Let’s cut to the chase: You love Cassandra Cat, everyone’s favorite alluring, sinister woman of mystery from Slylock Fox. Whether she’s sneaking into a movie theater, starting a media circus on false pretenses, plotting to rob public libraries, getting tied up, or luring Max Mouse to his demise, she does what she does with grace, aplomb, and style that will make your heart go pitter-patter. You want her any way you can get her, and since she’s actually a cartoon character, the only way you can get her is on a t-shirt or other product of some sort. Well, now you can buy just those sorts of items at the Comics Curmudgeon store at CafePress!

“But wait, Josh,” I hear you saying. “Your parodies are all well and good, but you can’t just reproduce a copyrighted character on one of your products. That would violate the intellectual property rights of Slylock Fox creator Bob Weber, Jr.!” That’s absolutely true. That’s why these merch items are sporting a logo designed especially for the purchasing pleasure of Comics Curmudgeon readers by Mr. Weber himself!

Did I just blow your mind? If I didn’t, the logo itself surely will:

Do I need to push this any more? I think not. Buy some Cassandra merch already! You know you want to. As usual, I’ve put up some starter items, including the more popular types of t-shirts and, naturally, underwear, but you can email me if you’d like me to Cassandra-ize something else.

UPDATE: Uh, as noted, there’s a typo in Cassandra’s name on the shirt graphic. Those of you who care about minutia like spelling will want to hold off on those purchases until I get an updated version from Mr. Weber…

UPDATE II: Fixed graphic to come within the hour; I’ll let you all know when it’s fixed.

UPDATE III: OK, as you can see above, the typo has been fixed, both here and in the store. I think that those of you who have already ordered will get the corrected version, because your orders haven’t actually gone to production yet. But if you do get the d-less version, feel free to auction it off on eBay for three times what you paid for it.

As it happens, two of my favorite cartoonist’s are Roz Chast and William Steig. Here we find them together for — as far as I know — the first time. (And what a team!) I lifted this piece from the “Drawn!,” website (to which you can link from the sidebar on this blog). “Drawn!,”  in turn, picked up the item from The Paris Review blog, where it originally appeared on September 1, 2011. (You’ll find a link to Paris Review by tapping Ms. Chast’s name, below.) If you love these two artists, you’ll enjoy — and learn a bunch of interesting stuff —  from this short essay.

Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns

September 1, 2011 | by Roz Chast

I first noticed William Steig’s covers and cartoons around 1970, when I was a teenager and would page through my parents’ New Yorker magazines. His drawings didn’t look like the rest of the cartoons in the magazine. They didn’t have gag lines. There were no boardrooms, no cocktail parties with people saying witty things to one another. His men and women looked as if they were out of the Past, although I wasn’t completely clear as to what era of the Past they were from. Sometimes the drawings made me laugh, and sometimes they didn’t, but I always wanted to look at them. I had a sense that these cartoons were made by someone who had had to create his own language, both visual and verbal, with which to express his view of the world.

His subjects? Animals, both real and imaginary. Also cowboys, farmers, knights on horseback, damsels in distress, gigantic ladies and teeny-tiny men, grandmas, clowns of indeterminate gender, average joes, families, old couples, young couples, artists, deep thinkers, fools, loners, lovers, and hoboes, among other things.

Blue Moon

Steig’s drawings seem to flow effortlessly from his mind to his pen and onto the paper. I doubt he ever looked at a blank sheet and thought, “I have nothing worthwhile to say today,” or “I can’t draw a car as well as Joe Shmoe, so why don’t I crawl back into bed and wait for the day to be over.” Steig gave himself permission to be playful and experimental. One of the many wonderful things about looking at his drawings is their message, especially to his fellow artists: Draw what you love and what interests you. Draw it how you want to draw it. When we are children we do this instinctively. But somewhere in our passage from childhood to adulthood, the ability to be truly and fearlessly creative is often lost. To quote Pablo Picasso, Steig’s favorite artist, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

William Steig produced more than fifty books, from early collections like Small Fry (1944) to children’s books like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969) and Shrek! (1990), which he wrote and illustrated late in his career. Unlike many artists who find a style early in their lives and then spend the rest of their careers perfecting it, Steig changed his style over the years. His work from the forties and fifties is fairly conventional. In the drawings of his middle years, his style is more angular and geometric. And in his last decades, his line becomes very fluid and playful, and there is an explosion of color, especially in his children’s books.

