G. B. Trudeau - 40. A Doonesbury Retrospective 1990 to 1999

2/25/90

T his is how surreal it became: On May 27, 1977, I found myself at a podium at Boalt Hall, UC Berkeleys law school, poised to give the commencement address. I glanced down into the front row of students, and there in the center was an empty seat, upon which had been placed a program and mortarboard. This was Joanies chair, where she would have sat in rapt anticipation had she in fact been real.

To a surprising degree, she was, if only to me and the Class of 77. Thered been the turbulent admissions drama, when I placed Joanie on the waiting lists of several real law schools. After three hundred students organized a petition demanding she be admitted, Boston University sent her an acceptance letter, as did Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and five other schools. From there, it only got stranger. Everyone played it straight. There were the innumerable forms I had to fill out on Joanies behalf. Her student card and packet arrived, as did the university magazine. For three years, she received letters from the Berkeley community, and when she graduated, a Southern California law firm offered her a job. Soon thereafter, the Exxon Educational Foundation announced a $100,000 Joanie Caucus Exxon Fellowship Program to aid women over thirty who wanted to become lawyers.

When writers are lucky, theyll occasionally create a character in whom readers become unusually vested. The downside is a tremendous pressure to treat that character gently, to not place her in jeopardy from which she cannot escape. But in Joanies case, I was happy to oblige, to let her survive the downdrafts and soar into a new future, becoming the kind of role model that the times seemed to demand. While its true that role models tend not to make very interesting characters, the unfolding revolution of feminism was so inherently dramatic, I never considered giving her another path.

Especially since I was having so much fun. Joanie was joining a feminist cohort whose company I happened to enjoy; indeed, I named her after the National Womens Political Caucus. Thanks to her, I found myself at large gatherings in which I was sometimes the only man in the room. Skeptical male friends thought I had stumbled on a brilliant new dating paradigm, but mostly I had a sense that these women were on the edge of some extraordinary social shift and I didnt want to miss out.

Of course, personal transformation can sometimes inflict collateral damage, and the price Joanie paid was the enduring fury of J.J., the child she abandoned. By now, the rift is clearly beyond mending. Ive painted myself into a corner with J.J.; her resentment has hardened, and there are too many people who have borne this kind of rage through their entire lives to make a tidy reconciliation fully believable. Still, Joanies life is its own kind of triumph. She remade her life at precisely that moment when society would finally support it in a woman. That some of her choices should leave her racked with regret no longer surprises. As my wife likes to say, there are no charmed lives. Only lives.