Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 21, 2021

1970 Buick GSX Stage III, now that was a bad-ass muscle car!

I could see her in a 1970 Dodge Charger painted Plum Crazy.

Some of us still do spend hours making it bad*** and keeping it bad***. Alas, it’s becoming a dying art form…

POWER WHEELIE SHOOTOUT DRAG RACING OLD SCHOOL AMERICAN MUSCLE CARS AT BYRON DRAGWAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPni9A0jfY

TOTALED Muscle Car Returns to the Road After 35 Years! Flooded LeMans Gambler Car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnGSXXooAGg

We learn that “parked in her rickety old garage is a brand new shiny red Super Stock Dodge.”

Is this strip set in Pasadena?

Caulfield, we were cooler than you will ever be.

That old girl has a history.

Caulfield just got a shot of the young and reckless Mrs. Olsen. He’s boggled but not out.

So, in this fictional world, she can say this to a child in a school, but in the real world we have to * it out. After all, children might see it!

Keep asking those questions, Caulfield. A rewarding experience for interviewer and interviewee.

Just did the Math, if we assume that “today” in the strip is 2021, then Ms. Olsen would have been at least 70 if she bought her new muscle car in 1972 after starting her first teaching job. Yeah…that sounds about right.

She was a hot mama!

Actually, you could just buy a muscle car. Starting with the 1964 Pontiac GTO until high gas prices, insurance rates and emission standards killed then off in the early 70s, every American manufacturer had a least one model with the biggest engine that would fit under the hood. Those were the good old days.

Get a starter kit, say the 1980 Buick Grand National, and go from there

She taught Frazz in his day, do I recall correctly?

Don’t make an * * * of yourself Caulfield…

She has a shiny red super stock Dodge in her gararge. Now I’m showing my age.

Ask her how to tune a four barrel carburetor, Caulfield.

It must be gooder english day!

Muscle cars were straight-line bad*** – braking & cornering, on the other hand…

It would be fun to see a few retro strips showing her in her day. Was she young and sassy? Tom Boy tuning her car? Inquiring minds …

Anyone else concerned that an elementary school teacher said something censorable to a student?

I think the approved locution would be "You didn’t use to just buy . . . " Use plus the infinitive is nowadays pretty much confined to the past tense, but it wasn’t always, as in “Fred uses to drink three cups of coffee in the morning, he used to drink five or more”. “Empty ‘do’” in a past tense or negative construction confuses things a bit, but the grammar is straightforward.

You didn’t USE to buy the car. Used is a verb in past tense. When making a negative, the auxiliary (helping) verb takes on the past tense and the main verb doesn’t.

Once again the redoubtable Mrs. Olsen gives us just a tiny glimpse of the amazon behind the patient, professional facade.

We didn’t say bad to mean the opposite.

It is an eye-opener when you first learn about the other parts of your teachers’ lives.

For some reason, I suddenly heard Margo Martindale as Mrs. Olsen and you can’t convince that’s not Olsen’s actual voice.

What? No hot 5 Star General food recipes included?

Jef Mallett’s blog

When I first started drawing up Frazz, Mrs. Olsen was supposed to be two-dimensional and terrible. Not that I believe that’s how teachers are, or how people are in general. I just thought that’s how storytelling worked. You had a villain. And I figured the honest thing to do was make the villain absolutely a villain. I’m not sure where I got that idea — after all, I’ve always been a fan of movies and novels where the good guys ranged from flawed to so bad you weren’t sure there were really any good guys in the vicinity — and it didn’t work for doodly squat anyway.

I’d like to say I recognized my mistake and quickly grew bored with the evil Mrs. Olsen. But it’s more like Mrs. Olsen didn’t like her role as it was written and gradually changed it. (Trust me, that’s how it works.) She developed. Now my challenge, as the writer, isn’t to find new, charming sides to her personality. The challenge is to keep her cantankerous enough, consistently enough, that the bursts of character still have a little element of surprise. Plus, you still need a villain. Just not a pure one. Those, it turns out, are as boring in a story line as they are in real life.

I love Caulfield’s expression. And I’ll just bet that one of the questions he wants to ask is: “Are you speaking from experience ?”