What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Did Dawn break up with her French boyfriend for that Star Wars guy? December 2019 – March 2020

Quick answer: no, but it’s maybe coming. Thanks, reader, for being where when I finally get to Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. This plot recap will get you up to date for the middle of March 2020. If it’s much after June 2020 when you read this, there’s likely a more current essay at this link for you. And on my other blog I look at comic strips with mathematical themes, and should be getting to Pi Day soon.

Mary Worth.

22 December 2019 – 15 March 2020.

Here are the relationship screwup standings, as of late December 2019. Wilbur Weston humiliates himself, and everyone around him, and everyone who eats sandwiches. He and Estelle went on a double-date with his ex-girlfriend Iris and her considerable boyfriend upgrade Zak. Wilbur, swearing off demon alcohol, begs Estelle to forgive him. Estelle misses him enough to consider it. Meanwhile Iris’s doctor has diagnosed her as old. To hide this from her supportive and emotionally engaged boyfriend she says they need time apart. With that background: what’s happened since Christmas?

Estelle goes to dinner with Wilbur. He shares his resolve not to drink anymore, and to stop embarrassing himself or disappointing her. So, credit to Estelle for having the patience for this. Everyone needs to recover from their screw-ups. Everyone around them needs to know how much screw-up they can take before it’s hurting themselves. I’d like to think Estelle has figured this out, but she was under a lot of Mary Worth pressure to just pair-bond with Wilbur already, despite his issues.

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That puts Estelle away for a while. How about Iris and Zak? Iris finally admits her problems to Mary Worth. Mary Worth asks: Zak is loving and supportive and you’re ditching that? And you haven’t even told him what the doctor said explained your weight gain and fatigue and hair loss? Look, just pull over and let me drive. I can sort this out in like ten minutes.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 7th of January, 2020. My love was complaining recently about asking people for recommendations for doctors (well, dentists). After all, anyone who did not think their doctor pretty good would not be going to them, right? It’s a hard position to refute. Anyway, I’m of the last age cohort that grew up hearing of “Dr Howard” and jumping right to the Three Stooges, so, good luck Iris.

Iris resists. Zak visits, suggesting his doctor evaluate her. She goes, but only to prove that her problem is she’s old and that’s it. The doctor listens to her symptoms and the first doctor’s diagnosis. And then asks, hey, did you check your thyroid? Because those things are always going wrong. And when they do? Reality dissolves into a surreal timeless fugue state of long-dead fiancees returning from the Himalayas and psychics planning your biological mother’s wedding and all space, time, and objects dissolving into a white void, except for Lampy. It’s a wild hypothesis. It demands we suppose a doctor would dismiss a woman’s roster of symptoms as `some weirdo woman stuff or something’. And then not run the tests he would if a white man described the same symptoms. But we can allow such flights of fantasy in our narrative fiction.

The test comes back positive: it’s Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease. So, some medicine, some diet, some exercise. Naps you plan for. Zak is of course supportive and helpful and tactfully avoids calling out the first doctor for screwing up. The treatment works great. Within days she’s feeling better. And Iris and Zak are hugging each other talking about how they love the other.

So that, the 19th of January, settles that. We then check in on Estelle, who’s settling for Wilbur quite well. And Estelle’s cat Libby, who cats. And back on Iris and Zak, in what seems like a redundant point. But Iris did have to thank Mary Worth for her advice. Which, to be fair, was correct and needed.

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The 3rd of February started off the new and current story. It features Dawn Weston, Wilbur’s daughter. She’s keeping up her long-distance relationship with her French boyfriend from France, Hugo Lambert Bilbiothèque Quatre-vingt de Poisson, Comte de Franceypants. They’d had a nice summer fling last year and kept it going. He’s got a nice job in Paris, in the being French industry. She figures to fly out to see him in summer.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 12th of February, 2020. “We’ve talked it out and made an arrangement. Six months of the year I’ll live in Santa Royale and he’ll live in Paris, and the other six months of the year I’ll live in Paris while he’s in Santa Royale.”

Wilbur worries for his daughter. This may seem meddlesome. But in fairness, he’s been in what he was told were long-distance relationships. And his relationship with Iris broke up while he toured the world asking disaster survivors why they weren’t dead. She dismisses her father’s fears about their relationship. She then contracts her father’s fears about their relationship.

While at a pizza place, thinking this over, she spots Jared Mylo. They’d worked together for Local Medical Group a couple summers ago. It’s a nice reunion. He’d had a crush on her back then. They talk some and decide to go see a movie, a parody Star Wars film. This causes me to wonder: hey, yeah, isn’t it weird there hasn’t been a Star Wars spoof movie in a generation now? Or at least a Spaceship Movie spoof? Is it that there’s enough Star Wars Trek spoofs on TV and web comics and podcasts and stuff that nobody needs a movie?

Anyway, Dawn reassures herself that this is just friends hanging out. It can’t possibly threaten her relationship with Hugo Lambert Cahier sur la Tante du Votre, 2CV. So that’s our conflict: is hanging out with Jared Mylo here in Santa Royale going to distance her from her French boyfriend in France, Paris? Dawn and Jared have a great time at Ruse Of The Fast Talker. Oh, maybe I see why there hasn’t been a Star Wars spoof movie in a while now. At dinner afterward Dawn and Jared bond over how their parents do embarrassing things, like karaoke and naked yoga. And meanwhile in Paris, Hugo is … agreeing with women.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 8th of March, 2020. Yes yes yes I have some basic media literacy. I know about stories coding stuff, so that I know what a single panel of Hugo, apparently in some kind of work space, getting agreement from a woman is supposed to mean. Don’t @ me. Instead ask: Dawn and Jared went to a movie before lunch? Are they having lunch at like 3 pm or did they go to the 8:15 am showing with an audience full of Trace Beaulieus?

So you know their thing is serious. Mary pops in to ask Dawn how serious this all is. Dawn says it’s not at all, they just like hanging out. And there’s the conflict for the story. How will it all turn out? Will Dawn handle having two people she likes seeing? I figure to check back in around June and give an answer.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

As foretold last week the car care place has updated their message board to another declaration that is meant to be inspirational and good Kantian advice and yet manages to also despair of the futility of existence. Other people see it too, right? This is not just me and my love having turned our little in-joke into a thing?

What has BrainyQuotes thought people said, since we last checked in on Charterstone? These inspirational mottos:

• “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” — Alexander Pope, 22 December 2019
• “Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.” — Desmond Tutu, 29 December 2019
• “To love is to be vulnerable.” — C S Lewis, 5 January 2020
• “I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.” — Henny Youngman, 12 January 2020
• “Love Heals.” — Maya Angelou, 19 January 2020
• “I mean we all need a second chance sometimes.” — Joel Osteen, 26 January 2020
• “We all need each other.” — Leo Buscaglia, 2 February 2020
• “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 February 2020
• “As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.” — Herman Hesse, 16 February 2020
• “Friendship is something that is cultivated.” — Thalia, 23 February 2020
• “In March, winter is holding back and spring is pulling forward. Something holds and something pulls inside of us too.” — Jean Hersey, 1 March 2020
• “There are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts.” — Leo Tolstoy (in Anna Kernina), 18 March 2020
• “Your friend is your needs answered.” — Khalil Gibran, 15 March 2020

Next Week!

How’s that spy ship working out? We skip out on Ambrose Bierce and Thomas Paine to see what’s happening in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity. See you in a week, more or less.

I never did work out that Mark Trail joke, but I am convinced by the hypothesis that what we’re looking at right now is Rusty Trail’s own comic strip rather than the reality.