy was firmly in the girl boss
lifestyle in the Reagan administration with Andrea, Andrea flipped the
switch again and decided that she wanted marriage, children, and
her career. But as the central plot of many TV
shows I watched When I Get a Cold Go women,

(17:48):
having it all is not something that's made simple or
sometimes even possible to do, and so while Andrea is
successful in getting married and having her children, she is
punished by being forced back to the bottom of the
corporate ladder. Andrea was furious as this happened, and she
told Kathy this when they became co workers. I was

(18:11):
earning sixty thousand a year when I quit working full
time to be a mother, and now all I'm worth
the six fifty and our temp job. Do people really
think I'm not serious about my career just because I
have children, that I'm incapable of the kind of focus
that got me to the top before. It's an outrage
I intend to fight, but for now there's work to do.

(18:32):
Where shall I get started on those? In the last panel,
Cathy peers over at Andrea's desk, which is covered in
framed photos of her kids. There's an inch of space
between Gus's first bath photo and Zenas birthday album. This
is my desk, You're kidding? I thought it was an
end table. The Andrea character, as we've discussed in past episodes,

(18:55):
made a strong effort to be the woman that second
wave feminism told her or she could be. Whether she
realized this or not, these opportunities were promised to upwardly
mobile white women in particular. At different points in the comic,
Andrea fought for pay equity, for solidarity among her friends
and co workers, for political candidates that she believed in,

(19:16):
for less aggressively gendered advertising, and children's toys and holiday mascots.
She literally dressed up as Santa. One year. She taught
her children to demand to dismantle these systems for her
friends to refuse men who didn't treat them well, just
like the Kathy character advocated for herself to her accountant.
These strips can be really cathartic to read, but in

(19:38):
terms of the direction of Andrea's life, they kind of
go nowhere. Andrea is never paid equally and she's discriminated
against for taking maternity leave. She ends up losing her
job and has to rebuild her career at Cathy's workplace.
Her kids, Zenith and Gus, do end up succumbing to
gendered marketing. Her daughter, Zenith gets married and has a

(19:59):
child right out of college. Her political candidates lose. And
Andrea's character, particularly as she gets older, struggles to accept
that her expectations for her children and herself didn't bear
out the way that she wanted them to. But by
the end of the strip, she has accepted Zenith and
she's really excited to be a grandmother. In some ways,

(20:20):
it's lovely, but it's also clear that there have been
a lot of blockades put in front of her and
she's just had to accept them. And like Andrea's initial
reaction to her daughter's life choices, Kathie sometimes struggles to
accept women who make different life choices than herself as well,
even when her own life choices were making her completely miserable.

(20:42):
Which I mean, has self floathing ever stopped you from
judging others? Because it certainly hasn't stopped me. I hate
myself Andrew choices are bad. Two things can be true.
But guys, why uses this friction to illustrate how women
of this time chose to live differently? Here's a strip
where the is visiting her friend who is a stay

(21:02):
at home mother in the seventies. Isn't this great, barb.
You're at home with the baby all day. I'm at
the office with my job all day. But we can
still talk like we used to. We're still just the same. Yeah,
deep down, we're just two tired women. The two sit
in silence in front of their coffees, clearly kind of

(21:24):
annoyed with the other. In the last panel, they both
explode into anxiety and say in unison for you didn't
do anything today. But keep in mind this is a
very early strip, and over time, Cathy manages to overcome
some of her prejudgments about women's life choices by actually

(21:47):
speaking with them. We see her talk to younger women,
we see her talk to stay at home mothers, we
see her talk to Charlene, who's of a lower socio
economic class, and it bears repeating that there is little
to no representation of non white or non straight characters.
But to say that Kathy is completely stuck in her
ways and how she views the world and other people

(22:10):
is kind of disingenuous. By the comics last decade, Kathy
is actively empathizing with the twenty two year old who
took her job. Andrea's real success is her mindset. Unlike Kathy,
we do not see her question her code of ethics
and values throughout the strip. She never wavers. Sometimes her

(22:31):
conviction is the punch line, but more often than not,
it's a tool that Kathy guys Like uses to channel
her own frustrations on how women were treated or marketed
to or told to look through the years, and sometimes
between Kathy and Andrea, we see Kathy push back on
Andrea's conviction. Here's the strip. I really love Kathy Irving

(22:52):
and Andrea all sit watching a TV ad. Irving is
blissfully unaware as Kathy and Andrea annoyed the ad exclaims
for the new breed of woman, practical yet sensual, dignified
yet wild, cool yet warm, businesslike yet romantic, demure yet passionate.

(23:19):
Look at that, Andrea, there's one of those new car
commercials that caters to the new working woman. The three
of them continued to watch commercials. Ha look at this one, Kathy,
here's an insurance company practically begging for the new working
woman's business. Here we go. Here's my favorite. The airline
wrote a whole new song to woo the new working woman.

