Betty MacDonald, Wolfgang Hampel, Betty MacDonald Xmas surprise

Betty MacDonald fan club fans, Send us your favourite text from very witty book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel, please and you have the chance to win a signed first edition of Betty MacDonald's Nancy and Plum. We have a wonderful Xmas surprise for everybody who joins Betty MacDonald fan club Xmas contest. Deadline: December 23, 2020 Everybody is a winner because we have a great Betty MacDonald fan club Xmas surprise for you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Betty MacDonald fan club fans, a new fascinating Betty MacDonald biography by Wolfgang Hampel, bestselling author of ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) will be published in 2021. Wolfgang Hampel was a very good friend of author Monica Sone, dexcribed by Betty MacDonald as Kimi in The Plague and I. Monica Sone shared the most interesting info on her wonderful friend Betty MacDonald. Wolfgang Hampel and Betty MacDonald fan club are working on this golden treasure for many Betty MacDonald fans around the world. Have a nice Wednesday! Take care, Mats -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/2020/07/readers-praise-satire-ist-mein.html Why are funny books so important? Take me, I'm a very optimistic personality but in these days I need some kind of support. Therefore I'm very glad and grateful I can read a very intelligent and funny book. Satire ist mein Lieblingstier (Satire is my favourite animal) by Wolfgang Hampel is a perfect example of very funny and very intelligent literature. Yes, indeed it requires lateral thinking; making unexpected connections; being one step ahead of the reader. If you are looking for a very funny and very intelligent book try brilliant Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel. You'll enjoy it as much as I do and many, many delighted readers around the world. Take care, Martine Didier ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Betty MacDonald fan club fans, we wish you a very happy Wednesday with one of the funniest books ever written. Send us your thoughts regarding humour, please. We are going to include the best essays in our next Betty MacDonald fan club newsletters. You might be one of our Betty MacDonald fan club surprise winners. Good luck! Why do I think that Satire is my favourite animal by Wolfgang Hampel is such a popular book? I guess the reason why is it's so witty and intelligent. Yes, it's true. You can read Satire is my favourite animal over and over again the same way I do and it won't bore you. To me this happens very, very seldom. Very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel the best recipe for bad mood and depression - especially important in times like we have now. Please don't miss Satire ist mein Lieblingstier by Heidelberg author Wolfgang Hampel ( Satire is my favourite animal ) one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. (UK, USA, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries) Very successful writers are going to introduce their fascinating books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. You are very welcome! Vita Magica setzt ihr Programm auch 2021 fort. Im ersten Halbjahr werden großartige neue Autoren ihre sehr erfolgreichen Bücher vorstellen. Vita Magica will continue with fascinating new authors and their very interesting books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. A fascinating new Vita Magica program. Wir brauchen jetzt sehr witzige und heitere Bücher!!! Golden laughter is very important - especially now!!!! Das wunderbare Buch ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel ist ein brilliantes Feuerwerk der besten Pointen mit sehr geistreicher, witziger und hintergründiger Unterhaltung!!!!! https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Wenn Sie ein sehr humorvolles Buch lesen wollen, dann verpassen Sie bitte nicht 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' von Wolfgang Hampel. Das sehr witzige Buch 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel lieben vieler Leser auf der ganzen Welt!!!!( USA, UK, Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz und vielen anderen Ländern ) Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel is like golden sunshine in very grey November. Please don't miss very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ). It's one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. It brings lots of fun and joy to many readers around the world. Many of them including me take this best medicine for bad mood every day. Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica founder, Wolfgang Hampel from Heidelberg, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is working on a new Betty MacDonald biography. 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' by Wolfgang Hampel is very successful in USA, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can read Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel over and over again and it won't be boring. Don't miss it, please. Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.com/Satire-ist-mein-Lieblingstier-Satirische/dp/3958281559 Happy Wednesday, Greta

