Annoying Bob is not two-timing his wife on his commercials

Here's a piece I wrote for the Dig about three years ago, which doesn't appear to be on their site anymore:

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What with all the other good news of the last few weeks -- a mostly-satisfying election, a new Thomas Pynchon novel I hear doesn't entirely suck, unlike the last couple -- I almost forgot to mention the most exciting of all: Cathy is back!!

No, not that horrible one-joke comic strip that even the Herald's increasingly lame comic section has decided is beneath them. Bob's Cathy. Oh, you know! CATHY! Okay, picture yourself watching late night television. Now visualize a Bob's Furniture ad. You see the thirtyish blonde who's standing just behind and to the left of ol' Bahb, making bizarre hand gestures that have nothing to do with what either of them is saying? Right, her. That's Cathy.

Specifically, she's Cathy Poulin, Director of Public Relations for Bob's Furniture, Inc. (You should have seen the look my wife gave me when she realized I had actually gone to the trouble of looking this up.) Over the last several years, I've gone from finding Cathy and her hyperactive hands one of the most irritating presences on local TV to one of the most charming. The tipping point came a couple of years ago on an ad comparing Bob's new mattress to a brand name competitor. While Bob was standing at the foot of his mattress, delivering his spiel about how it was impossible to tell the difference between the two, Cathy was in the middle of the shot, clumsily executing a spectacularly inelegant barrel roll from one mattress to the other. At that point, I realized that Cathy wasn't just another annoying non-actress in a cheaply made local commercial, but something entirely new: she's a TV personality who knows that she's painfully awkward on camera, and rather than letting that inhibit her, she has taken that gracelessness and just fuckin' RAN with it. Focusing on Cathy's manic coffee shakes added a quirky counterpoint to Bob's affable "I doubt it" everyman and, crucially, finally made me realize that Bob and Affordable Larry were not, in fact, the same guy.

However, we noticed over the course of the summer's ads that either Cathy was increasingly pregnant or a crewmember with a grudge was deliberately dressing her in an escalating series of horribly unflattering tops. (Full disclosure: I admit that part of my fascination with Cathy is due to the fact that, well, she's kinda hot, in that Connecticut soccer mom way.) This was followed by ads that featured other and less intriguingly inept employees, including -- most egregiously -- a mute and suspiciously blonde sidekick that Bob appeared to be attempting to pass off as a kind of second-string Cathy while the real one was away. (Shame, Bob! SHAAAAAAAAAAAME!) It was a bad move, losing the commercials' most memorable feature just as Bob's was starting to move down into the New York metro area. Which immediately paid pop-culture dividends, incidentally: last season, Saturday Night Live did a sketch commercial for a chandelier store featuring a blonde-wigged Rachel Dratch doing a dead-on parody of Cathy's signature moves. And so, in Bob's most recent series of ads, Cathy is back in all her self-conscious glory.

In fact, in what I like to think is a small gift for us devoted fans, one ad features her awkwardly jumping backwards into a couch, only barely avoiding tumbling right off while accidentally flashing most of her left thigh as she tries to keep from doing a face plant on the studio floor. God love that uncoordinated little spazz. Hey, Bob: always keep Cathy in your ads. Don't make me come down there and make jerky, unmotivated hand gestures at you.

Together in the Power Bob Adjustable Bed.

This is the Cathy of whom we speak, is she not? Hand jive and all.