Richard Thompson: Local Personality
September 8, 2010
For the past couple of weeks, I have been telling people that I met Richard Thompson.

Richard Thompson. The people squint and go into a brief trance as that search companion dog in their local drives flips through the pages of folders and files searching for the phrase. If anything appears in the found window at all, it inspires something such as, "Richard Thompson. The Waltons guy, right? With the thing on his cheek?"

Some do a little twirly finger gesture around their nose and ear.

"No that's Richard Thomas. Richard Thompson. The cartoonist."

Slight shake of the head.

"Local [DC] guy. He does Richard's Poor Almanac and Cul de Sac."

Now a slight shake with a shrug.

"His work appears in The Washington Post. Style section. Post magazine."

It is then that I am reminded that almost nobody reads The Washington Post, or its Style section, or its magazine any more. In fact, this past spring, I went on a scavenger hunt set up by Dave Barry and Gene Weingarten in an attempt to save the Post Magazine. My teammates were Harvard or MIT grads. One graduated from both Harvard and MIT. Another merely went to Rutgers, but she still has an infinitely better shot at winning a Nobel than you and I do. Did our team even get close to solving one clue? Is the Woodley Park-Zoo Station close to the zoo?

Those in the almost-nobody set who still read a Sunday paper will say, "Oh, yeah. Richard Thompson! Brandy!"

"No. Brandy is Frank Cho. I met him, too. Last year."

"Did you and Cho talk about women's...?" More gestures, but with both hands.

"No. Frank seems to be a very quiet guy. So does Richard Thompson."

In fact, Richard Thompson is nothing like what you imagine the creator of Richard's Poor Almanac to be. Looking at the big-shnozzed figures that come out through his pen, you conceive of him as something like an Al Hirschfeld, barreling through school zones at 50 mph in a '73 Fleetwood and unabashedly parking it on the sidewalk if he can't find a space. What's Richard Thompson like? Go to one of his signings and find out yourself.

In the meantime, dig up the 2004 edition of Richard's Poor Almanac(1) and cherish Thompson as a dying breed, a local DC personality in the great tradition. That means he is one who experiences and suffers the same traffic, news coverage, media obsessions, humidity, snow piles, local lore and assorted imbecillities that Washingtonians suffer, and who makes Washingtonians laugh at them. He's kind of like a Lisa Baden who can draw. Assuming that Lisa can't.

Remember the northern snakehead, the voracious, land-crossing, so-called "Frankenfish" that the radio news people yakked about for months. I laughed so hard at the limerick in Thompson's snakehead cartoon that I memorized it:

In a pond where it didn't belong,
lived a snakehead the size of King Kong.
It ate all the fishes
and said, "How delicious!
"But now I'll be moseying along."

Too bad I could never laugh at Math, Biology and Metric Verse so hard. Thompson also happened to write "The Anthrax Song" a few months before October, 2001. Bad timing if there ever was.

I enjoy thumbing through the poor almanac so much, I hate when it comes time to flush. There's the "Guide to Local Boogeymen" ( The Arlington Headless Soccer Mom), birds no longer recognized by the Audubon Society (The Unmitigated Gull, The Commonplace Dullard) and restaurant closings (Cap'n Bill's Crabhouse and Dinner Theatre: production of "The Vagina Monologues" deemed inappropriate.).

Yes, Washingtonians should cherish Richard Thompson as they cherished Glenn Brenner.

(1) Richard's Poor Almanac: 12 Months of Misinformation in Handy Cartoon Form, Richard Thompson, Emmis Books, Cincinnati, OH, 2004