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SHAME ON YOU, STEPHAN PASTIS
By Karyl Miller
Years ago I was tossed out of the Girl Scouts for desecrating their “Friendship
Circle.” For the uninitiated, at meeting’s end the scouts form a circle and join hands.
With heads bowed and eyes closed, each girl makes a silent wish and squeezes the
hand of the next girl and so on till all the wishes are in. Then the meeting is
adjourned.
But wait – there’s more – and this is the important part: If any person steps INSIDE
the circle – or where the circle was, it will cancel all the wishes - just like that! But in
my busy little 10-year-old brain I thought, “That is such bullshit .” And just to prove to
my point, I hopped inside the circle and danced around joyously. Suddenly the room
fell completely silent, so silent that for a second I thought I had gone deaf. But then
the Scout Mother shook her finger in my face and screamed, “Karyl, why did you do
that?! You just ruined everybody’s wishes!”
“No I haven’t,” I explained. “I did it to prove that the whole idea is preposterous. How
can a section of linoleum floor in a school basement suddenly become sacred? And
when does the linoleum go back to being NOT sacred? The Girl Scouts shouldn’t be
teaching superstition!”
I thought my fellow scouts would immediately see the light and join me in my
liberating circle dance and I would finally garner the popularity that had been eluding
me. But instead one girl started crying (the Scout Mother’s daughter, of course), and
then another girl and another. By the time our mothers got there I was the only one
not crying. With a great sigh of resignation my mother asked me, “What did you do
this time?” And I stated proudly, “I was helping my fellow scouts, doing them a favor
by telling them the truth!” And my mom said, “When are you going to learn if you don’t
have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all?” And I said, “Fine. Then you
can sew my lips shut right now.”
Over the years I’ve never been able to stop being opinionated, but I have learned to
keep more of my (possibly extreme) opinions to myself. That way nobody gets hurt.
Not me, not the person or organization I’m criticizing. Which brings me to Stephan
Pastis who recently revealed in his strip Pearls Before Swine his negative opinion of
Sally and Ted Forth (and Sally in particular). What did Sally Forth ever do to Pastis?
And why does he suggest Ted should cheat on her?
If I knew Pastis I would say to him, “From one extremely opinionated person to
another – keep it to yourself. You can think it, but you can’t say it. Even if you were
right about it, which you were not, nobody will like you for saying it because, face it, it’
s just not nice! And Stephan, since you brought up the subject, why do you think
Sally is an ‘emasculator?’ Because after Ted got fired he spent the next 6 months
moping around the house in a bathrobe and never lifted a finger while Sally brought
home the bacon? Was this the emasculating thing that Sally did?!
Far be it from me to tell another comedy writer how to write a joke. But the word
‘emasculator’ is never funny. Well - revise that. The slang version of this word is
sometimes funny, but why Sally? Was it personal or is it symptomatic of a vast Hillary
Clinton backlash? If that’s the reason - shame on you, Stephan Pastis! Shame on
you!”
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