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Several years ago, a male friend on whom I happened to have a huge crush looked at my 20 extra pounds, glasses, long hair -- and if we're being honest, mild yet incredibly consistent neuroses -- and said, "Hey, you know who you remind me of? Cathy. You know. From the comic strip. If I really wanted to get on your nerves I guess I could just call you Cathy."
Served.
"I AM NOT CATHY-LIKE," I said, all Cathy-like. "I am...not. ACK!"
I didn't really say "Ack!"
Except I was Cathy-like, kind of, down to the fact that I was hanging with a guy who would tell me I was and expect me to get a huge laugh out of it. Besides the (very vague, seriously) physical resemblance and the occasional twitchiness, I was all about my dog, my mom was often all up in my business, I was the long-suffering workplace standby, and I specialized in men with annoyingly vague concepts of commitment.
I was five years old when Cathy came to be, and it turns out that 2010 is the year where my life goes on and hers (the virtual one anyway) comes to a natural end. After 34 years of swimsuit neurosis, overbearing mom moments, long-suffering Irving-tolerance and a lot of chocolate, Cathy the comic strip everywoman -- via her creator and alter ego Cathy Guisewite -- is calling it a day.
Oh, and I forgot to mention shout-outs from Tina Fey on 30 Rock (Chocolate! ACK!) and Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live. (Cathy gets dumped again! ACK!)
Guisewite announced this week that Cathy's chocolate-covered swan song is slated for October 3 in all of the newspapers in which she is syndicated. The artist's "creative biological clock" is ticking, she says, and she wants to move on to other things. She also wants to spend more time with her 18-year-old daughter, and, I'd guess, see what life is like outside of Cathy's swimsuit dressing room.
I was a dedicated Cathy reader for a long time, but I admit that I've lost track of her in the years since she hooked back up with Irving, her off-and-on boyfriend of almost 30 years in comic book time, and married him in 2005. I had to check back in today to see if they'd had kids (they hadn't) and if the dogs, Vivian and Electra, were still okay. (They are.) Cathy Guisewite took some flak for marrying off one of the most well-known single ladies in pop culture when she and Irving made it official, but as much as that may have been rough for longtime readers to take, she said it was time.
Whatever. Cathy got her man, and what the strip may have lost in tension, she was none the worse for wear. Guisewite said the decision to end the strip was "excruciating," after decades of what she said was the very best part -- connecting with women. She has also gotten some backlash for supposedly reducing women to worries about weight and men and work, but honestly? A lot of women do worry about these things, and not in a vacuum. Life, family, jobs and relationships go on. We keep moving.
It's hard to say what the next month and a half will hold for Cathy, her family and extended group of friends and co-workers. Guisewite has long said that Cathy the character is somewhat autobiographical, so I'm sure she has a vision in mind of how she'd like to send her off.
And like it or not, she's been around a long time. Seems to me she deserves a sweetly neurotic departure, if we're staying true to type. At the very least, I hope she gives up t.v. dinners entirely, as I did long ago. We ladies in our prime deserve some real food, and the final realization that sometimes chocolate -- ACK!!! -- is a useful food group we need.
So make fun of her sweaters or call her the crazy dog lady who didn't exactly smash stereotypes or go for sweeping change, who was nagged by a mother who loved her and kept the peace more often than not. She's an aspect of personality and life choices for many of us -- not the whole shebang, by any means, just the workaday part that keeps getting up and doing it all over again, sometimes with a sigh, especially when it's time to try on bathing suits. I wear better sweaters
