What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Was the last three months *all* praising Mary Worth? January – April 2024

It was not. It feels close, though. It’s traditional after a Mary Worth story to have Mary Worth recap the lesson learned and then for everyone, and then for Dr Jeff, to praise her. This time around it felt like a lot of that. I’m not sure it was, but the coda to the story of Keith Hillend felt like a prolonging of this transitional period.

I hope this plot recap gets you up to speed on story developments in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for mid-April 2024. Is it after about July 2024 when you read this? Then check this link where there’s probably a more up-to-date-for-you plot recap available.

Mary Worth.

21 January – 14 April 2024.

Retired cop Keith Hillend had reconnected with old girlfriend Kitty Faber. And bonded with his unknown daughter Sonia over their love of obscure indie musician Stevie Wonder. What more is there to do? Well, you don’t get to be a cop of twenty years’ tenure without being used to violating civil liberties. He snags the can of root beer she’d been drinking, and sends it to a friend in the Department of Magic DNA Analysis. The results: she’s 27% lowlands Scot, 48% Bulgarian Chavdar, 16% Ish Kabibble, 39% Pomeranian, 22% Jack Russel terrier, a direct matrilineal descendant of Cleopatra Herself — but zero percent cop. She is not Hillend’s daughter.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 19th of February, 2024. This is not the first time a Mary Worth character has resolved a problem by deciding they’ll pretend they didn’t know otherwise. There’s a practicality to it, and it is something people really do, but it stands out in the comics where we assume people settle on The Truth. I’m curious whether Moy debated having Hillend think over whether he would do anything differently before learning Sonia was definitely not his daughter, and whether the story would have been as effective if he had decided he didn’t need to test to be happy.

I don’t care for how we got there, but it’s not like I insist protagonists only make good choices, especially when it lands them in a fix like this. Also where we discover a Mary Worth character had premarital sex a whole two times! Wow! And we get intersting questions like did Kitty Faber lie about Hillend’s fatherhood? Was she mistaken? Can he trust these relationships that have a falsehood at their core?

He decides that he does trust Faber, and likes his new family, and however they got there does not matter. So this story finally resolves, the 25th of February, with a joyful group hug. Then we get a week of Mary Worth explaining the emotions of the hew-mons to Toby, another week of her explaining them to Dr Jeff, and a week of Dr Jeff talking about how gret it is he loves Mary Worth and she goes to restaurants with him. So, you see, it’s not a preposterously long period of everyone thanking Mary Worth. It’s just well-placed to feel like that.

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Monday, the 25th of March, starts the current story. It stars Agony Aunt columnist and man who has opinions about each of the possible etymologies of “mayonnaise” Wilbur Weston. Instigating things: Dawn’s got a call from her mother, who wanted to reconnect. After talking for hours on the phone Dawn wants to go live with her in Connecticut for a year. This seems like rather much to me — I’d maybe try a weekend, first, and discover if you can share a bathroom without killing each other — but hey, any reason to get away from Wilbur Weston, right? Also so she doesn’t accidentally run into her ex Jared, who’s going off being happy and all. So she’s off.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 4th of April, 2024. I have no information, I’m sorry, about whether Wilbur’s ex-wife has ever been seen on-screen before, or if we know precisely why she hasn’t been part of Dawn’s early adulthood. If someone knows, I’ll just have to say something wrong and they’ll come in to correct me. Um … Dawn’s mother is named … let’s say Alexandria Madeline and she’s a professional toll-booth designer who was instrumental in taking the tolls off the Connecticut Turnpike back in the day. They broke up over whether there’s any good surfing on the New England coastline, complex story.

With the house feeling big and empty now, though, he reaches to Mary Worth for muffins and companionship. She can’t make karaoke night with him, though, building his feelings of loneliness. He accidentally runs into his ex Stella and her boyfriend Ed Harding and their estimated 18 to 24 pets. They’re happy and charming and even invite him to get together with them for no reason any person, sane or otherwise, can imagine. This unquestioning acceptance leaves him only more miserable. This Sunday, he bumps into a kid — the art makes it look like he shoves the kid over, although it’s more that the kid collides with him — accidentally saving him from behing hit by a car. That seems like it might be something developing. We’ll see.

