Jean Teasdale
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Jean Teasdale is a fictional columnist of the satirical newspaper The Onion. She is an extreme example of a lamestress (female lamester) with kitsch tastes. Her column "A Room of Jean's Own" addresses such banal topics as her love of chocolate, plush toys, and Precious Moments figurines. Another major topic of her columns is husband Richard Teasdale, or "Hubby Rick", to whom she bemoans her childless state. The NASCAR-loving Rick is nothing like Jean, and in fact routinely mocks his wife. The two were actually forced into marriage after they had sex, in what Jean cheerfully describes as a "machine gun wedding."
She has two cats, Priscilla and Garfield. Her cat Arthur tragically choked to death on a Pinchers the Lobster Beanie Baby. Her middle name is "Meleanne", because her parents didn't know the correct spelling of "Melanie".
In her forty-odd years she has held dozens of jobs and been fired from almost all of them, not so much because of willful negligence or disobedience as because of her basic inability to focus on anything besides her own superficial desires long enough to develop a work ethic. For example, in her column "eBay? hOoray!" she describes having been fired from her data entry job at SouthCentral Insurance because she bid on a Miss Beaseley doll on eBay during work hours using her supervisor's computer, and then lied to her bosses about doing so. Jean's interpretation of this was that her supervisors were punishing her for having the courage to hang onto her childlike sense of wonder even as an adult (i.e. liking Miss Beaseley) instead of allowing her love of life to be crushed by daily drudgeries (i.e. doing the job for which she was hired.) This is a striking example of a general feature of Jean's columns: after reading them the reader has a more acute sense of Jean's circumstances, relationships, and even attitudes, than Jean does herself. The basic pathos of her existence is very clear even though all events are narrated from Jean's ostensibly sunny perspective.
Columns
Teasdale's most recent opinion columns include (with volume - issue):
- Test Your Jean-Q (40-13, published 3/31/04, [link])
- Sugar Baby (40-19, published 5/12/04, [link])
- Count Those Blessings (40-27, published 6/7/04, [link])
- Absolute Cute (40-36, published 9/8/04, [link])
- Walking on Empty (40-44, published 11/3/04, [link])
- Spawn of Santa (40-50, published 12/15/04, [link])
- Christmas In February (41-07, published 2/16/05, [link])
- Getting Our Jollies (41-13, published 3/30/05, [link])
- Snowball In Hell (41-21, published 5/25/05, [link])
- Shop Worn (41-30, published 7/27/05, [link])
- How Very Special (41-51, published 12/21/05, [link])
- Fabulous Trash (42-17, published 4/26/06, [link])
External links
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