Love Is Walking Hand In Hand – With Lucy van Pelt (1965)

In out first look at Love Is Walking Hand In Hand, Charles M. Schulz’s gorgeous book on what The Peanuts gang know of love, we focused on Charlie Brown, the comic strip’s eternal optimist. As Schulz said, Charlie Brown’s character is “full of hope and misdirected faith”. Now we look at Lucy van Pelt, a kind of I Love Lucy written in the first person. Lucy is over-confident, sharp and crabby. She’s keen to show Charlie Brown the perils of too much dreaming. “She’s always going to do that, you know” says Schulz in Charles M. Schulz: Conversations (2000) of Lucy’s invitation to Charlie Brown to run up and kick the football, “he’s never going to get to kick the football.” And like that un-kicked football, Peppermint Patty with her ‘D-‘ scores and Linus van Pelt waiting for the Great Pumpkin who never arrives, Lucy too knows failure. She’s knows what it is to hanker after the man of her dreams who thinks she doesn’t exist, in her case the piano-obsessed Shroeder. “I don’t want any downs,” says Lucy, “I just want ups and ups and ups.” But nobody get those, not even Snoopy. But love is prepared to wait…