(23:43):
Kathy and Andrea stand up from the couch and yell
in unison, how are sued to buy that stuff that
we can't get jobs that pay any money? And the
final panel, Irving is in the kitchen stewing. As he
opens another beer, he says, I hate watching television with women,

(24:04):
and yes, let's take a last look at Irving, who
no amount of analysis and empathy could make me like which, Actually,
I need to share this with you. A listener of
this podcast reached out to me to tell me that
Irving was a favorite comic strip character of Ted Bundy.
What else do you need to know? Kathy, guys White

(24:28):
has gone back and forth on her feelings about Irving
over the years, even though he eventually becomes Kathy's spouse
and the father of her spawn, Spawn of Kathy, I
would watch that movie. There were times during her strips
run where Guy's White got sick of Irving and he
would disappear from the newspaper for years. There were times
where guys White swore that her heroine would never get married,

(24:52):
but in the early two thousands, after she had been
married for several years herself, she wrote Irving a semi
redemption arc where he at least acknowledged some of his
more toxic qualities to Kathy, even if he didn't actually
resolve them. Let's bear that out ted Bundy can be like,
it's really toxic that I'm a serial killer, but if

(25:14):
he doesn't stop murdering people, it's like, well, this is
kind of lip service, you know. Anyways, Kathy guys Why
spoke with me about how she developed the character of
Irving over the years and the personal experiences and Boomerman
commentary that she brought to him. Well, sadly, it was

(25:34):
like exactly who I was dating at the time, which
would have been obvious to every single person who knew
me and except for me, because I thought I had
disguised everything about him and about how we related to
each other. So there's that, Um yeah, did he did

(25:56):
he realize? I don't think that any man I ever
wrote about thought but that was him, you know. I
think the man I chose to uh date and then
write about. We're pretty much always oblivious about how they
might appeared, you know, in this strip, they just it

(26:16):
were oblivious about how they were so um, So that
was that, that was what what began, and you know,
and that that relationship was when I first started the strip.
That relationship was all about waiting for him to call
and then him not calling and then I mean that's

(26:38):
as my memory is that long chunk of the comic strip,
and Irving was all about this and was, um, you know,
lusting after the man who was not there. So that's
exactly in my life at that time. And for a
great and for a lot of the time I dated,
I was always just um, you know, obsessed with somebody

(26:59):
who wasn't interested in me. So bad for life, but
great for comic strip, you know, because um yeah, because
I kept repeating the exact same relationship with with different people.
But I named all of them irving, you know, and
then I mean he involved in time a little bit,
evolved over time a bit, and um, I mean I

(27:22):
still can't believe that she married him, but there we are.
She did. But at the time I convinced myself that
they had worked out, you know, a much better relationship,
in a much better way of communicating with each other.
But yeah, it began, and I began a just a
pitiful long and for somebody to call once again, Jamie,

(27:44):
I have to remind you, when I wasn't born, that
was your age, and was writing the comic strip, there
was the answering machines hadn't even been invented. I mean,
certainly we're wrestling with all the same problems from the
man's point of view. I mean, which frankly I didn't
care about because we had our own problems. And for

(28:06):
all the billion hours I spent studying the books about
how to understand men, you know, I don't believe any
of them ever, books on you know, how to you know,
how to understand their female brand. It's didn't seem to
me that that was happening. They were just trying to
figure out how to behave well enough that they could

(28:30):
be in a relationship because you know, men wanted to
men wanted to love to you know, men have always
wanted to be with somebody, and it got very tricky.
It's not until much later in the strip that we
begin to learn what lies beneath Irving's external abrasiveness and
judge tendencies. He admits that he's insecure about his body too,

(28:55):
sometimes that he feels threatened when Cathy's career or income
eclipses his own. He's afraid of his body aging or
his peers not considering him to be masculine enough. Even
when he's going out to a department store and spending
thousands of dollars on a new cringe e look, Irving's
character is aware how his effort could seem embarrassing, to

(29:19):
the point where at sometimes he'd rather not make an
effort with Cathy at all than try and potentially embarrass himself.
As the strip goes on, he becomes more self aware
and tries harder. But I would be lying if I
said that this strip from the early two thousands where
Irving is appealing to Kathy doesn't have fro thing raw

(29:40):
Bundy energy for me. When we dated. Before it was
all about me, my needs, my agenda. I was such
an egomaniac, such a grandiose, self centered prince. But now
I'm humble, humble and vulnerable, the most vulnerable man you'll
ever meet. I want another chance with you, Kathy. Kathy says,

(30:04):
You've had ten chances with me. Irving run, Kathy run.
As you know by now, Kathy and Irving end up together,

(30:27):
but her marrying him comes after decades of Kathy making
an effort to convince herself that her body and her
life is worthy of real love. This is an entirely
Irving's fault. For all of his negative qualities, I never
found an example of Irving commenting on Kathy's body, and
in fact, he would actively encourage her to be happy

(30:51):
with herself as she is. But I do believe that
Kathy's failure to find herself worthy of love and her
eventual marriage to Irving are connected. And no, I don't
want to harp on this anymore. So let's play a
little send off to Irving with some strips I found
of him at his absolute worst. Play the music. I

(31:15):
hated being labeled an insensitive bumbler when I didn't do
something I didn't know I was supposed to do. What
is it now? Feelings, anxieties, commitment, dishwear, shows children, romance,
what aging boomer? This aging boomer that I am sick

(31:36):
of hearing about aging baby boomers. Good Bye Irving. A
psychic weight has lifted from me. And now that we
have freed ourselves from Irving, I do want to emphasize
one last time with evidence that the Kathy character fucked
and the generalization that Cathy was quote unquote desperate is

