I think they’ve done enough with fat mother jokes with Mrs Wolowitz. Let’s consider that Penny’s appearance is very important to her and that what she might think of as “fat” others might think of as merely zoftig (could stand to lose 20-25 lbs).
Excellent point!
It was Sheldon who commented on her mother’s appearance, at least in the
[quote posted upthread]
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19086709&postcount=123).
[quote=“Ellis_Dee, post:143, topic:745174”]
It was Sheldon who commented on her mother’s appearance, at least in the
… and Penny obviously agreed. No doubt Sheldon commented on her mother’s appearance when she showed him the photo, and it made an impression on her.
They’ve also done divorce and salt-of-the-earth pioneer woman more than once. Hopefully they’d come up with something different for Penny’s mother.
I would be interesting if, in her folksy, GED-educated, likkered-up way, she essentially has come up with the same child rearing philosophy as Beverly, formally Cooper-- we don’t know her last name don’t know her last name now.
Duh. Beverly “formerly* Hofstader*.” It appears that Leonard’s mother is continuing to use the name “Hofstader,” which makes sense if she is well-known as a published author under that name.
My mother got her Ph.D after she was married to my father, and published a couple of books, and numerous articles using her married name (she actually never liked her maiden name, and was happy to ditch it, although she uses the initial of her maiden name as her middle initial, because she also hated the middle name her parents gave her. She was widowed after 34 years of marriage, and remarried about five years later. She had retired from teaching, and doesn’t publish like she did before she retired, but she has written maybe one article a year, and translated maybe three or four a year. She still uses my father’s last name professionally, and uses it on her checking account, and just about everywhere. If a friend of my stepfather’s calls her “Mrs. Hislastname,” she answers, but she doesn’t really think of that as her name.
I’ll bet something similar is true for Leonard’s mother.
Anyway, my point in that badly-written post is that it would be funny if Penny’s mother had little education, tended to drink too excess, and basically was the opposite of Beverly Hostader-- sort of “all flesh,” the way Beverly Hofstader is “all mind,” and yet they had very similar ideas about raising children. We know very little about Penny’s relationship with her mother, but she doesn’t talk about it, and seems to have gotten most of her positive regard from her father, whom she talks about a lot.