Today's Cul de Sac

Petey recently got two additions to his cohort, Andre Chang and Loris Slothrop, bringing the total now to four and a half, if we consider Ernesto as possibly imaginary and therefor not a whole number. Fight it though he might, Petey's needed to expand his horizons for a while and the hard part was figuring out how to do it logically and gracefully and naturally.

I read an interview with Neil Simon recently where he discussed writing the Odd Couple and though he didn't talk about the obvious pairing of opposites in the play I kept thinking about that part of it. Petey attending Cartoon Camp had been mentioned a few months ago which meant he'd have to be exposed to new people. And as Petey's fairly meticulous and in perpetual retreat he needed an opposite, other than Alice, someone his own age who's sloppy and loud and big. Somebody who's a nice enough guy with his own weirdnesses, who Petey might like but who'd drive him up the wall pretty quickly. Et voilá, Andre Chang. Loris is put together from bits of anime characters that my daughters like and is tiny and high-energy, on the theory that large, clumsy Andre and inert Petey need an electron to orbit at light speed around them to complete the molecule or atom or whatever. So it's almost like math or physics, both of which I excel at of course.