Betty MacDonald, Monica Sone, Wolfgang Hampel

Betty MacDonald fan club fans, a new fascinating Betty MacDonald biography by Wolfgang Hampel, bestselling author of ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) will be published in 2021. Wolfgang Hampel was a very good friend of author Monica Sone, dexcribed by Betty MacDonald as Kimi in The Plague and I: Monica Sone shared the most interesting info on her wonderful friend Betty MacDonald. Wolfgang Hampel and Betty MacDonald fan club are working on this golden treasure for many Betty MacDonald fans around the world. Have a nice Monday! Take care, Mats -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/2020/07/readers-praise-satire-ist-mein.html Why are funny books so important? Take me, I'm a very optimistic personality but in these days I need some kind of support. Therefore I'm very glad and grateful I can read a very intelligent and funny book. Satire ist mein Lieblingstier (Satire is my favourite animal) by Wolfgang Hampel is a perfect example of very funny and very intelligent literature. Yes, indeed it requires lateral thinking; making unexpected connections; being one step ahead of the reader. If you are looking for a very funny and very intelligent book try brilliant Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel. You'll enjoy it as much as I do and many, many delighted readers around the world. Take care, Martine Didier ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Betty MacDonald fan club fans, we wish you a very happy Monday with one of the funniest books ever written. Send us your thoughts regarding humour, please. We are going to include the best essays in our next Betty MacDonald fan club newsletters. You might be one of our Betty MacDonald fan club surprise winners. Good luck! Why do I think that Satire is my favourite animal by Wolfgang Hampel is such a popular book? I guess the reason why is it's so witty and intelligent. Yes, it's true. You can read Satire is my favourite animal over and over again the same way I do and it won't bore you. To me this happens very, very seldom. Very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel the best recipe for bad mood and depression - especially important in times like we have now. Please don't miss Satire ist mein Lieblingstier by Heidelberg author Wolfgang Hampel ( Satire is my favourite animal ) one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. (UK, USA, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries) Very successful writers are going to introduce their fascinating books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. You are very welcome! Vita Magica setzt ihr Programm auch 2021 fort. Im ersten Halbjahr werden großartige neue Autoren ihre sehr erfolgreichen Bücher vorstellen. Vita Magica will continue with fascinating new authors and their very interesting books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. A fascinating new Vita Magica program. Wir brauchen jetzt sehr witzige und heitere Bücher!!! Golden laughter is very important - especially now!!!! Das wunderbare Buch ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel ist ein brilliantes Feuerwerk der besten Pointen mit sehr geistreicher, witziger und hintergründiger Unterhaltung!!!!! https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Wenn Sie ein sehr humorvolles Buch lesen wollen, dann verpassen Sie bitte nicht 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' von Wolfgang Hampel. Das sehr witzige Buch 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel lieben vieler Leser auf der ganzen Welt!!!!( USA, UK, Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz und vielen anderen Ländern ) Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel is like golden sunshine in very grey November. Please don't miss very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ). It's one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. It brings lots of fun and joy to many readers around the world. Many of them including me take this best medicine for bad mood every day. Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica founder, Wolfgang Hampel from Heidelberg, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is working on a new Betty MacDonald biography. 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' by Wolfgang Hampel is very successful in USA, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can read Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel over and over again and it won't be boring. Don't miss it, please. Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.com/Satire-ist-mein-Lieblingstier-Satirische/dp/3958281559 Happy Monday, Greta -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Issue 5 2002 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. -- Anne Finger 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. I knew that a wheelchair during rest hours usually meant the treatment room. The treatment room for me! My hands quivered like springs as I tried to tie my robe. I sat weakly on the edge of the bed and phrases from the lesson on surgery swooped around my head in a horrifying circle like bats. "Phrenicectomy, thoracoplasty, bilateral pneumothorax, collapse of both lungs. My heart pounded and my hand grew wet and clammy as I waited. Kimi [MacDonald's roommate] tried to comfort me. Her cheeks scarlet with excitement and apprehension, she said, "At least you know that anaesthetics have been discovered and whatever they do to you will be painless." I said, "Yes, but just the fact that they are going to do something to me must mean that I'm not getting well. Remember the lesson: 'There are cases that do not improve with rest, fresh air, and good food.'" We could hear the creak of the approaching wheelchair. Kimi said, "Breathe deeply quickly with both lungs. It may be for the last time." The nurse came in, I fumbled my way into the wheelchair like a trembly old lady, we rolled down the hall past the Charge Nurse's office, through large, double swinging doors and into the treatment room, where I was delivered wheelchair and all to the treatment room nurse, a Miss Welsh. Miss Welsh looked cheerful and proved both understanding and kind for she told me at once that I was to have artificial pneumothorax. She said, "For heaven's sake stop looking so scared, there's nothing to it." The treatment room, a very large old-fashioned operating room, was divided into sections by white sheets hung on rods. Miss Welsh whispered that all new patients were started on pneumothorax by the Medical Director; that he was behind the curtains and was very irritable when operating. Indicating by rolled up eyes and a finger on her closed lips that I was to be absolutely quiet, or else, she disappeared behind the curtain. The treatment room had windows to the ceiling, pure white walls and strong overhead lights and I sat in my