SIGNAL 1998 Features 24 The Last Word By Mandi Albright
VITAMIN B FOR BETTY?
Michael, who works here at the university, e-mailed me this past week, informing me of an apparent grievous error I'd made in the "Betty's Not A Pregnant Tooth brush" column from Feb. 17. If I re member correctly, I went off for about 700 words on some tangent about my Linguistics class and sentence anomalies — sense goyS j tain? yecJi- eKcepf if toaS less sentences, that is — and a local band, Betty's Not A Vita X toho rf'cJ dJl -ffe min, with what I figured was not only a cool name but a pos sible example of a sentence anomaly. of evil u kfepf sJjoof informed Rushing-To-Beat-Deadline Hack. tae. Me. Hey did 01'yelkr I'm just beating myself up, really; Michael and the other two eagle-eyed regular readers noting my mistake—Dori (an lOMW CrJCr other university employee) and Heather — were kind when X ytss I wotU 3^4 4k? correcting me. Nobody sent me flaming email saying anything like, "Hey, you chowderhead! Betty wasn't a Flintstones vita r,h9 •JK.5 make ytjo -preI min! You're a terrible journalist! And 1 enjoy punctuating all my ,4JvS a tid+le beffer: X ^nk sentences with exclamation points, so there!" But the scant frffte cufe. \t\ few e-mails trickling into the cyberoffices of The Last Word 3*°% SdH- <>£ these days are predominantly good-natured and even when I'm running lateI know I can count on seeing some message 'o from a thoughtful reader in my e-mail telling me that I'm a pretty decent hobnobbingobstoppingooglymooglybricabracksnack- andpackinfuddemuddemoodlenoggin—even if I occasionally fudge a fact or six. » And that's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago whenI rather hurriedly pounded out "Betty's Not A Preg nant Toothbrush."I honestly thoughtI remembered Betty be ing part of what I've now come to understand was a right clique- . J •ish group of vitamins but maybe I'm simply suffering from Flinstone flashbacks, sinceI popped the things like they were candy instead of the sugary sources of vitamin C they suppos edly were. Michael says Betty wasn't considered a favorite with the kiddies back in the day and therefore wasn't included as R I C C I N one of the Fab Flintstones. But Fred's car was a prominent, viable member of the ' Is F*' + fi-f T(,/ a UBetty Rubble — good wife, home- maker, mother to little white-haired Bam Bam and perennial second banana to she of the flaming red beehive and freshly Ajax-ed cave, Wilma. Adding injury to insult, as it were, it appears Betty was thevictim of, well, womanhood. Designers 0 mean,I guess someone "designs" Flintstones vitamins) were afraid Betty's slender 1960s-erasize two waist would snap, in its vitamin form, scaring the kiddies. Heather writes, "The Flintstones vitamins did not contain a Betty until about one or two years ago. Ac cording to one articleI read in a magazine or paper, the maker of the vitamins couldn't make a Betty because her waist was too thin and she kept breaking in half." Ladies, back me up here: If Betty had been a regular shopper in what has to be the most ineptly-named section of any given department store—the women's department—she no doubt would've been considered "too fat," for lack of a more tactful adjective, for inclusion in Flintstones vitamins. Betty, like the majority of women, was either too thin or not appeal ing enough or too frumpy. But Wilma, with her Baroque bee hive and leopard-print "housedress," fit the mold (forgive the pun) of womanhood for vitamin designers. Whatever the rea son, Betty Rubble wasn't considered fit to satisfy a growing child's masticulatory tendencies and Wilma Flintstone was. Betty is now a vitamin but I think she's reached the dreaded "glass ceiling." Can she aspire to more than supple mental status? Michael says (and I agree), "Given the life of disappointments that Betty's obviously had, I'd say the chances aren't good."
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