9 Chickweed Lane

2-22-2023

I don't fully understand the time line of this particular story.

Mary purchased a recording of Amos' music and has it on her when she encounters Edda. Did they plan to meet? Was it a coincidence? Was it a planned coincidence? Edda infodumps at her, making it clear they haven't spoken in at least five years.

After Edda's quick summary of her life, Mary reveals some more emotional yet vague details of her own (does she have a job? children? pets? where does she live?). The two discuss Amos and how rad and sexy he is.

The two women encounter Amos (accidentally? on purpose?) who does not recognize Mary. Edda refuses to share Mary's identity. Mary has "a recording" which is... an enormous CD? A 7" album? She asks Amos to sign it. He doesn't remember who she is, which is embarrassing for him and mortifying for her.

The mortification seems to be the point.

Mary walks away. Amos recognizes her back, even though they spent years together speaking face to face, in addition to meeting twice as adults in New York (once at his instigation).

Edda and Amos, now dressed in formal wear, discuss Mary. There is no background or any sort of context clue other than their garb as to where they are. They dance in one strip, Amos plays the piano while Edda crouches on said piano in another strip, then in the third strip they are dancing (?) as Mary applies make up.

Mary slinks toward the "camera" only to be nearly "accidentally" kicked by Edda. She is in the same vague location they are, dressed in a formal yet incredibly revealing gown (like Edda is).

It's unclear how she got there. Did she follow them? Ask mutual friends? Come upon them accidentally?

Mary asks to cut in. Amos responds by bending Edda backward in a deep kiss and then picking her up and carrying her away.

Mary, alone, sits at a table. Seth, who doesn't recognize her, sits with her while he waits for his wife Fernanda. This is, apparently, a public place where strangers feel comfortable interacting.

The two realize they do know each other after all, via Edda. Seth mentions that he's gay, as cis men who marry cis women so very often mention. There's "witty banter" and then Fernanda appears. Mary finds her sexy (?). Fernanda sits in Seth's lap. Seth and Fernanda make out (in this public place) while Mary watches. Seth points out that Mary has never known True Love. ("True Love" is "sitting on someone's lap in public directly in front of a stranger making out hot and heavy" I guess)

Seth and Fernanda leave to dance. Mary remains at the table, lacking a dance partner.

Hugh approaches the table, stating he was meant to meet Seth and Fernanda there. I guess... tables... are assigned? Reserved? Mary has been there long enough that a glass of wine has appeared. We see that the table is fairly large, actually, with seating for 6. After announcing that they are horny and want to fuck Seth and Fernanda walk away, heading home, apparently without greeting or speaking to Hugh? We don't actually see them interact.

After striking out with gay, married Seth Mary tries flirting with Hugh who casually mentions his wife. Xiulan shows up, still massively pregnant. Like Amos, he's in a tuxedo. Edda, Fernanda, and Mary are all dressed in clingy, revealing, "sexy" evening gowns. Xiulan is in a baggy turtleneck and loose jumper (sleeveless dress worn over a shirt/pinafore).

Edda and Amos pop by (where did Amos carry Edda off to, exactly? and why?) to say hello to Hugh and Xiulan and say they are going home to... eat home made spaghetti. It's set up like Edda's going to announce their plans to flee and fuck, of course. No, no. It's spaghetti. The fucking comes later.

Edda... invites Mary home to eat spaghetti with them?

Everyone else leaves, with Hugh and Xiulan remaining at a large table... in a dance hall?

I mean, I'm assuming this is one of their much-beloved Tango Salons since McEldowney established fifteen or twenty years ago that these folks attend them regularly. However there is literally no way any recent and/or casual reader would ever know that.

Mary and Edda ran into each other in a white void, discussed Amos in a white void, talked to Amos in a white void.

Edda and Amos, in different clothing, danced in a multicolored void. Mary, similarly attired, joined them in the colorful void. More characters joined them. The only furniture? A piano, a large table, some dining chairs, and a glass of wine. Ok, a glass of wine isn't furniture. Set piece.

It remains unclear how Mary found them there. Did they plan to go there together? Did the three couples plan to meet there? Did all seven of them plan to dance together? Why on earth would you get dressed up, travel to a place, dance one dance, then go home? Why on earth would you get dressed up, travel to a place, dance one dance, then go home to eat spaghetti?

This kind of... feels like Mary was ritually humiliated and now that she's been torn down to mud she can be permitted in their home. Assuming she wasn't in their home before. They may have all been standing on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in their living room. Waiting for a bus. At the zoo. At a different dance hall.

Tomorrow's Thursday. What will the strip bring? More Mary? Some kind of flash back to toddler-aged Amos and Edda discussing conceiving children? Edda and Amos as adults eating ice cream and riding ponies without their children? Mark proclaiming his finally-realized love for Janice or some other girl? A talking cat being wrong about grammar?

I'm tired.

2-20-2023

A friend of mine very literally threatened to throw an intervention so I'm going to keep this short.