wheelchair, absolutely quiet but blinking and squinting in the strong light and feeling like a mole that had suddenly burrowed out into the sunshine. There were two other patients waiting. One was the blonde with the gold tooth, who had brought washwater on my first morning at the sanatorium. She wore the same maroon sweater and was tatting something shrimp pink. She smiled but said nothing. The other patient was a young man with thick straight dark hair, very sunken brown eyes and feverish red cheeks. His navy blue flannel robe had a blob of egg on the lapel and I could tell that he was a very new patient because his fingers were still brown with cigarette stains. He showed not a glimmer of interest in me, the blonde or his surroundings, but stared morbidly at a large black framed motto which read, "It's good to have money and the things money can buy -- but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you have some of the things money can't buy." "Like tuberculosis," I thought bitterly. I was getting very sick of mottos and maxims and beautiful thoughts and as the minutes slogged by and there was no human sound from behind the white curtains, only occasional metallic clicks or the gushing sound of a faucet, I grew more and more apprehensive. "What were they doing behind there? Had something gone wrong? Why didn't somebody say something!" I moved my wheelchair back a little but this only brought me face to face with another motto, "Worry, the interest paid by those who borrow trouble." I felt just like Eileen [another patient] and wanted to shout rudely, "What knothead thought that up?" Just then the curtains parted and out came Little Miss Teacup Cavities of my first trip to the bathroom. She said goodbye to the Medical Director and Miss Welsh and was retrieved by a nurse from our ward who curtly took possession of my wheelchair. Miss Welsh indicated that the feverish boy was next and that I was to sit down on a bench beside Gold Tooth. I was so scared I was practically in a coma. Pneumothorax! Collapse of the lung! I was sure that I would suffocate. I remembered with disconcerting vividness the time, when I was twelve years old, I had tried to crawl between the crossed supports of a diving platform and had become firmly wedged. I drew air into my lungs in great gulps as I recalled the horrible smothering sensation and the long breathless terrible minutes it took Cleve to free me. I derived small comfort from the fact that everyone had told me that there was no sensation, no pain, to pneumothorax. Hadn't everyone told me that having a baby was just like a little case of indigestion? Indigestion maybe, but the kind you'd get from swallowing a cement mixer. I could now see the wall that had been behind me and it framed another motto. "Let thy speech be better than silence or be silent." Obviously somebody's mother had been scared by Bartlett's Quotations. I resolved to burn my copy the minute I got home. The thin blonde began to cough, first, however, neatly laying down her tatting shuttle and covering her mouth with a paper handkerchief. When she had finished she put the used handkerchief into an envelope of heavy waxed paper, put the envelope into her sweater pocket, then picked up her shuttle again. I could feel a cough bubbling in my chest. I swallowed hard and concentrated on "a cough can be controlled" for in my hysteria I had forgotten my waxed paper envelope and clean paper handkerchiefs. It was very warm in the treatment room and as I controlled my cough I could feel my face turning a dark unhealthy red. A nurse opened the outside door and looked in at us. Apparently neither the blonde nor I was what she wanted, for after looking at my red face suspiciously for a minute or two, she shut the door again. I grew fascinated with the blonde's tatting shuttle. It darted in and out of the shrimp pink like a dragonfly in a hollyhock. The pink thing was square and lacy and seemed to be some kind of a yoke. I had seen many such yokes displayed at county fairs and could easily picture it completed, its virulent color clutching the top of a too-short white cotton petticoat, cut on the bias and sucked in at the knees. Miss Welsh finally emerged again from behind the white curtains and motioned to me. My heart gave a wild leap of fear but I got up and marched resolutely over to her. Whatever it was, I was willing to face it, to get it over. She helped me off with my robe and the tops of my pajamas and up onto an operating table. She told me to lie on my back with my left arm above my head, then painted the entire upper left half of me with mercurochrome. The Medical Director was washing his hands over in the corner, his back to us. When he had finished washing the nurse handed him a pair of rubber gloves, which he put on without speaking. Then he poked me experimentally in the ribs, looked at my x-rays, examined my case history and said, "Yell if you want to but don't flinch!" I felt the prick of the hypodermic needle, just under my left breast, then an odd sensation as though he were trying to push me off the table, then a crunchy feeling and a stab of pain. "There now," the Medical Director said, as he attached the end of what looked like a steel knitting needle to a small rubber hose connected to two gallon fruit jars partially filled with a clear amber fluid. The nurse put one jar higher than the other and I waited frantically for my breathing to stop and suffocation to start. There was no sensation of any kind for a few minutes then I had a pulling, tight feeling up around my neck and shoulder. The doctor said, "I guess that's enough for today," took the needle out, slapped a bandage on me and I got down from the table, dizzy with relief. Climbing back into bed, I had a terrific, overwhelming desire for a cigarette. A cup of hot coffee and a cigarette. Laughing so that she would know it was just a little joke, I told the nurse but she looked disapproving and brought me two aspirin and some lukewarm water. By suppertime I had sharp knifelike pains in my chest and had spit up a little blood. I excitedly reported these symptoms to the Charge Nurse and she immediately put my bed down flat and said that 1 was not to walk to the bathroom and was to eat all my meals lying down for three days. She then explained calmly that the pains were adhesions tearing loose, the blood was probably from my nose, that I was most fortunate to be able to take pneumothorax. She said the only reason I hadn't had pneumothorax as soon as I entered was because of the shadow on my right lung. She said that this shadow had cleared and I was a very lucky young woman. Lying on my back, spilling tea and little slimy pieces of canned pear down my neck, it was difficult for me to see eye to eye with the Charge Nurse, especially as I had felt perfectly well without a single pain of any kind before I got so terribly lucky and was given