Steig, who was a follower of Wilhelm Reich, was deeply interested in psychology. Much of his work looks at society from an outsider’s point of view, observing with humor and compassion the compromises we make when we grow up and try to conform to society’s expectations. His earliest collection (and one of my favorites) was About People (1939). Each page contains a drawing representing a different emotional state, with a caption written underneath in his handwriting. Some combinations of drawing and title are fairly obvious, like the man sitting in a chair calmly smoking a cigarette. Behind the chair is a huge octopus with four tentacles wrapped around the man. The caption is simply “Poise.” But some of the drawings are not of people at all. One contains a roughly drawn spiral, and in the center of the spiral is a black blot with a tiny white dot in the middle. The caption is: “Father’s Angry Eye.”

Self-Contempt

These are not your typical cartoons, and especially not typical of cartooning at the time. They’re offbeat. They’re also about something otherwise intangible: actual emotions.

Hostess

Steig’s interest in psychology continued with Persistent Faces (1945), which explores a variety of visual types, like the “Hostess,” who has alarmingly twinkly eyes and teeth, and a worried man’s face, captioned “Straw in the Wind.” The Agony in the Kindergarten (1950), which he dedicated to Reich, is filled with drawings of children and accompanying statements like “I need that kid like I need a hole in the head,” and “Stop asking so many questions.” Perhaps Steig’s most famous cartoon of this period is “Mother loved me but she died,” from The Lonely Ones (1942). These demonstrate Steig’s ear for language, and also demonstrate his ability to look at life through a child’s eyes.

Just a Dream

Steig was an exceptionally gifted colorist, and he used color in a luminous, instinctive, and expressive way. Even when the goings-on are terrifying, as they often are in Rotten Island (1984)—my favorite of all of his children’s books—they’re never depressing. His dark colors are about a gleeful darkness, the darkness children feel when they know their most trusted adult is going to tell them a spooky story. The color isn’t over-fussed or second-guessed or muddified.

Steig loved pattern. Rugs, sofas, chairs, wallpaper, ladies’ dresses, and men’s shirts were all miniature canvases where he could make up designs—diamonds or flowers or spirals or something that looks like an upside-down banana peel. Even a sky could be patterned with lines or brick-like shapes or decorative cloud puffs.

Carnival

In the preface to his collection Dreams of Glory (1953), Steig writes, “We can laugh at the pretense and pose and foolishness of an irrational ideology and at the same time feel the pity and love—for a living being—that should be ingredients of all humor.” Sometimes I think of the Cartoon World as a big house with a Magazine Panel Cartoon Wing, a Newspaper Daily Strip Wing, a Graphic Novel Wing, an Underground Comics wing, a Superhero Comics wing, an Animation wing, and lots of other wings I don’t know about yet. Steig’s drawings throw open a bunch of windows and let in some fresh air, for which I am deeply grateful. He saw the world of human beings as absurd, hilarious, terrifying, mystifying, and infinitely worth observing.

Roz Chast’s cartoons have been published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Scientific American, and Mother Jones. Her next book is What I Hate: From A to Z. A longer version of this essay will appear in Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies, & Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig.

The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1987

When I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me.

(Performance) to make the looking have an element of moving.

 It begins well but then it begins to get funny and one must not be too funny.

This is one in a series that will post  on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more about what people like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing and directing plays, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button.

The New York Times, May 26, 1985

I grew up in New York and worked in radio and in television for 10 years. Then I said, “If I don’t start to write a play and start to get out soon, I’ll be writing ‘My Three Sons’ for the rest of my life,” which I did not want to do.

There will never be any satisfaction for me unless I can write what I feel I want to say. And I wrote that first play (“Come Blow Your Horn”) — and it was a matter of life and death for me.

Mike Nichols and I were doing “Plaza Suite” in Boston many years ago, and the first act was too long — it wasn’t that it was too long, we were getting too many laughs in a scene that we thought was basically serious. So Mike and I started to cut out all of the laugh lines, and they started to laugh at other lines that they had never laughed at. They just wanted to laugh!

I’ll write a scene that is really funny, and then I try to switch it quickly, because I think that happens in life a lot. You know, in the middle of some wonderful moment you get a phone call with tragic news. There have been a few occasions in plays when I’ve done that, and the audience is really thrown by it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes they resent it. They feel that they’ve been taken or had a little bit.