(32:00):
certainly tied to her relationship with Irving. There are many
moments where her behavior toward Irving excuse on the needy
and neurotic. But outside of that relationship, Cathy wasn't desperate
or clueless about the way men treated her. And there
are numerous examples of Kathy telling either us, her audience,

(32:21):
or sometimes the man she's going on a date with,
exactly how she feels about them she fox. Here are
some of my favorite examples. Cathy standing in the foyer
of her house with some dorky doctor named Nathan. I
don't want to go out with you anymore, Nathan. I
have no interest in a man who's given up his

(32:42):
whole life for the Internet, Nor do I care to
help you try to dredge up the jewel of a
human that may still be buried in your brain under
forty email addresses. In this one, Kathy sits at a
bar with a mustachioed creep named John who's just approached her. Hi, sweetie,
can I buy you a drink? No? Thanks? Hey, come on,

(33:04):
this is the twenty century, baby. You gotta loosen up,
you gotta live, you gotta do whatever makes you feel good.
In the final panel, Cathy smirks as she dumps her
glass of water on his head. John shot his shot,
and he fucked with the wrong girl. Here's another, at
the dinner date with a guy named Bradley in the eighties.

(33:25):
In this one, Bradley is talking, Kathy is thinking, yack yack,
my beamer, my boat, yack yack. The second this blind
date is over, I'm going to murder Charlene. Yack yack,
my jacuzzi, my club, yack yack, my masseuse. I'll go

(33:45):
to her home and strangle her scrawny neck for fixing
me up with this geek. My condo yack yack, my
broker yack yack. Cathy is still thinking, but she's furious.
I'll go to prison, so what. I'll spend the rest
of my life rotting behind bars, but I'll have my revenge.
Bradley cluelessly blathers on in the last panel, completely unaware

(34:10):
that Kathy is plotting to murder her best friend. So
what are your plans for the future, Kathy? And I
saved the best for last. Here's Kathy rejecting her coworker, Ted.
Do you want to get together sometime? Kathy? No, Ted,
Actually no, I don't. Well, you may be asking about
the most casual of dates. I can only suspect you

(34:33):
have deeper interests, and it's my responsibility to tell you
I do not share them. Experience has taught me that
even one day with a man I'm not attracted to
is a mistake. I'm not interested in romance with you, Ted,
not now, not ever. And the last panel, Ted is
gone and Kathy looks nervous, thinking to herself at her desk.

(34:54):
The only man I really communicate with are the ones
I'll never speak to again. So to say that Cathy
is not a desirable entity, come on, This is a
woman who two of her own secretaries fell in love
with her and abuff personal trainer ten years her junior
fell madly in love with her and proposed so. While

(35:16):
Cathy generally doubts her own desirability, she desires and is desired,
which could be said of virtually no single woman over
thirty five in the Funny Pages, or, while we're at it,
in the vast majority of pop culture while Kathy was
in print. But Guys White still finds room for nuance

(35:36):
here because yes, her character is desired, but that doesn't
mean that she isn't still insecure and self conscious. The
Kathy character was never really encouraged to love herself by
her culture, because accepting yourself generally means spending less money.
I firmly believe that the reason that all of these
elements come together so cleanly, especially on the topic of

(36:00):
body and self image, is because of Kathy Guys, who
has awareness of not just her own feelings but the
feelings of the people in her generation. By her own admission,
she's a little less clear on the subsequent generations. But
that wasn't what the Kathy comic was. It was an
examination of the way that the average American boomer was

(36:22):
encouraged to liberate herself one decade, then pivot to hyper
consumption and self absorption the next. It illustrated how this
model was completely unsustainable and disorienting, and the Kathy character's
whiplash when it came to the constant changing in diet
and fashion reflected that guys White spoke with me about

(36:44):
her inspiration, about where she pulled from for food storylines
and how they were received well. The I think the
approach to the subject matter only changed because the sensibility
of the world change. When I started the strip, nobody
was talking thing about embracing your lovely feminine form whatever
shape or size you are, which you know, changed a

(37:07):
lot in the last years. Even though I think that
that that that team just kind of evolved as as
as the food consciousness evolved in the frustrations of it evolved.
M it was just with like an ongoing battle that
I know that a lot of women had with their
self image. A lot of it had to do with

(37:29):
how much they wait in the morning, or how they
feel about themselves in the morning, or what they could
fit into to go out. And no matter how supportive
the universe was, how you know, how they shouldn't feel
bad about their weight. Then, uh, you know the reality
of a woman's looking in a mirror and not being

(37:49):
happy with yourself is is hard. It's hard for that.
It's hard for that to be changed by the power
of like a magazine article that says you have to
feel good about yourself. So, I mean, there were a
billion diets over the years. There still are, you know,
that promise all kinds of things. It's hard to not
be seduced by those. It's hard for women to not
it's hard for women to pick up any magazine where

(38:11):
the cover says, you know, we're all beautiful the way
we are, and then inside his twenty articles on how
to you know, loose twenty pounds by by Memorial Day weekend.
And it's so complicated right now to be a woman
and to know how good you're supposed to feel about yourself.
And yet too, you know kind of um experience that

