Location, location, location.....

As we continue our jarring journey into the hybridized format, we can point out two logical absurdities in the staging device. The first is, of course, obvious to everyone who isn't looking for an excuse to jam it to the storyteller. Namely, a small child is naturally going to think that the people that she's met have always been the same age that they are right now. If you were to show Merrie a series of photos of Jim taken at ten year intervals, she'd assume that she was looking at six or seven different people. The second absurdity is far less obvious. Not only does Merrie think that people have always been and always going to be the same age, they've always lived and always will live in the same place. This is, of course, because a preschooler thinks the universe is essentially static and change unnatural and wrong. When you add in the fact that said child doesn't really believe that there are places that she has never been, we're in for a confusing round of nostalgia. This attatchment to place is not only going to confound a five-year-old, it can also, as I've said before, explain some of the deeper resentments in the strip. To start with, Mike had to move at a very young age. As far as he knew, his world was being turned upside down without his prior approval to accomodate his baby sister. He may have forgotten the trauma of having to move but he never got over resenting Liz for 'making' him. He can safely be said to marrying his own kind depending on which back story of the Sobinski family Lynn has decreed official. If it's the one where Wilf and Mira fled Cold War Poland, Deanna sometimes wishes they'd've stuck around waiting for the Iron Curtain to come down. That way, she'd have been spared the trauma of being the child of weird foreigners.