My experience has been that if you write a situation well enough, the tension is so great that the audience will laugh whether you provide it or not. But many times when it’s either laugh or cry, a lot of them don’t want to cry. And they will pick out a moment — a line, a gesture, whatever it is — to laugh at. It becomes part of the play after a while. I expect it night after night — never having intended it in the beginning. There’s just so much that they can handle. You force the audience to deal with a great deal in the theater.

The thing I think most about when I’m writing is what goes on in the bedroom between the husband and wife. I don’t mean the obvious, but what they really say to each other.

I know when my unconscious is doing the writing, because when my conscious is doing it, it seems familiar to me when I see it later on. Let’s say I haven’t seen the play in eight weeks or something, and I go and watch it. I say, “I didn’t write that. That has nothing to do with me. That came out of somebody else.” I know that’s the unconscious writing. And that’s where the surprises come from. And that’s like mercury. You just grab that if you can; it’s really hard. I can’t pin it down, but I know it’s probably very important to my psyche — that bit of information. I say, “That’s what I’ve been keeping hidden.” It’s a dangerous game. If you don’t grab it, then you don’t have it anymore. But it’s also the most exhilarating. I can get up and go, “What? That was terrific! You just caught a great long fly ball.”

“Brighton Beach Memoirs” took nine years from the inception of the idea. I let it sit for six years. It just kept going in my mind. I would think about it, and six years later I wrote 35 pages. I said, “This is good, but I don’t know how to write the play.” I’d never written a play like that — sort of a tapestry, where everybody’s story is very important. I generally had written plays about two characters and the peripheral characters and how they are involved in it. And it took a long time — another three years. And then I sat down and went right through the play. But the unconscious is doing the work. It’s typing away.

I don’t know what it’s like not to write. I don’t do it every day of the year, and I do take time off, but I feel empty if I don’t have something to work on. The trick is not  to get caught up in something that’s not working just for the sake of working. But I feel very happy when I can say I’ve got an idea for something that I think is worth doing. And then I can leave it alone and not work at all — it can just do its own work there while I go to the beach or play some tennis.

This is one in a series that will post  on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more about what people like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing and directing plays, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button.

By Angeline Goreau, The New York Times, August 9, 19982

“Hound” is timeless in the truly pejorative sense . . . incapable of change. It doesn’t lend itself to deep scrutiny. It’s an entertainment, just like a mechanical toy. It waves a flag, squeaks and turns a turtle and carries on. It’s a logical structure with a vein of parody going through it. There’s no reason to write a play like that. It’s an enjoyment. And that is what it is. One hopes it will work out all right, because in the nature of theater there’s this interesting transition between the text and the event. The ball can be dropped in many different ways. Or not dropped.

I don’t trust writer’s who wax confidently about what they do and why they do it. In writing plays, I find that the problems — if that’s what they are — are very mundane, and in a way surface. The wellspring of a play is often curiously uninteresting — it derives from insubstantial stray images and ideas, What it doesn’t arise from at all, I don’t think, is anything like a complete sense of the whole. You know, What am I going to try to achieve here? What is it going to be about underneath?

I seldom worry about underneath. Even when I’m aware that there is an underneath. I tend to try and suppress it further under, because theater is a wonderfully, refreshingly simple event. It’s a storytelling event. The story holds or it doesn’t . . .  The same would be true of a short story or a novel.

The first idea I had was that I’d like to write a play in which the first scene turned out to have been written by a character in the second scene. That was all I started with. There is a strong — not autobiographical element — but a strong editorial element because the man spouts opinions generally which I subscribe to. So in that sense there’s a lot of me in it, more than in most plays, but only by virtue of the fact that the protagonist is a writer in London in 1980-odd.

“Hapgood” has a physicist in it, who talks about physics a bit. But I don’t think that actually is the problem. The intricacies of the spy plot are quite difficult. I think I’m not as good as John le Carré at doing that kind of story. But I find I’m talking about the play as though it failed in some way for me. In fact, I’m interested by it in so far as it succeeded.

One of the built-in ironies of being a playwright at all is that one is constantly trying to put into dramatic form questions and answers that require perhaps an essay, perhaps a book, but are too important and too subtle, really, to have to account for themselves within the limitations of what’s really happening in the theater, which is that the story is being told in dialogue.

