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Mary Worth, 1/8/07

MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM!

“In person” even! This is too important to take care of via teleconferencing or astral projection!

For some reason I keep thinking of the song “Old Hippie” by the Bellamy Brothers, which my mom loved when I was a kid. It contains the following line:

“Then they sent him off to Vietnam on his senior trip.”

Mary’s sort of doing the same, although her senior status means that she’ll be shouting at locals both because she thinks they’ll understand English if she does and because she’s going deaf.

There are so many awesome possibilities to this plotline that I’m practically overbrimming with joy at them, even though I know that this is Mary Worth and thus only the most boring ones will actually occur. But still, it’s fun to imagine: Will Mary end up lost in a jungle and have to feed herself by hunting and fishing? Will she be kidnapped and forced to work in a Nike sweatshop? Will become a committed Marxist and come home determined to spread Communist revolution in her condo complex?

Better, and actually somewhat plausible: Will she discover that Dr. Jeff is living comfortably in a foreign medical staff compound, is totally startled to see Mary, and when she starts describing how she was brought there by a powerful dream, begins backing away in wide-eyed terror?

In other news, I think it would be funny if Toby were serious about her New Year’s resolution. It’s a little-known fact that last year she helped negotiate an end to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency; this year she has her sights set on just settlements in Sri Lanka and Nagorno-Karabakh. But Mary doesn’t care about that kind of do-gooding nonsense, as she’s made clear in the past; she just needs a damn date to the damn Bum Boat.

B.C., 1/8/07

Johnny, diarrhea jokes make Baby Jesus cry.