#204: Therapy Cat
Jenny from Ad Sales got a new dog named Arlo. He’s a yellow lab & a retired therapy dog. The thing about therapy dogs is they take in all the energy of their owners, so after a while they just get kind of burnt out. Apparently, this is what happened to Arlo and he’s just not really up to absorbing anyone’s energy anymore, especially Jenny-level energy, so he’s not much of a therapy dog these days, he’s just a regular dog who kind of mopes around the apartment. Jenny doesn’t know what happened on Arlo’s prior assignments, but it must have been pretty draining. When he’s not mopey, he’s started barking at every little noise day and night, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of getting a retired therapy dog. Jenny’s grown attached to Arlo and doesn’t want to get rid of him, even through she says he’s not really doing his job. (I told her, in his defense, he is retired.) So the vet suggested Puppy Prozac for his absorbed anxiety. It seems to be working, bc Arlo’s not barking as much, but he’s still mopey & Jenny thought he seemed like maybe he needed a therapy animal of his own. So she got a cat. She named it Gus, after Artie’s dissembling alt-country singer cat, who himself is named after Asparagus the theatre cat from Cats. Now there are 3 of them in the apartment. Artie made a series of panels for this one that basically told the whole story in a dialogue between two cats sitting on a fence. It was 10 panels long & ventured into French/German absurdist theatre territory, closing with the throwaway line “So why are you wearing that mask, anyway?” The Committee, of course, rejected it. Artie had this short version on standby bc he knew how it would go, but he gave Jenny the originals and she framed them and hung them over Arlo’s dog bed. The cat sleeps in the closet. -Ed.
(P.S. Krenshaw proposed we hold this one until Halloween & run it with the caption “I think I’m just going to go as Simba again this year.” But it came back from the S-MCSS focus groups with a 2.3/23.0, which is well below the publishability threshold.)
