Sunday, November 1, 2015

Betty MacDonald's life in October 1938



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

Vita Magica

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Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University 

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Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD

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Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I 

Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund 

 

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.


ragged edge magazine online
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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.