pneumothorax. The maxim on my tray was: "I would rather be able to appreciate some things I cannot have than to have things I cannot appreciate." From then on until I left The Pines, like all the great clan of "gas" patients, I was given a jigger of "gas medicine," a brackish-tasting liquid, before every meal. For three days and nights, each time I moved I had severe tearing pains in my left lung. I took aspirin and tried to concentrate on feeling fortunate but succeeded only in feeling very tubercular. Friday morning, just after temperatures and pulses, a strange man stopped at our door, read my name from a list he was holding, told me to put on my robe and slippers, helped me into a wheelchair and started toward the elevators. "Now what?" I asked myself, my fear-addled brain trying to recall the various forms of surgery used if pneumothorax was not successful. When the elevator door had clanged shut, the man said, "Ever been to fluoroscope before?" I said no, and he said, "You'll like it. You can talk and you'll see people from all over the hospital." My sigh of relief almost collapsed my other lung. Before we had rounded the second bend of the tunnel leading to x-ray, we heard what sounded like the chirping and twittering of thousands of nesting birds. "Fluoroscope patients," the x-ray man explained. The noise was almost deafening as we rounded the last bend and came on about eighty patients, both men and women, but carefully sorted according to sex, sitting on benches along the walls of the tunnel and waiting to be fluoroscoped. The x-ray man pushed my wheelchair to the door of the laboratory and callously left me facing the benches and the eighty strangers, who immediately stopped talking and unabashedly looked me over. Feeling like a pimply blind date and very conscious of my gray lips and uncombed hair, I lowered my eyes and examined the fingernails on my shaking left hand. When the talking at last began again, I was sure much of it was about me but I was able to raise my eyes and observe. Most of the patients were young, in their teens and early twenties, and appeared robust and very healthy. The female patients from the Ambulant Hospital wore makeup and hair curled and arranged in slightly out-of-date fashions. The degree of out-of-dateness varied with the length of time the patient had been at The Pines and what had been in vogue when she entered. Most of the women were doing some form of fancywork and knitting needles, tatting shuttles, crochet hooks and embroidery needles flicked and darted as they talked. The men just sat. This made them appear sadder and sicker than the women. All the patients were dressed in bathrobes or housecoats. The women's were floor length and bright colored. Coral, turquoise, pale green, bright red, electric blue, lavender, yellow, and of course magenta. The men's robes were short and drab. Dusty dark blue, maroon, earthy brown and gray. The men were combed and clean shaven and actually as fat, pink cheeked and bright eyed as the women, but they didn't make the same effort to look healthy and happy. They sat in dejected attitudes looking as unemployed and beaten as possible, and coughing and spitting constantly. It made me wonder if any occupational therapy other than spitting was provided for male bedrest patients. From past experience with sick males, I knew that no form of occupational therapy, including how to make your own diamonds, would get a very enthusiastic reception, as a man's natural reaction to illness of any kind seems to be to see how big a stinker he can be and how much resistance he can muster against all forms of treatment. However, even the novelty of being a stinker must wear off after the first year, and it seemed to me that there should be something for those large idle hands to do. Something to bring a smile to those sad dejected faces, to lessen the tedium of tuberculosis. I was wondering what that something could be, when the door of the x-ray lab opened and Miss Welsh winked at me, jerked my wheelchair into pitch darkness, took off my robe and the tops to my pajamas and put a sheet around my shoulders. When my eyes had become accustomed to the dark, I saw that there were several doctors sitting facing the fluoroscope with their backs to me. A door to the right of the fluoroscope opened and a girl came in, closing the door quickly behind her. She sat down in front of the fluoroscope, slipping the sheet from her shoulders as she did so. There was a buzzing noise and I could see her ribs and lungs. They looked just fine to me but the technician ran his finger over the plate on her right lung and the doctors grunted unintelligible things to each other. They told her to raise and lower her arm. When she left it was my turn. The technician asked me my name, the House Doctor found my card, the technician ran his finger over the plate on my left side, I was told to raise and lower my arm, the doctors grunted unintelligible things to each other and it was over. Miss Welsh pushed me out into the hall again and over to the bench on the women's side, where they crowded over to make room for me. The woman next to me was embroidering "When you come to the end of a perfect day" in bright orange yarn on a maroon velvet pillow. just behind the word "come" she had already embroidered half of a large orange with spikes protruding from it. This puzzled me a good deal until she turned the pillow around and I realized that the prickly half-orange represented a sun setting behind a maroon horizon. The Perfect Day woman was talking to a girl, who had a big heap of loose curls on top of her head and winked every time she spoke. She was crocheting something in ecru string. Perfect Day said, "I was talking to Bill, Thursday, and he said that the Charge Nurse wouldn't send Mervin to the dentist because he was going to die anyhow and the Institution don't want to waste their materials fixin' his teeth." Heap O'Curls winked and said, "And I've heard that the poor kids in the four-bed ward up in Bedrest are starving and the Charge Nurse just laughs when they ask for seconds." Perfect Day said, "It's a wonder to me that anybody gets out of here alive." The girl on my other side was making a rag doll. It was supposed to be one of those long-legged French bed dolls but there had evidently been no pattern for the girl had made the body as long and thin as the legs and arms. The result looked like a squid. A tough delinquent squid with its face all pulled down on one side and bright orange hair exploding from its peaked head. The girl was attaching an arm and as she sewed she told her neighbor on the other side about a hemorrhage she had had at dinner before coming to The Pines. "A cup full of blood!" she finished triumphantly and I wondered where and how she had measured it. All the conversations were about operations, hemorrhages, ambulant patients who were to be sent