Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about life six months from now is that we're going to be dealing with a heaping helping of deja vu when Molly makes the scene. When Lynn wrote 'The Lives Behind The Lines', she put a lot of effort of talking about a sort of dark aura of negativity that surrounded the girl and in Connie's bio, she made a lot of noise about how her dark influence over more tractable and Elly-loving Gayle made the girl go off with her birth mother and shiv poooooor Connie in the heart and deny her the chance to be anyone's mother of the bride and a whole host of other annoying whimpering that would probably be regarded as specious nonsense by a select committee of Scooby-Doo villains and bad guys from Totally Spies.

It seems to never have occurred to either Connie or Elly that maybe, the best thing to have done was to not consistently trivialize the girl's concerns. Sadly, trivializing the concerns of adolescent children is what both of them are really good at. Just as the Connie of 2016 still holds out hope that Lawrence will admit that being gay was a phase and present a vain half-wit with grandchildren, the Connie and Elly of 1987 lived to do unto them the same shit they hated when it was done to them by their parents. Take, as a for instance, Elly's pious, ill-informed and short-sighted crack about some boy she'll never meet being a jerk because Molly ain't heard from him. Oh, sure, she could be told later on that Greg and Connie are screening Molly's mail and answering the phone to keep her away from THAT BOY but Elly would still think that even if he wasn't a jerk, they should do the same thing Jim HAD to be doing to her because kids grow up too fast these days.

The problem is that she's making a problem for her family. Just as April would target the poor slob who made her feel insecure because she can't fight back against her parents, Molly found someone in the neighborhood she could terrorize in order to at least feel as if she's winning. This comes into play when she threatens to destroy Mike's reputation because she was mildly inconvenienced. It wouldn't have solved sweet Richard all because Greg would still vamoose in order to avoid having to feel guilty, Connie would still be a self-absorbed nutjob nailing herself to her cross, Elly would still be a pious blockhead AND she'd be thought of as a bully who went way too far on a relatively innocent kid because she was in a bad mood. Since she's been in the real world for about twenty years, she's more than likely ashamed of that phase of her life. This means that we'll have to wait for April to be thirty-five before she finally starts to cringe at the thought of lying about not being jealous and insecure.

Having established that a potential employer would only hire Elly if he or she were looking for a drudge who can be sweet-talked into doing the menial labor that pushes her envelope of competence if the joe-boy job she's barely good at is dressed up really nice, let's see how the people she employed in her hobby business see her.

Let's start with the woman who actually ran the place when she was off babbling witlessly about not being able to work a computer and allowing a lying thief to help her boyfriend jack the place and threaten her child. It seems to me that Moira tended to view Elly as being someone who simply didn't understand what a retail business was all about but had to be taken more seriously than she should because she owned the place on paper. What this meant is that she had to stand by and grin while the dimwit boss she had to flatter made idiotic business decisions like getting rid of a coffee counter that brought in customers, throwing temper fits because customers didn't give the vain dolt with the turnip-shaped honker the deference she deserved and letting a lying thief manipulate her. This probably means that she regrets the day when said imbecile's dentist husband helped bankroll his moron wife's need to play magnate.

As for that lying thief I'd mentioned, Kortney got away with a lot of mischief because she saw our hero as an inattentive dilettante with a bottomless appetite for flattery who she could manipulate with ease. All she needed to do is whine about made-up hardships, tell lies small children could see through and tell Elly how great she was and she'd avoided getting sacked for stealing from the business, helping her boytoy loot the place and threatening April.

Since Moira and April did most of the real hiring, it's not much of a surprise that Kortney's replacement Bernice is a sort of clone of Moira herself; she too regards Elly as a well-meaning but inept obstruction who simply wasn't cut out to work retail.

Finally, we come to April herself; Elly seems to have hired April on to keep her from running around unsupervised and adjusting her attitude. This backfired hilariously when Kortney threatened to punch April in the face for informing on her; given how stupid Elly is and how little she trusts her children tell her the truth (as well as her oh-so-characteristic refusal to even see the possibility that she should make things right with her child), all she did was inflame the sort of animosity that keeps April from phoning, writing or e-mailing her poor aggrieved mother.

One of the trends I've noticed in the strip is the not-very-well hidden emnity between mothers and daughters. Given Lynn's issues with her own mother, that's maybe not such a surprise. We start off, of course, with Liz and Elly. At first blush, you'd assume that they get along fairly well but you'd be mistaken. Time and again, Elly feels shut out of Liz's life because it takes something really awful to get her to open her mouth. The rest of the time, Potato Nose is on the outside, wishing the blinds weren't drawn. I remember a long screed about why Liz taled about things to her teacher and not her, as if she didn't know that her failure to stand up to Mike and insistence that she raise April for her was the problem. It's of a piece, though, with Elly's clucking her tongue that her mother wouldn't listen to her excellent advice. Any suggestion that she was a boorishly inept know-it-all was the ranting of a picky-face. In comparison to the passive-aggression we see from these two, Deanna's open contempt is refreshing in its honesty.