(38:33):
you know, the true pressure and the world pressure to
look and be a certain way. Who is Kathy changing
or like trying to change her body for? Ultimately do
you think, well, there's a good question. Ah, I don't know,

(38:54):
it seems I don't know. I mean, it seems I
assume in the beginning of the trip, you would think
that Kathy changing it to be more lovable, and then
towards the end of this trip, I would think that
Kathy just wanted to not you know, being to be
happier with how she looked at herself in the mirror.
I would think it was not so much about being
loved by somebody else. It was more about not being

(39:17):
discussed by herself. Sure, you know just what you just said,
what you just said that, um that self consciousness is
a very lonely place. It was lonely when I was young,
and it's I think it's a lot lonelier. It's even
lonelier now now that everybody is so self expressed and
so empowered to be who they are, it seems like

(39:40):
it's less even even lately, I saw on Instagram that
was kind of a new wave of kind of being vulnerable,
in the power of being vulnerable. And but then, you know,
in my time, I would have looked at those and gone, well,
they're not being vulnerable in the way I feel vulnerable.
You know, there still is a lonely There's is a

(40:00):
great loneliness to that, and I think right now because
it's I think less less okay to admit that you, um,
don't you know, maybe feel good about yourself or your
own sure about this, or your feel inadequate or I
feel insecure. It's that's okay to admit it out loud.

(40:21):
So it's kind of even with all this this universal
women supporting other women, it's it's still, you know, it's
still like at the end of the day, is so
so you're looking in the mirror and going, you know how,
you know, so where am I? And what did I
do today? And you know, do I measure up? And

(40:41):
did I blow up? Self consciousness is a very lonely place.
Could very well be the subtitle for this comic strip.
And I think it's particularly interesting how Kathy Guisswide's body
was also constantly commented on whenever she would do an interview,
whether she was actually appearing on screen or not. I

(41:03):
recently spoke with Drew's on dan Ella Standard, a researcher
who worked on Marissa Metzer's book This Is Big, a
history of weight watchers and spot on criticism of how
predatory diet culture continues to mutate and evolve, and we
spoke about where the Cathy Comics fell on this spectrum.
Here's a little bit of our conversation. It moves forward

(41:27):
in time and you can see there's a very specific
line that's you know, followed from you know, someone's you know,
Silent Generation mom being on like a cigarette diet. And
you know Lurd was one to like the weight Watchers
at Work program, which is what you know Cathy was
licensed for. And it's so interesting, like to learn more

(41:49):
about that. I mean, obviously the history of weight Watchers
is like a whole thing when you talk about it
and you start going down that path unraveling that. I mean,
we all are caught up in what we're told about
our bodies, their entire lives. We're told that, you know,
it's a it's a lifestyle and not a diet, and
I think, you know, it makes you feel like you're

(42:10):
going crazy at a certain point because you know, like
you know that there's a separation there and like it
doesn't necessarily make sense. So Cathy is interviewed in this
Weight Watchers magazine, um, and she says a couple of
things that I think we're like really interesting because I
do feel disconnect there, right, she said, weight Watchers gave
me a foundation for living in a world filled with

(42:32):
food and talks about you know how she's really proud
of weight Watchers in the work that they do, and
she did a couple um specific kind of motivational posters
and cartoons for weight Watchers and one of them, you know,
it's caffe at Work because it was the Weight Watchers
at Work program. And I can't, by the way, I
think of anything like more humiliating than being laid in
front of my coworkers, I know, like so straight yeah,

(42:58):
but like Happy in this car team is saying, I
will not think about being on a diet. I am
not on a diet. I'm on a new food program
for life. So when you're framing it that way, and
like when we think about you know, Oprah's partnership with
w W, it's like, well, she's talking about a lifestyle change,
and it's never a life. It's not a lifestyle. I mean,
like you can't count points for the rest of your existence, right,

(43:21):
and and it doesn't quite make sense, but I try,
Like in my heart of hearts, I'm always trying to
give happy and you know, the real happy, like you know,
the I don't know some space in my heart to
understand that, like they're on their own journey. What have
the change has been in how we're trained to see

(43:42):
their bodies. A portion of my professional life is brand
strategy and specifically like the background of food UM and marketing.
And it's a repackaging, you know. And it's not as
simple as that, obviously, because I think, especially in the
last few years, like that attitude has changed more than

(44:02):
it has in a very long time. UM. But when
you look at the way that people talk about UM,
dieting in like the older books that I have, when
you talk when they talk about aging, when they talk
about you know, any kind of like health and wellness,
beauty situation, UM, you can see how that language has
changed over time. But it's still selling the same thing, right.

(44:25):
And you know, I think in this interview, I keep
going back to the Westsnitz the same thing because it
was so interesting for me to actually hear Kathy speak
about herself and you know, she talks about weight being
central to every woman's existence UM, and that's very true.
Like that's the truth that hasn't changed, UM, And the
way that we talk about it has changed a bit. UM.