back to Bedrest and bedrest patients who were to come to the Ambulant Hospital. I said to Perfect Day, "My, everyone certainly looks healthy!" She said, squinting as she threaded more orange yarn into her needle, "Don't let it fool you, honey, those red cheeks are t.b. flushes and only show germ activity." Rag Doll leaned across me and said, "Hazel, I had a chest exam yesterday and if it's o.k. I'll get six hours and my clothes. Mama said she'd buy me a whole new outfit." Perfect Day said, "God, honey, I'm prayin' for you but I wouldn't count on it. Henry Welter had a chest exam last week and they sent him back to Bedrest this morning." The Rag Doll girl said, "Really! Oh, the poor kid!" They both sewed in silence for a minute or two in honor of poor Henry's memory. A very attractive blue-eyed, dark-haired girl motioned to me. As she was sitting about ten people down the bench from me, in order to talk to her I had to lean forward. This almost got me Perfect Day's needle in my eyeball, so the dark girl moved up next to me. She said, "My name's Sheila Flannigan and my brother Red went to college with your sister Mary." I said, "Why I remember Red, but how did you know I was out here?" She said, "Molly Hastings told me." Sheila also told me that she had been at The Pines three months, had time up and was at the opposite end of Bedrest in a room with a former schoolmate of my sister Alison. I began to think that my sister Mary was right and that "practically everybody has tuberculosis." Catching my eye over the Perfect Day pillow, Sheila said, "That, my dear, is occupational therapy. 'There's a little bit of the artist in each of us,' " she said, quoting someone in a high squeaky voice. Looking at the maroon pillow I thought, "But what a tiny little speck in some people," and then the x-ray man came for me with the wheelchair. As I climbed into bed, I realized with surprise that the unaccustomed noise and confusion had been tiring and it was nice to return to the peace of our cold little cubicle. Kimi wanted to hear about everything and during the turmoil of returning patients to their beds, I managed to tell her most of what had happened. When I finished she said plaintively, "You know, Betty, it seems to me that the institution is making a greater effort to save you than to save me." I laughed, which immediately drew a disapproving nurse to the doorway, for fluoroscope was over and the ward was again so quiet that a whisper sounded like a steam jet in full release. On November twelfth, Kimi and I had a long bitter letter from Eileen. She had been moved into a room by herself. She said that she had thought that rooming with Minna was as low as you could get. Her exact words were, "Jesus, honey, it was, like livin' under a stone with a grub but now I'm still under the stone but all alone." She said that the reason for the move was: "Gramma brought old Mrs. Walladay out with her last Sunday and Mrs. Walladay yelled so loud the nurses told her three times to be quiet and finally the Old Dame came down, and raised hell and Gramma said, 'Ain't you ashamed, a big strong woman like you makin' fun of a poor old deaf lady!' Jesus, kids, I almost choked." So apparently had the Charge Nurse for she moved Eileen by herself. I felt very sorry for Eileen but didn't realize the extent of my sympathy until I was moved by myself on November fifteenth. It all happened so quickly I didn't even have a chance to say good-bye to Kimi. I opened my eyes after rest hours and the next I knew I was in a cubicle- by myself at the opposite end of the building. A few minutes later Kimi was wheeled past my door and a pathetic note from her that night informed me that she had been put in a room with the Japanese girl with no character. She said, "If not speaking will heal my lung I should be out of here within the week." The note ended, "Why did the Charge Nurse separate us? How could she perform such an act of cruelty?" That's what I wanted to know so I asked her. She said, "It is better for the patients to move every so often. To adjust to different personalities. It is better for you to be by yourself." I loathed being by myself. It was dull and depressing and I found it impossible to adjust to my own personality. My new little room was very comfortable with a window opening on a huge porch beside the bed, a radiator within easy reach, so that I could thaw out my feet occasionally in the early morning, and a delightful view of the Children's Hospital, the waters of the Sound and many trees. It was the first time since entering the hospital that I had been able to look out of a window and I found watching the writhing trees, the angry gray water and the driving rain very exhilarating for a day or two. Then I began to miss Kimi. I missed her gentle voice, her understanding and her acid tongue. Being alone made the whole day seem like the rest hours and I soon lost my feeling of high spirits and exuberant. good health, and spent much of my time longing for the children and thinking about death. There were six or seven beds on the porch and the patients in these beds were very quiet, almost immobile. It was undoubtedly because of the cold that they lay so very still under covers pulled high and tucked in, only their faces showing above the white spreads but to my morbid eye they seemed very sick, probably dying. At night when I lay wide awake, cold, lonely and sad, the beds looked like rows of white biers, and the patients' faces gleamed greenish white and dead in the pale reflected lights from the Administration Building. Before coming to The Pines, death, if I thought of it at all, which was seldom, was something swift, awe inspiring, cataclysmic, dramatic and grand. Death was a lightning bolt, a flood, a fire, a hurricane, a train wreck, an airplane crash, a pistol shot, a leap from a high bridge. When I had told this to Kimi one evening she had said, "Oh, that is not at all my idea of Death. To me Death is a lecherous, sly, deranged old man. His beard is sparse and stained. His eye are coarse lidded, red rimmed, furtive and evil. His loose red lip are slimy and drooling. He pants with anticipation. His partially opened mouth shows brown shaggy thread of tooth. He shuffles up and down the corridor at night, his malodorous, black robe dragging behind him." I was horrified and told Kimi that she was morbid. She had said, "I cannot help it. Each time Margaretta or any other very sick patient passes our door I fancy I see Death's evil face peering around the corner. I think I see his black robe swirl through the doorway ahead of the wheelchair. I can see him hovering like a great bat over the emergency ward, the light room, the private room. I can hear him shuffling up and down the corridor at night." (He must have done his shuffling in the very early evening for Kimi closed her eyes on the stroke of nine-thirty and did not open them