Roxanne and Allie are so, so bummed. About the task, and not their obnoxious behavior, because they would be "great" in a cartoon, because their voices are fit for stardom. If Roxanne were a cartoon character, she'd be...see, I don't know cartoons! The only cartoon I ever watched was Pepper-Ann, because I support my lesbian sisters. And Mo Rocca used to write for it. If I were making up a cartoon, though, Roxanne would be "Snopes McGee," a no-nonsense kid who was always solving crimes like Encyclopedia Brown, and Allie would be the pixie-voiced villain, "Sweetie Penmark," who fools all the adults into thinking she's sweet as pie, when really she's just biding her sociopathic time. The first season would end with her diving into the town lake for her penmanship award, and all you see is bubbles, and that's the cliffhanger. The second season would reveal that she's faked her own death and it's actually her that ruined the school play, and this particular hijink has set her back a grade, and that's what really causes her to break with reality because she already knows subtraction and she hates being treated like she's not Gifted & Talented, so she leads an abortive coup during naptime that results in the permanent disfigurement of the school's Language Arts teacher: ironically, she bites through her own tongue and can no longer properly pronounce coronal consonants, so she has to just grade essays all the time, which gives her the ability to perfectly mimic all the students' handwriting, including the seemingly repentant Sweetie Penmark, who is eventually struck by lightning after the Language Lab teacher tells her to do a role-playing project about "Bendanin Fnanknin," thus finally getting revenge for her tongue disability. It's kind of high-concept, but that's The N is for.









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