It's weird to introduce yourself to a stranger with your full name, right? I met a bunch of people at a party a few weeks ago. None of us exchanged last names.

Mary seems to attend a lot of concerts. Very cultured. Very refined. She even recognizes Hugh somehow.

And I'm tickled by her "his... wife!?" thought balloon, like the idea that he's managed to trap someone in a marriage is so unbelievable, so surprising.

It's interesting that she states he accompanied a cellist, not was accompanied by a cellist. Xiulan was the focal point. I guess her very large pregnant stomach didn't interfere with playing the cello? I have no idea how that works.

Xiulan is wearing street clothes, a baggy turtleneck and loose jumper, to dance with her husband who is in a tuxedo. Formal gowns for pregnant people exist, and also she's a gazillionaire and can easily have all of her clothing custom made. But no, she made this sartorial choice.

And I guess her turning to the side after taking off her coat was meant to be a Big Reveal except 1) regular readers already know she's pregnant and 2) she looks pregnant from the front.

I've been pregnant and I cannot imagine a very pregnant person enthusiastically dancing the tango. Not as far along as she is, anyway. Pregnancy is exhausting, it changes your center of gravity, and it limits your mobility.

The only way to redeem this stretch of story is if this all acts as a means to re-introduce these characters to the strip, a sign that we're going to be seeing more characters doing stuff, more story telling, Edda and Amos actually interacting with other people. But, I mean, they didn't interact with these people at this event, they dipped before anyone else arrived so they could fuck. So I don't know if this is even possible.

I expect we'll see Isabel and Burkhardt next.

2-17-2023

And once again...



Fernanda was an EXTREMELY skilled professional ballet dancer whose career was cut short by a severe knee injury. I mean, she was in her prime. Famous. It’s a huge tragedy, an abrupt derailment of her entire life.

It was mentioned in passing then never brought up again.

Her knee will NEVER have the strength, flexibility, or range of motion it once did no matter how much physical therapy, exercise, stretching, etc. that she does, and it’s prone to re-injury.

Tango is a dance that involves the kind of twists likely to re-injure her knee.

Perhaps that’s why instead of dancing Seth is waving her around in the air. Flapping her around. Just whipping her around. Sweaty dancers slipping closer to feel the breeze of her passing.

I just... she's a collection of body parts loosely wired together, flopping around. This isn't how bodies work.

McEldowney has spent all this time rubbing his characters' sexy One True Love relationships into the Single Sad Lonely character's face but he made that character to so what's the point? What, sincerely, is the point of all of this?

Especially as he could be spending this time telling a story exploring, say, what it's like to have your career end over a decade before it should have because you fucked your knee up. What's it like to have the one thing that defines you taken away from you? To have what you love destroy you? To fall in love with, and marry, someone who's doing your dream job every single day. She's married to her former dance partner. He, older than her, is still dancing. She can't dance. What is that like? Her dancing is what initially attracted Seth to her. Now she can't dance. How does she feel?

And, God help me, I just realized that McEldowney ended her dance career so that Seth would have to admit he loves her womanly self not just her ~~artistry~~. He can't be in love with the way she dances if she can't dance.

2-15-2023

Wow, Mary, you're missing SO MUCH!

If only you'd committed adultery with the RIGHT person you could be humping your way across a tango salon RIGHT NOW!

2-11-2023

I don't know how something that was already mortifying hours ago can go on to turn into a "a first-rate embarrassment."

It's very polite of Seth to announce his full name so that the audience can recognize him as opposed to all the other beef headed hulks who aren't Amos that McEldowney populates the strip with.

That said, just cannot wait for more humiliations for Mary.

Is she based on a real person, and did that person do something to McEldowney recently?

2-09-2023

Note how Edda's gown is both utterly skin tight, clinging to her and highlighting her curves and also extremely voluminous and billowing with every move while still clinging to her buttocks.

I'm not EXACTLY sure what's going on w/Mary's skirt there. It's got a double slit, one on each side? One side slit but she worms her legs around so it slithers over the forward facing thigh as she walks? Like is she just wearing a really long loin cloth here? Is that her dress situation? A slit up her skirt on each side with the material in the center trapped between her thighs as she wriggles her way painfully across the floor? How is she MOVING? And why doesn't she know enough to maintain a distance from dancers?

Edda and Amos flail wildly as they dance, Amos swinging Edda around and throwing her into the air only to catch her and toss her backwards etc. Really they should be swing dancing or something, but there's no sexy accordions with swing dancing as far as I know.It must be deeply, deeply unpleasant for everyone else there. Just... these two humping on a piano then careening wildly around the room legs and dress akimbo before they start humping on a chair.

How many tango salons do you think they've been banned from?

And how would Mary know they're there? She slumped off, defeated, the last time we saw her (ok, time before last). Then these two donned evening wear and went, alone, to a tango salon. She doesn't know any of their friends!t's not like she can ring up Seth and be all "Hello, my fellow adulterer. Do you know where Amos, a married man with twin children who makes his living as a cellist, spends his evenings? Because obviously it's not at home with his small children!"