again until the washwater was delivered.) Now that I was alone and had long sleepless hours to think, to listen and to observe, I thought Kimi's idea of death much more realistic than mine and I too began to see his evil peering face, to hear him shuffling up and down the corridors in the night. I'd awaken when the night nurse made rounds at about one or half past, and when the friendly yellow eye of her flashlight had darted off the ceiling and the soft pad of her retreating footsteps had been absorbed by the dark, I'd lie waiting. Stiff with dread. Then it would start. From far down the hall a cough -- dry and rattling like seed pods in the wind. Then another nearer -- gurgling and strangling and leaving the cougher gasping for breath. Then from across the hall a harsh deep cough with a strange metallic ring. Then the girl in the private room, the girl with skin the color of old snow, the girl with arms and legs like knobby sticks, whose voice was gone, would begin to gasp dreadfully. Involuntarily I'd try to help her until my tongue felt swollen, my throat ached, my lungs seemed crushed. "Hurry, hurry," I wanted to scream, because over it all I could hear the slow, sure shuffle of Death. Up and down the halls he went, never hurrying, knowing that we'd wait for him. One morning the Charge Nurse said, "The night nurse reports that you do not sleep well, Mrs. Bard. Is something troubling you?" I said no, not any one thing. She said, "What kind of thoughts do you have before going to sleep?" I said with mistaken honesty, "I long for my children and I think about death." She said with horror, "Death! Why Mrs. Bard, how awful!" Then quickly recovering and jerking herself down so that not a speck of revealing human being showed, she said, "We do not allow patients of The Pines to think about death, or other unpleasant things. You must have pleasant cheerful thoughts." I said, "But I can't have cheerful thoughts when I'm by myself. I hate to be alone." She said, "It is better for you to be alone. You must have cheerful thoughts or I will report you to the Medical Director." I wrote to Kimi that night and told her that the institution was now controlling my thoughts. She replied, "If only they could. I look at my roommate and think of murder twenty-four hour a day." From then on, while by myself, I spent the days trying to line up cheerful thoughts to mull over during the night. As I lay quietly assembling cheer, the two women in the next cubicle compared ailments. One of them had a liver that was crowding her tonsils; the other a uterus hanging by a thread. One had an ingrown toenail; the other a loose crown on her tooth. One of them belched and the other had pains because she didn't. One's sinus was so clogged she could not get any breath, the other had an empty tunnel from one ear to the other through which cold air whooshed, giving her earaches and other discomforts. One had fluid on her lung which had to be aspirated, the other was taking pneumothorax. They were each sure they were being given the wrong treatment and the wrong medicines. One of the women had a sweet motherly voice and talked about her organs as though they were little friends. "Old Mr. Gall Bladder acting up this morning" she would say right after breakfast, or "All my little intestines are crowded today, I don't think they liked the salad we had last night." I could picture Old Mr. Gall Bladder pounding on her liver with his cane and all her little intestines with bibs on crowded around the table not liking the salad. The other woman's insides were all little machines that didn't function. She was sure that if the Charge Nurse would only give her something to stir up her bile, the bile would start the wheels in her liver, the wheels in her liver would start the pistons in her stomach, the pistons in her stomach would generate enough juice to run her intestines, which would in gratitude wind around her uterus and keep it from dropping on the floor. The thing that amazed me was how either of the women had ever gotten tuberculosis, because according to their conversation, for years and years before coming to The Pines, they had spent every day but Sunday in various doctors' offices and had grown so familiar with all germs that they should have recognized the tubercle bacilli and swatted them like gnats. I was surprised the first time I saw Friendly Organs' visitors. I had thought of course that like her they would be dreary operation talkers and symptom discussers. But they weren't. They were hard bright women with lustreless dyed black hair, black sealskin coats, bright pink rouge, felt hats with vizors like policemen's hats, and big patent-leather purses. Their talk, loud and cheerful and punctuated with claps of laughter, was entirely about poker parties, drinking beer and people named Chet, Murphy and Vera. When they left, the air around Friendly Organs swirled with the musky scent of tuberoses and gardenias and the air around me swirled with pictures of the visitors at home in their one-room downtown apartments, drinking beer, opening cans of beans and being pinched on the behind by Chet or Murphy. On the days when the poker players didn't visit Friendly Organs, a small man dressed in black came and stood stiffly, like an exclamation point, at the foot of her bed for the two hours. I guessed that he was her husband but could not picture him fitting in with Chet, Vera and Murphy. The woman with the Little Machine intestines had a husband and son who came every visiting day. They were as pale as oysters, dressed alike in brown belted overcoats, tan fedora hats, and yellow pigskin gloves, and looked like burglars. I was amazed therefore, on a day when my visitors were late and there was a sudden little block of quiet, to hear the older burglar say in a gentle, tender voice, "What did you have for dinner today, Sarah, honey?" Sarah said, "They had cabbage again and I'm all bloated up." Son said, "Gosh, Ma, you know you can't eat cabbage. It always talks back to you." The older burglar said, "Have they done any thing for your sinus, honey?" Honey lowered her chin on her chest, belched, patted her stomach, looked at her husband accusingly and said, "See! Cabbage! It's just poison to me." Every morning the Friendly Organs woman would tell the Charge Nurse that she needed a "good cleaning out," or something for her ingrown toenail. The Little Machine woman would ask for something to stimulate her "nasal drip." When the Charge Nurse came to me she dared me to complain about anything and I didn't dare. I was cold and lonely and hated tuberculosis but I had cheerful thoughts, By God. "And how are you this evening?" the Charge Nurse would ask, her eyes steely and forbidding. "Just splendid," I'd answer dutifully reciting my catechism. "Simply splendid." © Copyright 2001 by The Advocado Press This Website produced by Cliffwood Organic Works