(44:48):
But when we're talking about, you know, even now, like
when we're talking about wellness culture and self care culture,
it's diet culture and re packaged and resold to us.
Like we know we're not like licking foil at yogurt
and lives anymore. And you know, buying I hope not,

(45:10):
I know, you know, like buying all kinds of weird
like we've had like diet foods, like you know, microwaving
sadly in cuisines or whatever. But like maybe some people are,
and good for them. That's their choice, right, it's their body.
But um, you know we're talking about wellness in a
different way. Um, but it's very much the same as

(45:30):
you know, the older books I have on you know,
beauty of It's it's an it's an awkward thing to
realize that too, right, because we like to think, we
like to go back and look at our formerselves or
go back to older generations and say like ha ha ha,
you know they were so dumb then, like I can't
believe that, you know, you would suggest that someone would

(45:51):
smoke a cigarette instead of you know, having breakfast whatever.
But then you look at things like and then and
I'm not critical of anyone that makes these Choy says,
but you look at things like interminute fasting, right, and
that's just a choice not to eat at certain times
of your day. And we've been telling people to do
that for a long time. Yeah, it's just being resold

(46:14):
to us in a different way. But that's why I think,
you know that research is so important too, because it's
important to understand how we've talked about our bodies for
however many years, and how food is tied to that
and how we treat food. Because if you don't have
you know, if you don't have a perspective on that, um,
it's hard to confront anything you know that you're going

(46:34):
through on your own, or look critically at, you know,
the media, like the world around you. Please check out
drews onto ella standards work. It is incredible. I was

(46:59):
also key to speak to Rachel sime, a New Yorker
writer who wrote one of the best pieces on Kathy
guys White ever. It's a twenty nineteen piece from New
York Magazine called The Feminist Paradox of Kathy Guys White,
and was released during the press cycle for guys White's
memoir Fifty Things That Aren't My fault for the interview.

(47:20):
Rachel sim went to Guys White's Los Angeles home. The
two of them played a game of chicken on whether
either of them would eat any of the cookies on
the table. Neither Diad and sim echoes. Juliette cons wish
to reconsider the bad faith criticism made about guys White's
work back in the day. I got to catch up
with Rachel recently and ask her where Kathy comics fall

(47:42):
in our understanding of the relationship between Kathy, the American
middle class, and failure. Here's our conversation. One of the
things that I think is a real disservice to her,
which I know you've gotten into, is this idea that
like this external creation she made for the comic, this satire,

(48:02):
this avatar upon which she could project all her anxieties,
became a stand in for her right and her totality,
and that's her creation, Like Kathy is her little impish
avatar that she made for so she could launder all
these issues and like figure them out and work through them,

(48:23):
as opposed to it being like this is my autobiography.
I don't know. I think that that distinction was really
stark to me. When I met her, because she's so
funny and she's so charming, and you get the sense
of what she was like one of Johnny Carson's favorite guests, right,
And people always forget that part of Kathy's life where
she was, you know, had a public life. She was
very charming and full of charisma and all this stuff

(48:45):
versus like everyone wants to think she's like sitting at
home in sweatpants, like deciding whether or not she should
eat the chocolate. Right, That's that's not an accurate representation
of her. At the same time, she was never Philis Diller.
She was never out there like yep in it up
and given it back to the boys. I think that
she had a very sort of interesting place that her
comedy was coming from, which was like it was a

(49:07):
comedy of insecurity, anxiety and questions about being a woman,
and especially for her time, those questions which are just
so clearly addressed in today's comedy, I mean, could be
even more. But is so, you know, is like much
more to the forefront. I mean, at that time, I
think it was pretty radical and people didn't really know
what to do with it. For Kathy, at least, it

(49:28):
felt like her work was interpreted so literally by people
as and in a way that you would never assume
that any other comic would be interpreted so literally, and
so went to one and it almost like, I mean,
the closest thing I can think of maybe is like
Larry David or something where he's made this like creation

(49:50):
out of his anxiety. And then everyone's like, that must
be Larry David. I've never met Larry. I have no
idea what he's really like, but I think maybe there's
that amount of project sin and maybe the closest thing
I'm thinking of, you know, certainly Kathy has changed in
my estimation so many times, you know, flip flopped and
oh I'm angry with it and I'm wrestling with it,

(50:11):
and then I'm so astonished by what she was able
to do, especially being you know, one of the only
women cartoonists to ever get a nationally syndicated cartoon and
completely made it and if Man's World for what that's worth,
and also she was a mogul and an entrepreneur, and
she was incredibly successful, and she made a lot of

(50:32):
women feel seen. I mean, at the end of the day,
that was what was so astonishing to me. I mean,
she has an entire room of fan mail rights. She
has letters from women saying, this is me, you make
me laugh. I look forward to your strip every time
I opened paper. This is me right, and there's you
can't take that away from her at all. Intergenerationally, a

(50:54):
lot of people don't have enough context or appreciation for
how hard it was for them, for what they went through,
For everything Kathy did to even get her own comic strip.
How she had a hide in the bathroom of her
ad agency on low woman in the hierarchy there, and
she you know, I didn't want anyone to know she
was doing this sort of strip about not being able

(51:14):
to get a boyfriend. On the side she got men
would judge her. She's crying in the bathroom stall and
all of these things that, like, you know, she broke
a lot of ground. She made a lot of things happen.
She was the first person to do a lot of things.
So we need to appreciate that. I think the conversation
I had with her was one of the more enlightening,
like intergenerational conversations I'd had. And she's so funny. You know,

