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December 2000 Issue

Nothing Rhymes With Orange:
Hilary Price Takes an Offbeat Look at Cats, Stamps, and Judaism in Her Syndicated Comic Strip

By Rahel Musleah

By now, cartoonist Hilary Price is used to e-mails that read, "Hey! You've got cameras in my house!" For the past five years, her strip, Rhymes with Orange, has translated the details of daily living into truth, humor and art.

So what rhymes with orange? Nothing. And that's Price's point: Her strip shows a singular, offbeat perspective. (It doesn't hurt that she has red hair, either.)

Take the one about the journey of a glass of water from the bedroom back to the kitchen (it takes nine days), or "Phenomena of the Late Twentieth Century," in which people shun the stairs in favor of escalators and elevators, then pay for a step class at the gym.

In "The Rules of Attraction," one cat says to another: "It's weird how they criticize us for walking into a roomful of cat lovers and going straight to the one person who hates cats." "As if," responds Cat #2, "they don't walk into a party, find the one person who is completely unavailable, and try to rub up against them."

How did a nice 25-year-old Jewish girl from Weston, Massachusetts become the youngest woman with a daily comic strip, now syndicated in 80 newspapers?[note: she's now 30] An inveterate doodler as a child, Price loved The New Yorker cartoons, and was inspired in eighth grade when she learned that the "Boynton" of greeting card fame was a woman.

She intended to use her English major at Stanford University in writing or teaching, but her first job, writing ad copy, left her feeling that she "didn't want to make toothpaste emotional." The San Francisco Chronicle ran her first cartoons; that motivated her to submit to King Features Syndicate.

If toothpaste didn't inspire her then, it probably would now, especially since her studio is in the the former Prophylactic Toothbrush Company in Florence, MA, and she admits a passion for "pedestrian objects" like her grandmother's wooden-handled eggbeater.

Her punchy, concise writing outweighs her lack of formal artistic training. "A cartoon can have bad art and good writing," she says, but not good art and bad writing."

As she reads newspapers, listens to the radio, talks to friends, and notices her own daily activities, she jots down her ideas in a notebook. Realizing she saved "ugly stamps" for bills and "pretty stamps" for letters, she created a strip commenting on the reason the postal service prints both kinds of stamps: nobody would pay their bills otherwise. The pressure is on by the end of the week, when she has to submit seven strips to her editor in New York.

Judaism, Price says, "informs her worldview," and she is not afraid of using it in her work. On her website, www.rhymeswithorange.com, one section is even titled "How are Jew?" Here are Jewish Gardening Tips: Take one poppy seed bagel, toast, eat with lox and cream cheese, open window, turn toaster upside down over window box, water: poppies should bloom by springtime.

When her editor balked at the possible offensiveness of this strip, Price argued that Jews like to see their culture represented. She didn't receive any criticism.

For this Hanukkah, she is planning a strip about a kid in a spelling bee. The word in question?

(C)hanu(k)kah.

Rahel Musleah is the author of Why On This Night? A Passover Haggadah for Family Celebration, that also includes recipes (Simon & Schuster). She also presents programs on Jewish India. This article originally appeared on www.JewishFamily.com.

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