Betty MacDonald, Monica Sone, Wolfgang Hampel

Anita, Eartha and Betty MacDonald fan club fans, my family, friends and I already sent several mails to Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel. We convinced Wolfgang Hampel and Betty MacDonald fan club research team to publish a new Betty MacDonald biography. We adore Wolfgang Hampel's excellent work and his unique book ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier '. Dear Anita and Eartha, we are going to support your activities. Let us know, please what we can do. Did you know that Wolfgang Hampel was a very good friend of Monica Sone, author of 'Nisei Daughter' and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I? We can't wait to hear from you, Lots of love and good luck! Denise, family and friends --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/2020/07/readers-praise-satire-ist-mein.html Why are funny books so important? Take me, I'm a very optimistic personality but in these days I need some kind of support. Therefore I'm very glad and grateful I can read a very intelligent and funny book. Satire ist mein Lieblingstier (Satire is my favourite animal) by Wolfgang Hampel is a perfect example of very funny and very intelligent literature. Yes, indeed it requires lateral thinking; making unexpected connections; being one step ahead of the reader. If you are looking for a very funny and very intelligent book try brilliant Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel. You'll enjoy it as much as I do and many, many delighted readers around the world. Take care, Martine Didier -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The fiction that makes us laugh the most is, paradoxically, often the most profound and intelligent. The problem is even more deeply entrenched than that: it’s not just that comic fiction is rarely taken seriously. Humour is not just an example of intelligence but a form of intelligence. The humour enhances rather than detracts from the seriousness, and vice versa. If that sounds familiar, then it should: literature is awash with books that are both very serious and very funny. The opposite of funny, of course, isn’t serious; the opposite of funny is unfunny. Funny and serious are symbiotic because humour is not just an example of intelligence but a form of intelligence. It requires lateral thinking; making unexpected connections; being one step ahead of the reader. John Self --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Betty MacDonald fan club fans, we wish you a very happy Thursday with one of the funniest books ever written. Very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel the best recipe for bad mood and depression - especially important in times like we have now. Please don't miss Satire ist mein Lieblingstier by Heidelberg author Wolfgang Hampel ( Satire is my favourite animal ) one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. (UK, USA, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries) Very successful writers are going to introduce their fascinating books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. You are very welcome! Vita Magica setzt ihr Programm auch 2021 fort. Im ersten Halbjahr werden großartige neue Autoren ihre sehr erfolgreichen Bücher vorstellen. Vita Magica will continue with fascinating new authors and their very interesting books at Vita Magica January - June 2021. A fascinating new Vita Magica program. Wir brauchen jetzt sehr witzige und heitere Bücher!!! Golden laughter is very important - especially now!!!! Das wunderbare Buch ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel ist ein brilliantes Feuerwerk der besten Pointen mit sehr geistreicher, witziger und hintergründiger Unterhaltung!!!!! https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Wenn Sie ein sehr humorvolles Buch lesen wollen, dann verpassen Sie bitte nicht 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' von Wolfgang Hampel. Das sehr witzige Buch 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) von Wolfgang Hampel lieben vieler Leser auf der ganzen Welt!!!!( USA, UK, Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz und vielen anderen Ländern ) Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Wolfgang-Hampel/dp/3958281559 Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel is like golden sunshine in very grey November. Please don't miss very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ). It's one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. It brings lots of fun and joy to many readers around the world. Many of them including me take this best medicine for bad mood every day. Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica founder, Wolfgang Hampel from Heidelberg, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is working on a new Betty MacDonald biography. 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' by Wolfgang Hampel is very successful in USA, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can read Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel over and over again and it won't be boring. Don't miss it, please. Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.com/Satire-ist-mein-Lieblingstier-Satirische/dp/3958281559 Happy Thursday, Greta

Betty MacDonald, Claire Dederer, Anybody can do anything, Wolfgang Hampel, Satire is my favourite animal

Claire Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses lives in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times, Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications. Dear Betty MacDonald fan club fans, I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive. That's wonderful. I checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint or repost. I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty. Thanks so much for all you are doing! All the best, Claire Dederer Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years By Claire Dederer From the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle, someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a book. A book that got published. I was always on the lookout for a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing about. Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but she seemed to hate the place. And, eventually, I read Betty MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything. I had seen it before but assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough, I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages. It’s funny to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This, putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine. But it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me. As the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair. “Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by foot, bus, and ferry. There she and her girls are folded happily back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury.” The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression: hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator, baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster. The author jumps from job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves, like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers herself an “executive thinker.” Mary has a job ready for Betty as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.” The truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on the Pike Place Market: The Public Market, about three blocks long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds, yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful vegetables. Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did. I saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s. My mother told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough. Other writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure out just how she did it. She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone: Until I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity. While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner, highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player, most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so coarse is what makes it look so thick.” It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class. MacDonald was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest people in any given room. I know whereof I speak—I am this year publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody” memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their kin.” How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her reader. In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s. It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills, which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and file clerk.” Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it in ten copies.” MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone. When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation, but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer. Many years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh) tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight. But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with, say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad about Erma Bombeck?) What MacDonald models in her writing is actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane details of your life, and they will often go. I teach adult writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody. These simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic record of her time. The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the “earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s documentation nonetheless. Take, for example, MacDonald’s account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to divide everything by twelve.’?” As she makes her way to work each morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.” Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’ telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.” The author and her family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat. Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to. You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what you eat but if you eat.” But sometimes the details tell the story that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck, you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire. This isn’t an overlay of social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s wondering if she’s next. When I came to write my own memoir, I was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical. In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam in. The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book, is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me, the question has always been: How close to home might I stay? MacDonald’s qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely, says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you. Such lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships, not even a public library conference room named after her. But in the shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road. ----------------------- Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel is like golden sunshine in very grey November. Please don't miss very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ). It's one of the funniest books ever written according to many readers around the world. It brings lots of fun and joy to many readers around the world. Many of them including me take this best medicine for bad mood every day. Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica founder, Wolfgang Hampel from Heidelberg, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is working on a new Betty MacDonald biography. 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' by Wolfgang Hampel is very successful in USA, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can read Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Wolfgang Hampel over and over again and it won't be boring. Don't miss it, please. Wolfgang Hampel, author of very witty Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) and Vita Magica Team support culturual institutions with special events and book sales of Satire ist mein Lieblingstier. This very witty book is according to many readers from all over the world one of the funniest books ever written. https://www.amazon.com/Satire-ist-mein-Lieblingstier-Satirische/dp/3958281559

Betty MacDonald, Erich Kästner, Der September

Erich Kästner 

 

Der September 

 

Das ist ein Abschied mit Standarten

aus Pflaumenblau und Apfelgrün.

Goldlack und Astern flaggt der Garten,

und tausend Königskerzen glühn.

Das ist ein Abschied mit Posaunen,

mit Erntedank und Bauernball.

Kuhglockenläutend ziehn die braunen

und bunten Herden in den Stall.

Das ist ein Abschied mit Gerüchen

aus einer fast vergessenen Welt.