(Based on the Comics Kingdom offer of a week’s preview … this doesn’t immediately lead to something, but there’s some quite funny bits coming up soon.)

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

• “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” — Aristotle, 21 January 2024.
• “Hope is a waking dream.” — Aristotle, 28 January 2024. A rare double-feature! Unless these are different Aristotles.
• “By doubting we are lead to question. By questioning we arrive at the truth.” — Peter Abelard, 4 February 2024. So somebody got the Mary Worth team a Quotes From Philosophers book for Christmas.
• “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” — Aldous Huxley, 11 February 2024.
• “Follow your heart and make it your decision.” — Mia Hamm, 18 February 2024.
• “While loneliness has the potential to kill, connection has even more potential to heal.” — Vivek Murthy, 25 February 2024.
• “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” — Richard Bach, 3 March 2024.
• “Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out.” — John Wooden, 10 March 2024.
• “Life is made up of small pleasures.” — Norman Lear, 17 March 2024.
• “Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.” — Alexander Smith, 24 March 2024.
• “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and my father.” — Greg Norman, 31 March 2024.
• “Hard to be sure … sometimes I feel so insecure, and love so distant and obscure … remains the cure.” — Eric Carmen, 7 April 2024.
• “You can have an impact anywhere you are.” — Tony Dungy, 14 April 2024.

Next Week!

The Ghost Who Orders Office Redecorations sees his most dramatic plan come to fruition! How will this change forever the Jungle Patrol’s relationship with their Unknown Commander? Or with their fan idol John X? Catch up with Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) next Tuesday, if all goes according to the script.

PS: the “Ish Kabibble” line is there for my Dad, great guy, working on sending me one of those animated emojis of a smiley face cracking up even now, so let’s give him a round of applause, make him feel at home. Thank you.

On How Technology Has Changed the Way We Discover Dialects

Overall, yes, I appreciate how easy the Internet makes it for people to discover dialects and regionalisms. Not just learning of others’, but of learning of your own unique phrasings and common idioms and vowel mergers.

But the change is losing something too, and that’s worth mention. Think, now, of going through your whole college career without that night of hanging out in the dorm lounge, and discovering, in a moment of giddy delight for your friends, a moment which earns you a nickname that lasts intensely for two weeks and then makes occasional reappearances for the rest of your four years, that it is only people from your half of Livingston County, New Jersey (plus a zone around New Danzig, Oklahoma) who have ever called mayonnaise “sandwich gravy”. I don’t know if this is the world we would choose, but it’s the one we’re coming to live in.

Belarus Diplomat Delivers Warning From Dream World

I want to thank whoever at Reuters created this headline, because it’s one of the best I’ve seen in ages:

Belarus diplomat worries topless, mayo-throwing women could disrupt U.N.

Specifically, in a discussion about opening up the Conference on Disarmament discussions to the general public the Belarus delegate worried about what this could do to security and allegedly, according to the official summary, said, “What if there were topless ladies screaming from the public gallery throwing bottles of mayonnaise”. Reuters doesn’t say what the answer was, but then, what kind of answer could you give besides “hope the sergeant-at-arms hasn’t run out of catsup”? The correct answer was given by Mexico’s representative: since the public was already allowed to attend plenary sessions, “in theory [they] could already drop mayonnaise onto delegates”. Also there were only two people watching right now, anyway.

Actually, Reuters doesn’t even say who the Belarus delegate was, so I can’t swear that this isn’t entirely a prank put in to see if anybody’s reading the summaries. But if it did happen, then, I have to suppose that Belarus has gotten a warning from the dream world about a future in which Disarmament Conferences are held much closer to a Roy Rogers’ Fixin’s Bar, which is good news for the people trying to bring the Roy Rogers franchise back from being just four stands in service plazas on the New Jersey Turnpike. It just feels like the sort of thing you wouldn’t fear unless you had some specific reason to, though, doesn’t it?

Yet I can’t help feeling a little sad. I can’t convince myself that the guy from Belarus wasn’t making a really sly, snarky joke — I mean, the specificity of topless women with mayonnaise is suggestive — and then Mexico’s guy didn’t realize it and answered flatly. If that’s the case I hope the Belarus guy just went home with that smug feeling that comes from making a joke so deadpan that nobody realizes you’re joking.