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 <sTfcr k»ack«J My train of thought ran the express line straight to di/h f lover power kick; the Betty Was A Vitamin station uptown and when one opts for the express rather than the local, one misses a whole heck ijieUj J fW of alot of other stops along the way in their haste. SoI whizzed through a couple of stations I should've stopped at, including " (ZZZ West 4th and Lower Betty Wasn't A Vitamin After All, You Mis­ ry<>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 U<M supplement squad. That's right; a wooden vehicle with oddly Wlu~«- ^ ^ ioc,«^ .a-VcJ rounded-off stones for wheels that cranked solely by means of * h.t G ^ foot power (that funky lift-up-the-car-and-start-running thing Fred always did) received more prestige, more overall "props," as we say in the 90s, than Betty 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." • p 'fir'''--' • 4 S V • €r •< (*• <*5 i f / <r" *"• *•. E-mail: [email protected] .