McEldowney tries to have it both ways w/Amos. He is an absent minded dork with poor social skills who is extremely literal in ways that many people find baffling if not insulting, skinny and chinless and balding, and also so appealing that multiple women have tried to seduce him.Isabel Florin, famously sexy slut and amazing pianist; Xiulan Goldaming (nee Yuan), unbelievably wealthy Chinese woman and amazing cellist; Mary Rosenzweig, childhood crush and flautist.

These beautiful women have all attempted to seduce him WHILE HE WAS IN A RELATIONSHIP.

In a relationship, I might add, with an incredibly beautiful and graceful accomplished young woman who speaks French, was a professional ballet dancer with an elite ballet corp, was a professional model, plays piano at a professional level based only on private music lessons as a kid and a lot of practice, plays viola, & I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting.

I mention the private music lessons because Amos didn't just major in music. The gifted motherfucker went to Julliard. He plays multiple instruments, he composes, he orchestrates, he conducts, he does EVERYTHING. He STUDIED this shit. He lives and breathes music. Edda took lessons a few times a week and banged around on a piano in her home when she felt like it, and she's somehow on par with him, and with his intensely-trained highly educated peers.

I get it, I get it. Amos is a self-insert, a dorky nerd who is appealing to women somehow. (It's me, I'd find him appealing in real life. My husband monologued about Sauron for 1/2 an hour last night.) But yet another installment of "a hot chick throws her dripping wet panties at Amos while Edda frowns disapprovingly and then humiliates her somehow" is pretty boring. And insecure.

And the worst thing about this strip... the absolute WORST thing about this strip... is that a sultry lady slinking panel by panel toward the viewer and then being thrown awkwardly off balance should be funny! But it's done so poorly here that it's not!!!

What would have made this funny is if the thing that threw her off balance was a completely different dancing couple and one of them was dipped so Mary was avoiding their HEAD or maybe an extended arm, not a kicking leg. Like she's so focused on slinking toward someone that she doesn't notice the chaos around her and said chaos interrupts her slinking but not in a, like, VIOLENT way. And the dancers DO NOT NOTICE HER AT ALL. She's not in their world. She's just another person. That would, yes, require drawing other dancers and perhaps hinting at the existence of a back wall or something. Maybe one of those sexy, sexy accordion players (NOTE: accordion players are pretty sexy people based on the accordion players I know. Charming and funny, too).

It would also not involve what looks like a direct attack from Edda.

Again, I'm REALLY hoping that Mary is there to see someone else because dang it doesn't make sense for her to be there on Amos'. We've already established it doesn't make sense to pursue Amos. He's married, he's happily married, he has no interest in her, Edda was her best friend who treated her decently enough (except for never telling Amos to stop stalking her).

Some people might be holding out for a thruple here, but given how uptight McEldowney is about people having the wrong kind of sex (it has to EITHER be IN WEDLOCK or between two heterosexual people DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER) it's not going to happen. Given the contempt Edda feels for most women it's absolutely not going to happen.

2-7-2023


Oh man, this has it all:
Edda humping a piano
Edda in a skin tight evening gown
Edda's bare leg
Amos looking dapper, playing a musical instrument
Edda talking floridly of sex
Amos talking floridly of sex
Tango/Bandoneon

All that's missing is an audience made up of people fucking on top of tables while small children provide commentary.

Anyway, I'm sure it's meant to be romantic/sweet/sexy that Amos is casually saying he'd cheat on his wife with Edda were he to have wedded someone else but it's actually kind of gross ... especially given just how much adultery is complete anathema to Edda. Well, when other people partake in it, I guess.

It's rich saying she's never thought of him as "so sinful" when this motherfucker spent a week licking her feet on a New York sidewalk in front of passers by. If that's not sin then I don't know what is.

11/14/2022

She isn't really "throwing herself" at him, she's wearing a slip dress with a high thigh slit while standing with her hands on her hips.

NOWHERE do they make a hot coffee/is that coffee hotter than I am/etc joke. It's just left lying on the table, unused. But at least we know that Amos loudly "splurps" his coffee, moaning, while he drinks it. That, right there, is possibly reason enough for divorce.

The middle panel proves that McEldowney is not an ass man. Just... fundamentally proves it.

The strip ends like so many 9 Chickweed Lane strips: with the two of them thrusting their groins into each other most unsexily, at least one of Edda's legs on full display. Her legs have the trademark airbrushed highlight, details added nowhere else, with her foot kind of crammed last minute up against the top of the panel.

I am, again, going to take the bold stance that the one foot-centered week aside he doesn't have a foot thing. Why? Because her foot, in a very boring shoe, is obviously an afterthought crammed into the top of the panel while her leg and leg alone is airbrushed to perfection.

You wouldn't think it to look at his noodle arms and sparrow chest but Amos is apparently able to support 120+ pounds of dead weight with one arm while splurping down his coffee.