(I use) this ill-suited medium (to account for) matters like morality or empire, or the authenticity of romantic love (with the reservation) that failure is almost built into a play if that is its true purpose, its true function. And so one avoids failure if one can, by denying that that is the function of the play. And one says that, no, that was merely an aspect or a sidelight of the play’s function and the primary function is to tell an entertaining story.

My primary delight, which is a good enough word for the fuel that one needs to do any work at all, is in using the language rather than the purpose to which language is put . . . and more than language, I would say theater — the way theater works, through disclosure and surprise.

This is one in a series that will post  on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more about what people like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing and directing plays, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button.

By John Lahr, The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2007

The author’s position is an odd one. The characters resist him; they are not easy to live with; they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent, you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind-man’s-bluff, hide-and-seek.

(Among people) I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but . . . it’s more like a quicksand. We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?

To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to me facile, impertinent, and dishonest. Where this takes place it is not theatre but a crossword puzzle. The audience holds the paper. The play fills in the blanks. Everyone’s happy. There has been no conflict between audience and play, no participation, nothing has been exposed. We walk out as we went in.

Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labelled and ready for export is dead . . . and meaningless.

You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it’s out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said.

(“The Homecoming,” opening words:) “What have you done with the scissors?” I didn’t know who was saying it. I didn’t know who he was talking to. Now, the fellow he was talking to — if he had said, “oh, I’ve got them right here, Dad,” there would have been no play. But instead he says, “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” Once that’s said, there’s a spring of drama, which develops and follows its own course. I had no idea what the course was going to be. I hadn’t planned anything. In the back of mind, I think I knew there was another brother going to come back. I think I saw them quite early in a big house, with the doors being taken down, leading to a stairway. I saw them moving in that space.

It (“The Homecoming”) is all to do with me in some way or another. You’re not consciously looking back to . . . the values, the threats. Not at all . . . But it’s a world related to you, otherwise you wouldn’t write it.

I’m well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being “enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding.” Well, I do have my moods, like everyone else.

This is one in a series that will post  on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more about what people like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing and directing plays, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button.

I write

I cannot honestly recall or retrace the conception or development of a single comedic idea I ever had or developed. They vanish from memory after they are written out. Don’t ask a cow how to analyze milk. One sits in a corner and secretes the stuff. One— But you see how right Kafka is? You have lured me into using the word “comedic,” which makes me sick.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Comedy deals with the portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

Nonsense is such a difficult art!

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.

By Michael Ver Meulen, Esquire, February, 1980

There’s a way of just improvising a play, as an actor would improvise a scene, and I’ve discovered how to do that. I have tons of stuff that I just haven’t shown ‘cause now the values have changed. Along the road, that improvisation has to come to terms with something and make it cognizant. And that something is not explainable. For instance, if we start juggling glasses we could juggle glasses and carry on and we could juggle glasses all day long, but then what, then what’s going on underneath?

There’s more to it than just getting off as an artist, because, you know, anybody can make a piece of art. It’s not hard. And anybody can have that piece of art admired by any number of people. But what happened between those other people and the artist? Is there really a sense of responsibility in the relationship between the thing that you make and the people who come in touch with it?

The picture is moving in the mind and being allowed to move more and more freely as you follow it. The following is the writing part. In other words, I’m taking notes in as much detail as possible on an event that’s happening somewhere inside me. The extent to which I can actually follow the picture and not intervene with my own two cents’ worth is where inspiration and craftsmanship hold their real meaning. If I find myself pushing the character in a certain direction, it’s almost always a sure sign that I’ve fallen back on technique and lost the real thread of the thing.

You can only face so much, and then you turn away. Writers are very adept at covering that up; they cover it up in all kinds of disguises. But when it comes right down to it, what you’re really listening to in a writer is that: his ability to face himself.

I certainly don’t want to depress the hell out of people, but I think you’ve got to go through the night to get to the day, and I haven’t gone all the way through the night yet.

Dealing with the media makes you believe that you have an importance beyond your actual importance. It leads to a lot of false assumptions about who you are.

It’s pretty hard to make a living as a playwright, I mean, in terms of the rising price of gasoline and all that shit.

This is one in a series that will post  on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more about what people like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing and directing plays, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button.

