GOOD GRIEF, PURLY BROWN!!

Do you know what would make a great book?  Take all the Peanuts strips that feature Lucy giving Charlie Brown psychiatric advice (for the unbeatable price of 5 cents) and put them in a handsomely printed cofee-table edition.  The only place you wouldn't want this collection of Charles M. Schultz classics is in an actual Psychiatrist's waiting room.  Let's face it, Lucy was the worst posible person in that strip who could have been featured as a psychiatrist.  Even Pigpen would have been better qualified.  Reading all of Lucy's sadistic wisdom while waiting for one's own therapy session would most likely cause anyone reading it to get the heck out of there as fast as possible and to forsake psychiatric help for ever and ever.  It was rather remarkable that, time after time, Charlie Brown would keep coming back for Lucy's unique advice.  But then, this is Charlie Brown we're talking about. 

While Lucy is undoubtedly the worst mental therapist ever, there are topics where her idiosyncratic personality and her lack of any sort of tact would have been a positive.  Imagine for a moment Lucy as a knitting instructor.  Would her approach have been a tad harsh?  Undoubtedly.  Would there have been student tears in her sessions?  Most definitely.  But would one come out of there a better knitter?  I think so.  Linus would have knit his own blanket by the age of three.  Charlie Brown, the perpetual loser, would have put his neuroses aside and would have become a great knitter and quite possibly a decent crocheter also.  Schroeder might have stopped practicing his piano and instead, might have spent his free time creating unique lace shawls.  Snoopy would have abandoned the obsession he had for shooting down the Red Baron and instead have developed his own line of knitwear for dogs (I am still amazed at the number of wonderful designs there are for knitted projects for dogs.).  Pigpen would ... well, ....while Pigpen is not exactly the type of person you would want to see take up knitting, Lucy would have risen to the challenge.  She just would never have let him knit with anything but ultra-cheap synthetic yarn.  The type that makes those funny noises as they're being worked on needles.  Yes, Pigpen would have taken to knitting like an alligator to a swamp.  Marcie, my personal favorite Peanuts character of all time, would have been the most polite knitting student ever and might possibly have earned a one cent discount from Lucy's normal fees.

It is a shame Charles M. Schulz is no longer with us as he would have loved this new approach for his characters.  I only wish I could draw so that I myself might pay homage to that great cartoonist.  Instead, I offer you the attached caption.  Fill in your own dialogue.  And pay a visit to the actual tableau as it is displayed in the window of Montoya Fiber Studio - Cathy Montoya, owner and resident knitting expert and Fred Montoya, Vice-President in charge of window decorations and the tidying up of messy shelves filled with beautiful yarn.