JEAN TEASDALE

'Jean Teasdale' is a fictional columnist for the weekly satirical newspaper ''The Onion''.
Onion writer Maria Schneider took over the Jean Teasdale column in 1996. She also wrote the Herbert Kornfeld and T. Herman Zweibel columns (Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/content/archives/03/02/24/).
Jean is a housewife with a superficially bubbly (but shallow) personality and rather kitsch tastes. Her column "A Room of Jean's Own" (alluding to Virginia Woolf's ''A Room of One's Own'', and nearly the only high-brow reference Jean ever makes) addresses such banal topics as her love of chocolate, plush toys, and Precious Moments figurines. Another major topic of her columns is husband Richard Teasdale, or "Hubby Rick", to whom she bemoans her childless state. The beer-drinking, NASCAR-loving Rick is nothing like Jean, and in fact routinely mocks his wife. The two were actually forced into marriage by their angry parents - who caught them having sex in Rick's car - in what Jean cheerfully describes as a "machine gun wedding."
Jean is overweight and rather frumpy in appearance, and it is suggested in her writing that she is not particularly intelligent or educated. She seems to be at least somewhat aware of these shortcomings, however, and often copes with them through self-deprecating humor. Jean has few friends in life other than (she imagines) her readers, whom she often addresses as "Jeanketeers".
She has two cats, Priscilla and Garfield. Her cat Arthur tragically choked to death on a Pinchers the Lobster Beanie Baby. In an early article ("Hubby Rick and I Just Got Vanity Plates!"), she mentions that she has two cats named Max and Clementine, although no other mention of them has ever been made. Her middle name is "Meleanne", because her parents didn't know the correct spelling of "Melanie".
In her forty-odd years Jean has held dozens of jobs and been fired from almost all of them, not so much because of willful negligence or disobedience as because of her basic inability to focus on anything besides her own superficial desires long enough to develop a work ethic. For example, in her column "eBay? hOoray!" she describes having been fired from her data entry job at SouthCentral Insurance because she bid on a Mrs. Beasley doll on eBay during work hours using her supervisor's computer, and then lied to her bosses about doing so. Jean's interpretation of this was that her supervisors were punishing her for having the courage to hang on to her childlike sense of wonder even as an adult (i.e. liking Mrs. Beasley) instead of allowing her love of life to be crushed by daily drudgeries (i.e. doing the job for which she was hired.) This episode is a striking example of the ironic dynamic of Jean's columns: after reading them the reader has a more acute sense of Jean's circumstances, relationships, and even attitudes than Jean has herself. The basic pathos of her existence is very clear even though all events are narrated from Jean's ostensibly sunny perspective.

Contents

Columns

External links

Columns

Teasdale's most recent opinion columns include (with volume - issue):

★ ''Test Your Jean-Q'' (40-13, published 3/31/04, link)

★ ''Sugar Baby'' (40-19, published 5/12/04, link)

★ ''Count Those Blessings'' (40-27, published 6/7/04, link)

★ ''Absolute Cute'' (40-36, published 9/8/04, link)

★ ''Walking on Empty'' (40-44, published 11/3/04, link)

★ ''Spawn of Santa'' (40-50, published 12/15/04, link)

★ ''Christmas In February'' (41-07, published 2/16/05, link)

★ ''Getting Our Jollies'' (41-13, published 3/30/05, link)

★ ''Snowball In Hell'' (41-21, published 5/25/05, link)

★ ''Shop Worn'' (41-30, published 7/27/05, link)

★ ''How Very Special'' (41-51, published 12/21/05, link)

★ ''Fabulous Trash'' (42-17, published 4/26/06, link)

★ ''Not One of Those People'' (42-48, published 11/28/06, link)

External links

★ The Onion official profile on Jean Teasdale

★ A Site Of Jean's Own!!!!

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