Worse, it forces him to write in character, as a wild, feral youth who "stole a key, took a car downtown where the lost boys meet... we'll run riot," as he sings on Charlie Brown.

You can use an underscore (Scala's standard wild card character) as a placeholder to catch any type of exception (really, to match any case in a pattern matching expression).

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character.