By Jean Shepard

One day when I had to stay home from the Warren G. Harding School because of some Kid problem like a sty or a case of diarrhea and everything was quiet in the house in the Northern Indiana steel-mill town where we lived, half-way up in the next block on Cleveland Street, I suddenly heard my mother laughing uproariously in the kitchen.  I struggled out of bed to see what was going on.  There she was, sitting at our white enamel kitchen table, wearing her rump-sprung Chinese Red chenille housecoat, her hair festooned with aluminum rheostats, laughing her head off.

“What’s up, Mom?”

She waved weakly at me. She giggled again.

“What’s happening, Mom?”

She wiped tears away from her eyes with a soggy dishtowel.

“Walter’s kneecap is acting up again.”

“Huh?” I asked in the best Rush Gook style.

“Go back to bed.  Can’t you see I’m listening to the radio?”

She was indeed.  She had a white plastic Sears Roebuck Silvertone radio with a cracked plastic cabinet, badly repaired with adhesive tape, on top of our beloved Hotpoint refrigerator.  It was her constant companion.  It hummed and gave her shocks continually, but out of its imitation gold speaker grill flowed her secret world of fantasy and entertainment.  She was one of millions of lucky and discerning housewives who had the good fortune to  actually hear ‘Vic & Sade’.  They are, naturally, a decreasing band, the lucky ones, but they all, to the last one, remember whole episodes and places, people, and the Chicago and Alton freight yards.  Paul Rhymer was  unknown to most of them, as he is to most of the civilized world today.  There is just no one to compare him with.  As far as I know, no one working in the mass media has ever created such a complete and flawless world, peopled with characters so fully realized.

Most work done for the mass media is highly perishable by its very nature.  Unfortunately, also by the very nature of mass media, the mediocre and the banal tends to outlive the truly creative and original. The ‘Lone Rangers’ and ‘Green Hornets’ are forever dredged up as examples of “The Golden Age of Radio,” while unfortunately the true gold is mentioned rarely, if it all.

My memory of the actual show as broadcast is episodic because ‘Vic & Sade’ was a daytime show.  Radio, in those days, as television does to this very day, reserved its night-time prime hours for the “important” shows.  Daytime hours were packed with things designed for “housewives”, usually a term tinged with slight derision in network offices.  Therefore, not only was the great work of Paul Rhymer burned up by the nature of mass media itself, it was doubly cursed by being cast among the quicksand shoals of the world of Soap Opera.  It’s as though “Death of a Salesman” or “Our Town” had debuted on a typical Wednesday afternoon between “As the World Turns” and “Against the Storm”, followed by “The Hollywood Squares”.

Being a kid at the time, daytime was spent going to school, or outside just fooling around, but on the few times that I did hear ‘Vic & Sade’, Blue-Tooth Johnson, Rooster Davis, Third-Lieutenant Stanley and Mr. Gumpox’s horse Howard became firmly embedded in my subconscious–forever.  I remember nothing of ‘The Lone Ranger’ except “Hi Ho, Silver!”, which is not much of a line when you think of it.  All I remember of Fred Allen is his phony Chinese accent when he was playing a detective, but Smelly Clark’s Uncle Strap taking his lady friend to Peoria for a fish dinner somehow got me where I lived.  Maybe it was because Paul Rhymer created TRUE humor.  He did not deal in jokes, but human beings observed by a sardonic, biting, yet loving mind.

Rhymer has been compared to Harold Pinter by some, Mark Twain by others.  Personally I feel that Rhymer was a complete original.  Curiously enough, Rhymer READS better than any of the so-called “serious” writers of his era.  The ‘Vic & Sade’ scripts are not only still fresh and funny, but are absolutely recognizable as an authentic picture of American life which persists in millions of homes today.  Yamilton’s Department Store, Peoria, the peanut machine at the Depot, Consolidated Kitchenware, Plant Fourteen, The Sacred Stars of the Milky Way were never touched by Steinbeck or Odets.  The Okies are a quaint period piece, but Gloria Golden is still playing at the Bijou.  Her name may be Faye Dunaway or Raquel Welch.  Rush’s complaint “All they ever have in movies is Love, Love, Love. Boy, they sure are boring” could have been said yesterday afternoon.

