Images Best Departed

October brought us a couple of notable obituaries. First, rest in peace, dear Barbara Billingsly, the actress who gamely portrayed June Cleaver, mother of the Beaver, for nearly six years on the TV sitcom Twilight Zone we know as "Leave it to Beaver."

Barbara, as an actress I'm sure playing June was at first just another gig that just happened to grow into an iconic representation of idealized Baby Boomer youth without your help. But, oh what that gig hath wrought. As if post-World War II women didn't have enough trouble, your character came along in this time of simmering suburban angst to remind women that they were expected to be perfect in all elements of their life all the time.

No doubt, several generations of psychotherapy practices were able to pad their billings with the worries of women who felt like they would simply never live up to the insane standards represented by the matriarch of the Cleaver clan.

As the husband of a strong, smart, capable and beautiful wife, I'm delighted that she was never burdened with the insanity that was the June Cleaver ideal. As with any woman who holds down a full-time job and also has children, she naturally has her moments of worry over how her time is divided up. But as unrealistic ideals of motherhood go, she faces nothing like the guilt potentially wrought by not being able to go through a day of cooking, cleaning, child-rearing while wearing fashionable outfits, sporting immaculate hair and a flawless pearl necklace.

The other notable demise came in the form of the long-running comic strip "Cathy." As a guy, my primary response to just about every panel of "Cathy" has been, "Please, Lord, don't let this be the way women really think." And after 42 years on this earth, I do realize that that "Cathy" represents some small shred of accuracy as far as conveying the workings of the female mind.

But, damn it, that doesn't make me like it any better, and it certainly won't make me miss the strip now that it's gone. As far as I'm concerned, that spot on the comics page will now be freed up after 34 years of hyper-whining about dieting and clothes shopping to include A) a fresh new comic voice, and B) perhaps a funnier and less pathetic representation of the female psyche.

I'm thankful on behalf of my children, too. My daughter won't be traveling through life with the "Cathy" stereotype of the attractive-but-secretly-psychotic woman hung around her neck and will be free to create her own female reality that may include work and marriage, but isn't obsessively focused on both.

My son, meanwhile, won't be faced with daily printed reinforcement of the suspicion that all women are crazy and focused on little more than dieting, acquiring the next piece of chocolate and roping a man into a long-term commitment.

And we all will be free to further explore the possibilities of the truly funny, such as this appropriate farewell to the strip from a fellow artist on the comics page.