Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for July 23, 2019

Acronyms, how do they work? (Or: Sorry, Lucy.)

Hah! Love it!

I hope a little of this modesty sticks. Nancy wouldn’t be Nancy if she wasn’t somewhat self-involved, of course, but I didn’t care for her foray into outright solipsistic narcissism during the fallout phase of her breakup with Esther. The basketball arc has brought her back to a good balance I think where her egocentrism is amusing rather than toxic.

Team Sane El.

Has Nancy actually learned something?

I’m guessing the basketball situated episodes are winding down.

But the many complaints about the “basketball” subject matter going on endlessly reminded me of another story.

In 1977 I was teaching literature to high school seniors. They often tried to get me “off the subject” in class so they wouldn’t have to learn anything that day. Sometimes, I went along just to slip in something teacherly without their knowing I was teaching. One day their ploy was to ask me if I’d seen the movie “Saturday Night Fever.” They knew I saw lots of movies and figured it’d be easy to get me to talk about that rather than the short story they’d been asked to read.

I went with it. They asked me what the movie was about. I said, approximately, that it was about a kid from a working class family who had a difficult home life and couldn’t imagine how to improve his situation. He sought escape and a sense of self worth by becoming the “king” of the local dance scene, but ultimately he knew that this was only a delaying tactic to hold life at bay just a little longer. His problems were still there, some even getting much worse.

I mentioned that it was based on a non-fiction article from “New York” magazine called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” and talked about how the movie reiterated the bleak nature of the story. [But, P.S., about twenty years later, the author of the piece admitted it was not really journalistic reporting but had been a piece of fiction he slipped past the editor.]

We managed to have a classroom discussion about their looming entry into the post-high-school world and how that was akin to the themes in the movie. Productive, it seemed.

One kid, at the end of class, said, “Huh. I thought it was about disco dancing.”

I think of that when someone focuses on these strips as “this basketball story.”

I am glad Nancy knows enough to share the credit.

Hmm, did OJ give all those characters those names long ago with today’s payoff in mind?

Too bad they couldn’t work in something including Coach.

No one is expressing any happiness, except for maybe Nancy in panel 1.

8

So very, very good!

I too wonder how/if Ms. Jaimes had the N.A.N.S.E.E. acronym in mind when she first named the new characters? It seems too much of a happenstance to not have had it in mind….. but it also seems almost “novelesque” of Olivia to have refrained from using the acronym for so long if she has had it in mind from the inception of the new characters!

There is no ‘i’ in ‘Team NANSEE.’

Nancy is really changed! :D

Too bad Coach Bangles didn’t get any credit. It’s all about Nancy and the immediate audience. Part of being a famous person.

most excellent