Another thing that amazes me is Rhymer’s wild and subtle imagination.  Wild in the sense of being totally unpredictable, and subtle in that he touched at all times on the faint vein of madness that runs through all of us.  He rarely went for the obvious; hence he preceded the Theater of the Absurd by decades.  In fact, it is my opinion that in some ways he is far closer to Ionesco in spirit than he was to Thornton Wilder, who sentimentalized American life in a way that Rhymer’s sense of irony refused to allow.  For example, “The Washing Machine is On the Blink” combines the American Do-It-Yourself syndrome, Masochism, and the continual breakdown of modern technology in such a totally nutty way as to be completely logical in the way a Marx Brothers scene involving a grand piano, a stuffed duck, a bolt of lightning and an out-of-work Fire Chief does.  In some twelve minutes of inspired dialog, Rhymer convinces us that two otherwise sane human beings, down in the basement trying to fix the washing machine, begin to enjoy electric shocks, experimenting with various electric shock techniques, finally conspiring to lay one on an unsuspecting mother, all the while cackling maniacally in ecstatic pleasure.  There are very few minds that could possibly conceive of the electric shock as pleasure, but that’s Rhymer for you.  I, personally, am curious just what your average nice, hard-working housewife of the period thought when she heard that one.  I suspect more than a few crept down into the basement covertly and tried sticking their fingers into hot AC outlets while standing in puddles.

Another example of Rhymer at his surreal best is the little gem called “Caramels on a Hot Day”, in which we find Rush, as he puts it, “stirring up a little excitement” by sitting on the front porch, making round balls out of square three-for-a-penny caramels.  Think about that for a moment.  a hot day, caramels, and boredom.  This is exactly what a kid does do, squatting on a front porch in the heat of summer, but who thinks to build a fifteen-minute drama to be broadcast to millions out of that dynamic situation?  Better yet, who but Paul Rhymer could pull off such a feat, or would have the courage to do it even if he could?  Rhymer obviously was very sure about his work in a medium where that kind of security and self-knowledge is almost non-existent.

In a way it’s too bad that Paul Rhymer never wrote for the more recognized media. Great reputations exist in the theater or the novel on far less profound and effective work than Rhymer’s. In fact, he probably wrote more funny lines in one month of daily scripts than the combined output of five of the leading playwrights of modern times. Not only that his characters were truer, more consistent, and far better realized. Remember, reading these scripts in published book form is barely skimming the thinnest surface of the body of Vic & Sade. These works were written to be performed, and yet in spite of that they come alive, snapping and crackling, off the page. One reason, technically, is that Rhymer created a vast cast of unseen and unheard people who were every bit as alive and interesting as Vic, Sade, Rush, and Uncle Fletcher. Fred and Ruthie Stembottom and their continual snaillike drives in Fred’s old automobile to Chenoa, Illinois, and Ruthie’s “scared rabbit” smile; Mr, Ruebush, Vic’s boss at the plant; Ike Kneesuffer’s indoor horse-shoe set in his basement; Miz Husher’s continual peevishness, and, of course, Vic’s beloved lodge brothers in the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way – Robert and Slobert Hink, Y. Y. Flirch and H. K. Fleeber, are all part of the well developed cast of millions.

Not all of Vic & Sade’s episodes were pure fun and games. In fact, they rarely were. Practically every episode had little shafts of insight, and often sadness, that would come and go like the brief hints of darker things we all have in our own lives, Sade’s tenderness over poor old Uncle Fletcher’s wandering mind; Vic’s understanding of Rush, and his obvious love for Sade, comes through in a beautifully written and subtle episode called “Vic Confides in Rush about Mothers.” It contains hints of the inevitability of death, references to the “Empty Nest” syndrome (Rhymer was thirty years ahead of psychiatrists on this one), overlaid with a beautifully realized treatment of masculine relationships. In addition, he managed to be funny. Rhymer must have been a hell of an interesting man to know.

Perhaps one of the things that Rhymer did best was to illuminate and dramatize lightly, effortlessly, and without at any point lecturing, the vast gulf that exists between types of people. I have never read a better short story touching on the smothering boredom, yet natural concern we feel in the presence of close relatives than in “Vic Reviews a Vacation Week with Bess and Walter in Carberry.” Poor Walter and Bess, trying so hard to entertain Vic, and Vic trying so hard to be entertained, while Sade all the while blithely chatters on with her sister Bess, never realizing that Vic’s only vacation for the year is going down the drain. This episode, by the way, points out another quality in Rhymer’s work. He never ridiculed or put down people merely because they are what they are. However, he is razor-sharp when it comes to blasting the fraudulent and the inane. “Vic Is Elected to the Congress of Distinguished Americans” is a classic example of Rhymer putting another one right in the bull’s-eye. This particular con has been around for a long time, and there are countless walls in dens all over the country upon which hang framed scrolls proclaiming “officially” the profound and notable greatness of the yahoo who pays the rent. In fact, it was only last week that I received, personally, three notices in the mail informing me that I had been selected “to be signally honored” by outfits with names very much like The Congress of Distinguished Americans. I remind you that this particular episode was aired ’way back in the Thirties.

