Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
perhaps you are one of our winners of Betty MacDonald fan contest.
You'll be able to find the names of our winners in Betty MacDonald fan club newsletter November.
Betty MacDonald fan club contest question was:
What happened to Betty MacDonald on October 30, 1938?
( see answer below )
What's about a new breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick?
Enjoy a great Sunday,
Max
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The Plague and I
by Betty MacDonald
On October thirtieth, a month and two days after I had
entered The Pines, a nurse appeared in our doorway at the beginning of
rest hours and ordered me to get ready for a ride in a wheelchair
I
asked her where I was going but she said only, "Shhhhh!" and left. There
was probably some excellent reason for it, but the practise of coming
for patients in wheelchairs and not telling them where they were going,
or what was to be done to them, always seemed cruel and senseless to me.
A wheelchair brought to your bed could mean the dentist, surgery, light
treatments, examinations, X-ray, fluoroscope, the movies, a lecture,
dismissal, moving to another hospital, a death in the family, any number
of things, generally unpleasant but never as unpleasant as the not
knowing, the speeding down corridors with racing pulse and rocks in your
stomach.
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Issue 5 2002 Anne Finger:
Betty MacDonald is best known for her book
The Egg and I (a bestseller when it was published in 1945, it was made into a movie starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurry) and her children's books, the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series. The Egg and I is the story of a city girl who, at the age of 18, marries a chicken farmer -- from "that delightful old school of husbands who lift up the mattresses to see if the little woman has dusted the springs" -- and settles down with him to raise children and poultry -- and conceives an almost pathological hatred of chickens.
Published in 1945, The Egg and I is a classic
of the wisecracking, disgruntled dame variety -- but it isn't hard to see that beneath that veneer, the book voiced real complaints about women's lot in marriage and a tough streak of anti-romantic realism. (It also contributed to the image of Seattle and its environs as a realm of backwoods eccentrics -- a far cry from the current stereotype of grunge rockers and latte-drinking drones for Microsoft.)
The Plague and I (1948), MacDonald's subsequent
-- and largely ignored -- autobiographical follow-up, concerns the year she spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium. In it, she brings the same grim humor to the story of her institutionalization and the dehumanizing treatment she experiences there. |
