Betty and Veronica: A  Competitive Female Friendship

Comic books used to be for guys. There were superhero comics, military comics, and spy comics, based on TV shows.  With the exception of R. Crumb and an omnibus edition of Cathy, the last comic book I read was The Six-Million-Dollar Man, based on a TV show about an invincible man rebuilt from robotic parts. I read it for a paper I was writing on the Prometheus myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and pop culture.

My studies of pop culture lay in the future.  The pick of the comic books for girls was  Betty and Veronica. I would read almost anything:  (a) Nancy Drew, (b) Little Women, and (c), The World Book Encyclopedia.   But what doesn’t fit with the others? Betty and Veronica, a spin-off from the Archie comics, first published in 1950.  

Betty and Veronica were among the few female protagonists of comic books. As role models, however, I am sure they were failures. I can imagine mothers banning Betty and Veronica, because they reinforce sexual stereotypes of boy-crazy girls, yadda, yadda, yadda,.  And in the old comics, the girls’ friendship was twisted, but that made it exciting, because we were always on Betty’s side.   Veronica, a spoiled, rich, malevolent brunette competes with her “friend,” blond, ponytailed, nice Betty. for dates with Archie.  Here is Leslie Fiedler’s literary trope, “dark lady, light lady.” For some reason Betty’s hair is green on the internet, but that was not the case on the printed page!

I never got the thing about Archie.  He’s a nice, freckled, red-haired boy with the sex appeal of a flying squirrel.  But dating is what girls do in Archie’s world. And there’s not much to choose from in Riverdale. 

Jughead, Archie’s nerdy best friend, is funny, so he might be my pick; but Reggie is a devious male version of Veronica, with less personality; and Moose is big and dumb.  As for the girls, Veronica has advantages in terms of clothing and travel, but Betty is nice and normal, and very smart, at least in her latest incarnation. It’s pretty much a tie between them as far as Archie is concerned.

Betty and Veronica used to be funnier. I suspect that the humor has been watered down for reasons of political correctness.  Veronica is no longer the treacherous vamp, though she is still malicious, and Betty is brainier than I remembered, at the top of the honor roll. The episode I enjoyed the most in a 1990 comic book (see frame at top of post ) shows Betty struggling to open the locker for a fragile guy named Dilton, and his unabridged dictionary falls on her head.  This gives Betty ESP! 

In another less inspired episode, Veronica is allowed to run her dad’s business empire for the day. Much to everyone’s surprise, Veronica wears a man’s business suit in order to be ironic, saucy, and fashionable.  But everybody mistakes her for a man. Some young boys call out, “Betty has a boyfriend!” In this strange episode, super-feminine Veronica for the first time is not deemed feminine. The next day she traipses down the stairs of her mansion in a negligee.

I cannot pretend these make good reading, but once upon a time… and I suppose someone still reads them.

Tea Tastes Better in Porcelain

“Tea tastes better in porcelain.”

That was my declaration when I returned from a vacation with two charming porcelain mugs bearing the slogan TIME FOR TEA inside.

On my last day in London I had planned to visit the Royal Academy of Arts.  In the RA courtyard a couple of elderly gentlemen sat with their newspapers, waiting for the museum to open, I thought.  But it turned out they were not:  the museum was closed on Monday.  Perhaps the gentlemen had the right idea:  you soak up the atmosphere of the courtyard and it’s almost as good as being in the museum.

Since the museum was closed, I decided to visit the delightful shops in the area.  There are two bookshops, and there is also the enchanting Fortnum and Mason.  On the first floor of Fortnum and Mason’s there are shelves and shelves of bags and loose tea.  There is also a counter where you can get elegant candy, Marzipan,  and petit fours, which they put into elegant little boxes.  It’s not a paper bag kind of place.

I was in a teacup kind of mood so I climbed to the second floor.  where there are tables and tables of beautiful china sets.  Really so beautiful I could hardly choose.  I would have loved a teapot, but it is not practical to transport a teapot in a suitcase.  I decided on two understated but elegant “alphabet” mugs with our initials.  And the polite, charming employees were more like artistes than shop clerks.  Their training involves tying a beautiful ribbon with a bow. “It took me a month to learn this,” the younger of the two employees chirped.  No wonder the package was a work of art, as elegant as the cups, and even if the box had been empty it would have made a lovely gift.

I have enjoyed my mugs for several months, but tonight my husband brought bad news.  “One of the cups cracked.”