Some of Rhymer’s funniest stuff dealt with that all-pervasive goofiness of the moth Century – the movies. Vie, particularly, was great on the subject. In fact, in “Stembottom’s Invitation to Drive Thirty-five Miles to a Double Feature” we find Vic emitting “low, painful groans” for three full pages of dialog when faced with the nightmare of attending a double feature of two pictures he had already seen, and hated the first time around, and which he describes as “rotten, rotten, rotten.” Nobody in today’s situation comedies is ever remotely as honest about a fellow medium. Does Archie Bunker ever blast the movies, or even mention them at all? Does Mary Tyler Moore? Never. That’s the thing about the characters in Vic & Sade. They lived in the real world, where people really do say such things as movies are rotten, or Yamilton’s Department Store is throwing another one of “them phony Sales.”

Judging from his scripts, if Rhymer were alive today he would probably snort in derision at the pompous tone of this foreword, but I also suspect he would secretly have enjoyed it. Rhymer was an artist, and no artist who ever lived ever turned down a tribute to his work. I think I should point out a few techniques that Rhymer used that everybody tries but few master. Most contemporary writers for mass media simply feed a series of one-liners to their characters, go for the cheap laugh, and hope that no one is the wiser. Rhymer, in contrast, wrote dialog; succinct, spare, yet with an absolutely true ear for the rhythms and infections of American speech. This is much easier to talk about, or discuss in class, than to accomplish. Obviously, Rhymer was a very gifted listener. A few brief examples:

SADE: Sounds like somebody’s trying to knock our front door in.

RUSH: That stug cookin’ on the gas stove okay, Mom?

SADE: Why?

RUSH: Makin’ a gurgling sound like it needed water.

Now that’s nice. People talk like that. This, if you wish to read the rest of the dialog, which gets better as it goes along, can be found in “Manual for Wives of Sky Brothers in the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way.” There is also some very nifty Latin, a language not often heard on mass media. No pun intended.

Finally, I should point out that the announcer was also an integral part of the daily drama. My mother, for one, loved him. I think his name was Bob Brown. His subtle, confidential style set the tone for the daily session of eavesdropping in the small house halfway up in the next block. My mother to this day tells about the time, not more than five minutes into the episode, the cast, including the announcer, got to laughing so hard over some nuttiness that Rhymer had come up with that the entire show was a shambles. They just laughed and chuckled until finally they gave up trying to be Vic and Sade and Rush and Uncle Fletcher and went off the air, hooting and hollering and leaving millions of listeners in kitchens everywhere doing the same thing. When I was just beginning in the business, I had the rare honor to meet the fine actress who played “Sade.”’ She looked just like Sade should look. She looked, well, like Sade. The series was long off the air, but was rapidly growing as a legend. I asked her what was the hardest thing about playing Sade on a daily basis, year in and year out. Naturally, I figured she’d say something like “endless rehearsals,” how tough the grind was, and so on.

“Well, son, I’ll tell you,” she said, sounding exactly like Sade about to straighten out Rush on some fine point of life. “The hardest thing was to keep a straight face. Sometimes those scripts were so funny that we had to fight all the way through the show just breaking up, And the more we rehearsed, the funnier it got. Why, I remember one day having to turn my face to the wall while Uncle Fletcher was telling me about a trip he took to Cairo, Illinois, in the company of one of his friends. The engineer was on the floor, the announcer had to leave the room, and I can tell you it wasn’t easy.”

What better compliment can an actor pay a writer?

I have one practical suggestion for those of you who have had the great sense to pick up this volume of scripts. Read them aloud. Get three or four good friends together and decide who’s going to play Vic, who will be Sade, and finally Rush and poor old Uncle Fletcher. You can call in your next door neighbor to do the announcing. Ten to one you’ll be doing VIC and SADE episodes until five in the morning. Have fun. That’s what Paul Rhymer and Vic & Sade are all about.

Copyright © 1976 Jean Shepard.

In Which We Read With Awe And We Read With Wonder