Connie and the phantoms

As you might all remember, during the sixties, Archie Comics used to run a semi-regular feature called “Betty’s Diary” in which she would write down heroic tales of a glorious life where she was the apple of Arch’s eye only to have the artist throw her under the bus by showing us what actually happened. It thus became the mildly sinister tale of a deluded school-girl convincing herself that a boy who only dated her when his real girlfriend was being a jerk to him was her true love forever. The reason that I mention this is that how Connie Poirier describes herself is not what we actually see. The reason that this is important is that it puts an odd and unsettling spin on her eternal whining that she doesn’t rally have a grandchild of her own to be wonderful to.

After all, we have to remember things she’s at pains to avoid remembering. First off, she’s spent about twenty-five years not remembering that she’s pretty much disowned Lawrence for turning out gay and ruining her chance to be an actual grandmother. Second, she wants to avoid having to realize why it is that Gayle ran off to her birth mother as soon as it became an option because she doesn’t want to remember that she’s seen as more or less what would happen if Vicky The Babysitter were shtupping Timmy Turner’s dad. This tells me that she’s not going to have the self-awareness to look in the mirror and see that she’d be the same sort of entitled, short-sighted, short-tempered, immature, self-righteous and judgmental failure as a grandmother as she is everyting else in her life. The only substantive difference is that she’d also have someone to neglect and defame when Elly yaps about how haaaaard it is to pretend to be a grandparent.