“Oh, don’t worry.  We’re not set up for porcelain here.”

And really we’re not.  We are always breaking plates and cups while washing the dishes in the sink.  Perhaps there are fewer mishaps in a dishwasher.  We don’t have one.

And I still have one porcelain mug left, after all.

You can, by the way, order from the Fortnum and Mason website. But if you have a chance to visit the elegant store, do go. Avoid it on the weekends. It’s RIDICULOUSLY crowded then!

To Wash or Not to Wash:  The Politics of Bathing

In the 1970s I had a glorious bathing ritual.  Every day I immersed myself for half an hour in the tub, enhancing the luxury with a shot of Mr. Bubble or Vitabath, and reading a paperback.  I washed with a “natural” sponge, but disdained the loofah, which was rather  like a Roman bath tool that uncomfortably scraped the oil  off.  May I just say, Ouch!

 I also invested in a plethora of shampoos.  Shampoo was my  hobby.  In fact, our bathroom was too tiny for my collection of shampoo so I stored it in the chifforobe.   There was Herbal Essence,  Breck, Prell, Lemon Up, Redken, Pantene, and countless others I have forgotten.

But while we women were getting super-clean, the times they were a’ changin’ for men.  Several of my men friends were washing less. Truthfully, they were not washing enough.  I suppose people would call them “hippies” now, but that was a label nobody used.  Some people of that persuasion called themselves freaks.  There were some VERY handsome freaks.  Even if they didn’t wash enough, we trailed happily in their funky cloud of armpit odor, because we knew it was a privilege to be seen in public with such beautiful men!

I understood where they were coming from (that’s the ungrammatical way we talked) with their sparse bathing.  Soon I had read Dune, The Environmntal Handbook, and a variety of underground papers,  not to mention my favorite book about the simple life, Thoreau’s Walden.  There was a politics of not bathing.  I wanted to conserve water.  I really did.  I wanted to lessen pollution.  The daily bath became shallower and a little less bubbly, but I couldn’t give it up.

It probably balanced out: my daily bathing and others’ near abstinence.  A  friend who regarded bathing as bourgeois “crashed” at our apartment when he was passing through town.  He was handsome, smart, and witty, but he stank. I mean really stank.  He said he only took a bath once a month. As for his jeans, they seemed never to have been washed.   I was awestruck by this god who didn’t follow the rules of hygiene  But, really, couldn’t he have conformed just a tiny bit more? 

After all, he could have used my bubble bath and shampoo!   

Night Owls & Notebooks

It’s 6 a.m. You got four hours of sleep. You were up late writing, and the work was pointless. As you comb your hair, you wonder, Where is my energy? Where is my pep?

I envy people who get up and are instantly awake.  No pushing the SNOOZE button again and again and again. A friend used to rise at 5 a.m. (“That’s before the sun!” I said, incredulous) and bike around her upscale suburb before her family got up. 

How, I demanded, could she perform this feat without coffee?  I have always needed coffee. A travel mug of coffee accompanies me everywhere. Years ago I snuck the forbidden brew into my classroom. We were told not to drink coffee in while we taught because we had to be good role models for our students. Since coffee was not illegal, I paid little attention to this rule. Okay, I paid no attention to this rule. Coffee is not a drug.

But it doesn’t matter whether you’re a morning person or a night owl. 

It’s all part of being human.

Notebooks vs. Electronics

If I’m stressed about my schedule, I write down EVERY DETAIL in my planner.

And then I hear the call of electronics.

Do not succumb. It is best to avoid screens early in the day. You do not need Meta or X or Google to lure you down a rabbit hole when you’re frazzled and half asleep.  

A popular alternative to screens is writing free-form in your journal. For years people have read books on journaling and taught journaling, and I like the idea of letting the writing flow, of not knowing what you’re going to say until it appears on the page.

So write your lovely journal. Try to be upbeat in the morning. I am not a positive thinker, but it doesn’t hurt to be positive in the MORNING journal. It’s a different matter in your AFTERNOON or EVENING journal. Then you can embrace negativity!.  They begin as thick green leaves which soon flatten and vanish, only to bloom as beautiful pink lilies in late July or early August. 

Postscript: Might as well drink coffee while you scribble in your journal and look at flowers. I’m just saying…

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A person reading a book Description automatically generatedAuthor KatPosted on April 16, 2024Categories Uncategorized Edit “Night Owls & Notebooks”

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