(51:34):
if you don't already follow Rachel Sime's work, I strongly
encourage you to do so. She currently worked for The
New Yorker really anything in her catalog, and I buried
the lead a bit there because Rachel's experience going to
Kathy's house closely mirrored one that I had not too
long ago. Shortly before this show began to air, Kathy

(51:55):
guys White invited me to her house. It's a really
cool house. It's got two floors in this huge yard
in Los Angeles. Definitely a house that's out of reach
for the average person, but not so big that it
feels ghost or like the person who lives there thinks
that they're better than you. That's the kind of house
that you would get if you were doing well for

(52:16):
yourself during the Clinton administration, I guess. And that's where
I meet Kathy guys White in person for the first time,
and she was exactly the person I was hoping she
would be, apologizing for her dog barking from another room,
offering my boyfriend and I water, and very graciously accepting
the ugly grocery store flowers I brought that I could
have soren were tasteful and cheek when I got them,

(52:39):
but I realized about two blocks away from her house,
that they were ugly and desperate and would ruin everyone's
lives who saw them. So he stood in her foy
for a while and talked, but it felt awkward. We
sat outside for a while, but it was too hot,
and I was just really, really nervous to meet her
after spending this month time with her work and felt
the most embarrassing elements of my own personality come out,

(53:02):
which I think is anxiety from a sincere feeling. I
can't tell what she thinks about me, because I don't
naturally have the personality that matches who I am when
I'm preparing, like I am for you right now, like
I am six feet tall, but people regularly describe me
as five eight, which I think speaks to the energy
A bring to a room. And Kathy isn't the person

(53:22):
from the Johnny Carson interviews either. She's so kind and
funny and accommodating during our visit, but that polish that
comes with a well created late night appearance isn't there
in real life, of course. So instead of choosing a
third location to sit, she decides to show us around,
and in my opinion, there's like just enough Kathy stuff
in most of the house, not so much that it's

(53:44):
like we get it, but not little enough that it
seems like she's distancing herself from her most famous work.
What there's most of is other people's art and photos
of her family, her parents, as young people, as old people,
her sister's, her daughter, some of her HER's bedroom is
in the middle of getting moved out because her daughter
is getting married this fall, and it seems to be

(54:05):
kind of the ceremonial thing that you do when you're
getting married. A lot of the art she has hung
our original works from her peers that were gifted or
doodled for her through the years. There's original for Better
or for Worses by Lynne Johnston. There's original Charles Schultz Snoopyes,
there's a drawing of the Ziggy character looking at Kathy
sadly and she's saying it would never work. Ziggy were

(54:27):
from different comics. In her office, there are folios with
every Kathy comic organized in chronological order from seventy six
to two thousand ten. Her awards are in there, to
her Emmy, her Ruben, which is the highest award in
comic strips. She shows us her studio where she drew
new Kathy comics during the pandemic lockdown, andrew some of

(54:48):
the most popular Kathy comics ever in the nineties and
the two thousand's. There's a window that looks right down
to her yard. There's a large white lettered sign that
says AC but it's the same color white as the wall,
not too flashy. She's framed this hand drawn map near
her art supplies. It's a map that's covered in these
little tinfoil stars marking different places. I asked her what

(55:12):
the stars are marking, and she says that these are
the places where her comic strip ran on its very
first day in nine when she was twenty six years old.
The map had been carefully drawn and made by her
parents and given to her while she was still working
her advertising job in Michigan, not sure that this comic
thing would become a full time gig. There's not a

(55:34):
ton of stars on the map, but the comic would
go on to run in thousands of papers. And I
think about that and how impressive that is, and then
I think about how great it would be to get
a map like that from someone who had infinite faith
in you. We go back downstairs and I kind of
resist the urge to ask if I can look at
the comics that are framed in her bathroom, which I

(55:55):
regret that convinced myself that that's like where the good
stuff is. And she asks me if I want to
see the shrine room, and yeah, I want to see
the shrine room. So we go to the shrine room.
It's a small, extremely organized, but also absurdly cluttered room

(56:15):
full of the good stuff, and by that I mean
more Kathy merchandise than I could ever possibly conceive of.
She lets me take pictures of this room. There's this
gigantic and I mean gigantic, stuffed Kathy doll from Nemon
Marcus display. There's every published collection of Kathy comics. There's

(56:36):
all the merchandise that I remember from the past, the
Kathy t shirts, aprons, mugs, tote bags, beach towels, Christmas
tree ornaments, pins, a framed photograph of Kathy in front
of the Kathy ice cream stand at the Universal Aisles
of Adventure in Orlando, picture frames, rag dolls, greeting cards,
every novelty item you could imagine covered in acts in

(57:00):
gym clothes and Kathy and irving Kathy with her face
in a dinner plate Charlene talking about how secretaries aren't
paid enough, the Kathy character smiling knowingly as a phrase
goes up and down the sleeve of They're the Straps.
The Shrine Room is a shrine to this part of
her life. It's both a shrine to Kathy's work and

(57:20):
to the merchandizing business she worked so hard to build.
If you weren't around for Kathy Mania, people loved this ship,
and women in particular bought it for their friends and
siblings and themselves. I love the Shrine Room. Kathy very
kindly offers to let me take a picture with her
and the gigantic Kathy doll. And Kathy brings us over

