Peanuts Characters: The Later Years (Part 1)

Every year, the Great Pumpkin fails to come, Charlie Brown’s tree turns into a Rockefeller Center tree look-a-like, and the Easter beagle makes an appearance. But what has always struck me is that these kids never grow up. They had too, right? They couldn't just stay kids forever, so what happened when they grew up? Here is where I think they are today.

Lucy van Pelt

After high school, Lucy went off to college and tried to study psychiatry. She soon flunked out and after a year travelling Europe in an effort to “find herself”; she returned to the U.S. and got a job as a talk radio host in Yakima Washington. Her mixture of psycho-babble, anti-authority politics and women’s empowerment rhetoric soon made her a favorite of lesbians and libertarians alike and she is currently nationally syndicated under the radio name of Dr. Lucy Feltpetter.

Peppermint Patty

After an endless string of D- grades in high school, Patty dropped out in her junior-year and took off for California searching for her place in the world. Her love of sports landed her a wide variety of gigs, everything from a corner cut man for local boxers to the equipment manager for the Triple A Sacramento River Cats. Later she found minor fame and fortune as the "Red Bomber" on the Roller Derby circuit but had her career cut short by an ugly folding chair incident. She is currently the owner of a number of small businesses in the San Fernando Valley including three convenience stores, a roller rink, and a strip club featuring topless dancing and deep fried peppermint patties.

Sally Brown

Sally went to the University of Wisconsin where she majored in Communications, beer bongs and frat boys, often combining all three in one night stands that started with multiple beer bongs and ended with long vocalized rationalizations as to why getting drunk and screwing random frat boys didn’t really make her a slut. Her senior year she volunteered for the Clinton for President Campaign and parlayed her work there into a job with a Washington DC lobbying/public relations firm where her drinking and frat boy enticement skills are quickly getting her a reputation as one of DC’s up and coming Congressional lobbyists. She has been engaged to a congressional staffer for nearly two years, but secretly thinks getting married will hurt her career so she keeps refusing to set a date.

Marcie

Marcie moved away just before high school because her homophobic parents were worried she was in love with Peppermint Patty. That wasn’t true, of course, because Marcie really had a crush on Charlie Brown. But away she went and after a few years of private tutors and excellent schools, Marcie went to MIT. There she excelled in chemistry, specifically, lubricants, polymers and plastics research. She was a lead member of the team that developed the heat shield for the space shuttle. She recently married a bioengineer she met on Match.com and they are expecting their first child Mensa member in June.

Schroeder

Schroeder tried as hard as he could to make it as a concert pianist, but never made the big time, having to settle for jobs like “featured soloist for the Des Moines Metropolitan Orchestra.” In order to make ends meet, he played keyboards for a local Jazz quintet and tuned pianos. After several flings with bored housewives whose pianos he “tuned” -- sometimes weekly -- he met a jazz singer who introduced him kinky sex and heroin. Eventually, Schroeder got sober and  landed a regular gig playing in the piano bar on a Caribbean cruise liner filled to the Leto deck with out of tune women.

Pig Pen

He changed his name to Mike Rowe and has a successful television program on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs.

So, that's part one.  Part two will be coming soon and we'll answer the questions America has always had about some of our favorite cartoon characters, questions like: Did Linus ever lose the blanket?  Did Charlie Brown ever get to kick the football or was his life really just a bag of rocks?

Till then my friends, I'll see ya in the funny papers.