I’m going to level with you—today is one of the days when I’m not completely sure the picture I’m showing you is of the right person. I was reduced to comparing noses, and she looks like the right person. But I was deliberately looking for a picture from after 2001, and most of her images are from well before then. In the ’80s. She did a little acting—an episode of The New Avengers in the ’70s, a little bit of other stuff. She did a lot more writing and producing—she was basically the showrunner of WKRP in Cinncinnati for a while. And she was out of the public view for the stretch of her life where she was transitioning. Out of respect to her, I wanted to show her from that era; it has proven difficult to do so.

And I don’t know; perhaps she’s why WKRP wasn’t as misogynistic as many other shows of the era. Okay, so out of the show’s recurring characters, two of them are women. But that feels appropriate to radio in the late ’70s and early ’80s, honestly, as is the fact that neither woman was an on-air personality on the show. But despite Loni Anderson’s pure sex appeal as Jennifer, she was never said to have slept her way to her position and indeed so far as anyone knew shared her personal life with no one. And Bailey, played by Jan Smithers, was attractive in a tomboyish sort of way and just went about doing her job and being good at it. I’m not sure any of the characters treated women badly except maybe Herb who you weren’t supposed to emulate anyway.

Similarly, Real Genius is not terribly sexist for an ’80s movie. It’s not perfect, goodness knows, but there’s actually a female character with agency and motivation and things who provides tangible assistance to the assorted male main characters. It’s one of the better snobs-versus-slobs comedies, where the slobs are going to win not because of dirty tricks—though there are a few of those—but because they’re so good at what they do that it doesn’t matter. I’m trying not to read to much into how feminine Gabriel Jarret as Mitch has read to me, but I do think it’s notable that a woman is third-billed in a fairly long cast list, albeit not one that’s anywhere near gender balanced.

Honestly, that’s about where my knowledge of her career runs out. I’ve seen bits of Guarding Tess, which she also wrote, but not the whole thing. I never got much into SCTV at all, and therefore I am unfamiliar with the Cisco Kid sketch on which she appeared and which she cowrote. I haven’t seen the first Caddyshack, much less the second one—which she wrote—and Back to School is a movie I remember my mother watching without us when I was a kid that I’ve never felt the need to catch up with as an adult. Really, from what I know, the two parts of her career I know best are the two parts most worth knowing.

And none of that career was credited as PJ. This is where I have a certain amount of sympathy with catalogers. PJ absolutely had the right to change her name and to no longer be called by the one under which she was credited, and I’m deliberately not using that name here. But at the same time, I know that, if I go back to my WKRP discs, they’re going to have that name on them. So I do understand the fact that you either acknowledge those credits or else lose her entire body of work and why she’s a noteworthy person. Come to that, I’m pretty sure IMDb is old enough so that her page was originally under that name and was changed some time after that, possibly at her own request. It’s not an easy problem.

Stonewall was a riot; contribute bail funds for your local protesters.