(57:40):
to her living room table for the reason that I've
technically come to see her, and that's to get a
copy of her Emmy's acceptance speech, which wasn't available online anywhere.
But we keep talking after she gives me the DVD,
which I will later learn has individual chapters on it
with all of her public appearances. The talk shows a
ganted Kathy balloon at a national parade, footage of Kathy

(58:04):
speaking with girl scouts, not wanting me to think that
she's an egomaniac. She tells me that her dad had
this DVD put together in the two thousand's. She says
he wasn't very good with technologies and guesses that he
brought a stack of home videos to a video store
in Florida. Her mom continues to live in Florida, now
a healthy, fit years old. Kathy also asked me about myself,

(58:28):
how my boyfriend and I met. She tells me about
the work of mine that she's seen and tells me
what she was doing when she was my age, which
was making the Kathy comic and not feeling great about herself.
I'm my age right now and I'm making podcasts, and
I don't feel great about myself. She asks me a
couple of times, with genuine curiousness, why I'm making this show,

(58:51):
And I don't really have an articulate answer for her
in the moment, I didn't really think that I would,
but I'm still annoyed with myself that I can't do it.
I tell her I know that her work is important
to me, and that it makes me laugh and it
helps me see the world that it existed in very clearly,
that I liked seeing a character who tried really hard

(59:12):
and often failed, but was still deemed to be important
enough to be in the newspaper every day. I tell
her that my mom and a lot of people like
my mom enjoyed it, and so I want to understand it.
Cathy levels with me and says that she thought I
was going to make a show making fun of her
work or punching down at it, because that had been
her experience with, for lack of a better phrase, people

(59:33):
like me. And I've got a little bias here because
I really like Kathy. She loves her family, her home,
her dog, and planning a wedding for her kid. To me,
her career is thoughtful and made to commiserate with people
who felt the same way that she did, and it
worked really well. I mean so well that I'm sending
in a house with a shrine room because of it.

(59:55):
But as we're talking, she does acknowledge these lingering insecurities
she has. She tells me that feminists don't like her
work and seems a little disappointed. She thinks the reason
this is is that the Kathy character is too sad,
too pathetic, and I tell her that I don't think
that that's true. At all anymore, and that getting to
witness a character who you see a little bit of

(01:00:16):
yourself and fail feels a little good and a little bad,
and that people have no less need for commiseration than
they did. Then I bring up Rachel Sime's piece. I
bring up Juliette Cohn's piece younger feminists who also see
what Kathy was trying to do. Kathy thanks me, but
I don't know if she buys it, which is too
bad because I really meant it and I still do.

(01:00:38):
After a couple of hours, we leave because Kathy's daughter
and fiance are coming by to learn how to dance
at their own wedding. This afternoon, Isaac and I go
and get fries at in and out and talk about
her yard in the map with all the stars on it,
and the shrine room and everything we had a conversation about.
This is one of my first times visiting someone fully vaccinated,

(01:00:59):
and I will never forget that afternoon. It was the best,
and it made me feel completely confident that spending the
next couple of months making this show was the right
thing to do. So I go home and watch the
Emmy speech on my boyfriend's PS four I played some
of this speech for you in our second episode, but
I didn't play the full thing. And there's a funny

(01:01:19):
story that Kathy told us about it at her dining
room table. This was the Emmy's that took place in
and Kathy brought a date who she later decided she
didn't like because he was an asshole my words, not hers,
and they ended up trading their seats at the Emmy's
with some friends. So when Kathy's name was called as
the winner of the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program, it

(01:01:41):
cuts to a shot of random people, her friends, not her,
But eventually the camera finds her and she's wearing this
beautiful black dress and she's standing beside her male colleagues.
And Kathy blushes at the idea of doing this when
she talks to me, but as she's on stage in
Night eight, she doesn't let the men next to her

(01:02:02):
speak for the entire time that they're there. I'm assuming
they would thank their family and co workers and maybe God,
if that's their thing, but we'll never know, because on
this day, Kathy guys White took up every second and
every inch there was to celebrate this accomplishment and to
think the people who she felt were responsible for it.

(01:02:23):
So here's that speech in full. When I started the
comic strip, Kathy, I was sure that I was the
only woman in the world who came home from a
day in my brilliant career and stood in the kitchen
squirting ready whipped whip topping directly into my mouth. I

(01:02:47):
was sure that I was the only professional, enlightened, professional
businessperson who balanced my checkbook by switching banks and starting
all over every six months, or or who coped with
relationship problems by eating a cheesecake. I'm first grateful to

(01:03:07):
my parents, not only for encouraging me to believe that
I was not the only one, but for forcing me
to send the humiliating moments of my own life to
Universal Press Indicate for publication. I'm grateful to Universal Press Indicate,
especially John McNeil, Jim and Cathy, andrews Lee s Salem
and Tom Drape for their great support. I'd like to

(01:03:29):
thank Fred Rappaport and Kim La Masters of CBS for
taking one of the first chances on primetime animation for adults.
I'd like to say a special thanks to my sisters
Marianne and Mickey who are not only my best editors,
but the whole foundation of my sense of humor. On
behalf of the great animators we worked with, the producers,