Mus und Gelee kocht in den Küchen.

Kartoffelfeuer qualmt im Feld.

Das ist ein Abschied mit Getümmel,

mit Huhn am Spieß und Bier im Krug.

Luftschaukeln möchten in den Himmel.

Doch sind sie wohl nicht fromm genug.

Die Stare gehen auf die Reise.

Altweibersommer weht im Wind.

Das ist ein Abschied laut und leise.

Die Karussells drehn sich im Kreise.

Und was vorüber schien, beginnt.

Betty MacDonald fan club fans,

we wish you, your families and friends a very nice September. 

We have great news and many surprises for you!

More info are coming soon.

Happy September!

Love, 

Astrid  


Betty MacDonald Memorial Award Winner Wolfgang Hampel's very popular golden satirical book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is available in 5 continents and on Amazon U.S. Best Sellers Rank in Parody. ( see list below )  

We have a golden Betty MacDonald fan club offer for you. 
Tell us your favourite satirical text of Wolfgang Hampel's book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier, please and you'll get several fascinating Betty MacDonald fan club items for free.
Wolfgang Hampel's very successful book is available in many countries around the world. ( see links below )
A wonderful Betty MacDonald fan club offer: You can win a first edition of one of Betty MacDonald's books with a dedication of Betty MacDonald. It's a golden treasure. 

Don't miss this unique Betty MacDonald fan club offer, please.
Send us a photo of your favourite flower, please.

You can win many very interesting Betty MacDonald fan club items.

Good luck!

Thank you so much for your interest and support.

Greetings,

Lisa 

Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica fans,

very witty book ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) by Heidelberg author, Betty MacDonald fan club - and Vita Magica founder Wolfgang Hampel is successful around the world.
This very funny book written in German got readers in the U.S. and many other countries. 
Especially in these times we need golden laughter.
This wonderful book is the best medicine against bad mood. 


Das sehr witzige Buch ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier '  des
Heidelberger Autors und Vita Magica Gründers  Wolfgang Hampel ist auf der ganzen Welt erfolgreich.
Das deutschsprachige Buch hat auch in den USA und vielen anderen Ländern seine Leser gefunden.
Gerade in diesen Zeiten dürfen wir das Lachen nicht verlernen.
Dieses wunderbare Buch ist die beste Medizin gegen schlechte Laune.



You can order Wolfgang Hampel 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' (Satire is my favourite animal) 


Germany 

Germany buecher.de 

Germany Hugendobel.de

Germany - jpc 

Germany - lehmanns media

Germany - Jokers  

Germany - Weltbild 

Betty MacDonald Memorial Award Winner Wolfgang Hampel's very popular golden satirical book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is available in 5 continents and on Amazon U.S. Best Sellers Rank in Parody.
( see list below )  



We have a golden Betty MacDonald fan club  Egg for you. 

Tell us your favourite satirical text of Wolfgang Hampel's book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier, please and you'll get several fascinating Betty MacDonald fan club items for free.
Wolfgang Hampel's very successful book is available in many countries around the world. ( see links below )

A wonderful Betty MacDonald fan club egg: You can win a first edition of one of Betty MacDonald's books with a dedication of Betty MacDonald. It's a golden treasure. 

Don't miss this unique Betty MacDonald fan club offer, please. 



Thank you so much for your interest and support.

Greetings,

 
Astrid 

Betty MacDonald Memorial Award Winner Wolfgang Hampel's very popular golden satirical book Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is available in 5 continents and on Amazon U.S. Best Sellers Rank in Parody.
( see list below )  

Angelika Jung and Wolfgang Hampel in Marc Marshalls SWR 3 TV Sendung HERZSCHLAG-MOMENTE  am Samstag, den 3.  August 2019  21.50



Angelika Jung and Wolfgang Hampel in Marc Marshall's SWR 3 TV Show HERZSCHLAG-MOMENTE  on Saturday  3rd of August 2019  21.50



Angelika Jung and Wolfgang Hampel in Marc Marshall's SWR 3 TV Show HERZSCHLAG-MOMENTE  on Saturday  3rd of August 2019  21.50

Marc Marshall in SWR 3 TV ' Talk am See ' - HERZSCHLAG - MOMENTE 



Wolfgang Hampel's very witty book 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) is No 1 Buecher de TOP List.

Wolfgang Hampels sehr witziges Buch ' Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' ( Satire is my favourite animal ) ist No 1 Buecher de TOP Liste.


Many greetings - viele Grüße

Mats  

Germany 

Germany buecher.de 

Germany Hugendobel.de

Germany - jpc 

Germany - lehmanns media

Germany - Jokers  

Germany - Weltbild 

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Ich habe dieses Buch gekauft, weil Krimi-Königin Ingrid Noll Wolfgang ... sehr, daß wir die monatliche literarische Veranstaltung Vita Magica von Wolfgang Hampel bald einmal besuchen können.

Wolfgang Hampel's Satire ist mein Lieblingstier in Buecher de TOP list 

• PROMOTED Weltbild Satire ist mein Lieblingstier - Satirische Gedichte. Wolfgang Hampel, - Buch

You can order Wolfgang Hampel 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' (Satire is my favourite animal) 

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Informationen über die Kultveranstaltung "Vita Magica" der Akademie für Ältere in Heidelberg  

Wolfgang Hampel - Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal ) 

The best president ever 

Roger Cicero - ESC winner 2007  

Many ESC fans from all over the world are so very sad because we lost Joy Fleming - one of the best singers ever. 

Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel sings  'Try to remember' especially for Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund at Vita Magica September

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