(01:03:51):
the voices, and all the supporters of Kathy who are
sitting at home tonight destroying their diets while they watched
the Emmys. Thank you all for this wonderful vote of confidence.
We will really treasure it. Thank you Kathy. Thanks everyone
here who elevated her work to what it was. Her

(01:04:14):
parents who made maps with little stars on them, her sisters,
the people who had taken a chance on her, and
most importantly, her audience, mostly women who were struggling with
themselves in the same way that her character was. She
made work for women who experienced insecurities, who tried and
who failed, not to propose a radical solution, but to

(01:04:38):
reassure them that they weren't alone, the way that a
lot of really good art assures people that they're not alone,
whether in their fears or their pettiness, or their insecurity
or their triumphs. Each year in the Kathy comic, the
character would make a new Year's resolution to lose weight,
to eat better, to find someone, to stop smoking, to

(01:04:58):
be better, and every year, she basically stayed herself. There
were some people in her life that thought that was enough.
Your mom's, your dad's. There were some people who wanted
her to be the person she was told to be
because that was also who they were trying to be.
Your Andrea's, your Charlene's. And then there were people for
whom she would never be enough. The Caathy character's failures

(01:05:20):
turned her into a legend, and she stayed one for
fans who saw their own struggles in hers. And it's
in this character's intense effort and repeated failure that I
think Cathy strips really transcend and become something special because
to some extent, she is one of the ultimate hashtag
relatable characters, which is a convention that often makes critics

(01:05:43):
who cannot hashtag relate cringe. But Cathy's failures are invaluable.
Knowing the ways that she struggled and failed, the issues
that she harps on and the ones that she seems
completely unaware of, and what her definition of success us
say more than a simple victory and four panels ever

(01:06:04):
could have. I'm rooting for her. Hey, oh my gosh,
my Cathy, sleep paralysis demon, Where have you been? I've
been recording for like an hour. I was just looking
through some old stuff You've never brought me Cathy comics before.
What are these? O? Let's read this one. This is
four panels of Cathy talking straight to the reader. I

(01:06:28):
reject you, I reject all of you. In the second panel,
she sits in front of a desk sign that says attitude,
and the next one she peers above the panel feral angry.
She shouts, my ego will never again be squashed by
one of you miserable tourniquets, and nothing anyone can say
we'll change it. In the final panel, she's celebrating I

(01:06:52):
am loved. You don't matter to me anymore. I really
liked that. One oh one or one more, Cathy, the
show is over already, told my closing personal anecdote. That's
how this ship works. Just one more, okay, but it's
a kind of the rule to end your show right

(01:07:12):
after the little personal anecdote. One more, It's just two panels.
Cathy's on the phone holding a diet soda. I have
unshakable dreams, unwavering routines, and an increasingly picky view of
the world which lets me feel sorry for myself as
an unappreciated goddess while simultaneously rejecting all who come my
way as unworthy. That one rules, I like that one.

(01:07:38):
Is the show done? Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean
I don't have another sleep paralysis demon waiting in the wings.
If that's what you're asking me, I wasn't asking anything.
I just no, seriously, stick around hunt my dreams. Neither
of us will ever know peace anyways, right at Yeah,

(01:08:01):
you have now been ac pilled. It is a process
that cannot be reversed. Unfortunately, no one can be told
who Cathy truly is. You have to see her for yourself.
I'm trying to free your mind, listener, but I can
only show you the context. You're the one that has
to interpret it. Thanks for listening. Everybody at Cast is

(01:08:23):
an I Heeart radio production. It is written, researched, and
hosted by me Jamie Loftus. Thank you so much to
the team who worked on this show. Sophie Lichtreman is
the producer, Isaac Taylor is the editor, Zoe Blade is
the composer, and Brandon Dickert wrote the slapper of a
theme song. I also want to shout out the amazing
voice cast of this show. Jackie Michelle Johnson killed it

(01:08:46):
as Cathy, Melissa Lozada Aliva was my first choice for Andrea,
Maggie Mayfish ruled as Charlene, and Miles Gray as always
Blew Me Away as Mr Pinkley and Irving. We also
heard performances from my best friend in the world, Julia
Air as Kathy guys White and from my parents. Huge
thanks to Kathy guys White for being so supportive of

(01:09:07):
this show as I was working on it, and thank
you for listening to it. I'll be back later with
a different show about something else. Bye. She burst into
the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what, She's
out on dates and she don't like politics. From Mama

(01:09:29):
and Urban to with feminist friends. She's fighting all the
stands it with some chocolate and hand Kathy. She's fighting
back to stressed with success. Let's come her some slack, Oh, Kathy,
My Cathy fan Cathy. She is who she is. There's
no denying that she's up doing nag, living enemies world.

(01:09:54):
But speaking of mind, ain't no ways time cathein she
you and me. She wants to be seen just living
the dream of Kathy. My God, this week got there.
She's got a lot go in all. She's light to find,

(01:10:24):
says Liston, goes at you believe, I feel like you
would less, but look at you would bess why should
he a patriarchy? It commels to me, chocolate border. She's

(01:10:47):
fu to find stand cas she knows to be to make.
Didn't just gone on the stand losing to leave, feel

(01:11:07):
like you will please for at the Ruggy became with. Indeed,
just let