Laura Presents Betty MacDonald and Shirley Jackson

Jacquie's Email Notice

Sept 9: Hello Literary Ladies! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you all to the first email reminder of the inaugural meeting of the Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson's 2020-2021 season. When choosing our theme for this year, "Comedy, Humor, and Satire," we were still in the early days of this annus horribilis, but now I think we can all agree that we are certainly deserving of a few laughs, snickers, and even some guffaws, so let the games begin!

First up is Laura Rice who will be presenting on Wednesday, September 16th at 1pm via Zoom on "Betty MacDonald, Shirley Jackson, Tina Fey: Laughing While Living." One thing to do and one thing to know: Please let Laura know if you will be attending so that she can assign readings. Early next week she will send out the file. You can then choose to print it all out, print just your part, or have the text available on another device. So fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night,* but one I believe we will all enjoy together! See you next week on the big screen, Jacquie 

 

*That came out of nowhere. See Tina Fey meme above.

Barbara's Minutes 

The first Zoom meeting of the Lit Club for this program year began with brief updates from members. Some of us have recently visited our families for the first time during the pandemic, and many of us have children and grandchildren just returning to school, remotely or not. A few find refreshment in birding, and several are engaged in writing postcards to get out the vote. All are anxious about the political situation.

President Fran Greenberg rang the meeting to order and began by thanking VP/Program Chair Connie Stewart for this year’s splendid booklet. She welcomed Isabel (Izzy) Stephens, Louisa Stephens’s daughter, as a guest to our meeting. The minutes were accepted as read and the treasury reported at $285.67. Soon the Club will vote on an amount to donate to the Hastings Public Library.

Presenter Laura Rice revealed to us that the humorous autobiographical tales of the American authors Betty MacDonald and Shirley Jackson were her introduction to adult literature at the age of 11, when she found Jackson’s memoir Life Among the Savages (1953) and MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) and The Egg and I (1945) among her mother’s books. 

Each in our Zoom bubble we settled down to read selections from these works, beginning with Jackson’s account of her son’s early school days, when he proved himself a spellbinding story teller, and her hilarious trip to a department store with her young daughter and her daughter’s five imaginary friends. Then we turned to MacDonald’s chronicle of all the jobs her sister Mary thought up for her, culminating with Mary triumphantly maneuvering her into writing her first book. We concluded by reading from that book, The Egg and I, her bestselling memoir about her early married life on a chicken ranch in Washington State, where she learned that the hen is the boss.

Laura called her presentation “Laughing While Living,” but how can I capture Laura’s laugh in these minutes? As if she were hearing these stories for the first time, she laughed in hearty, exuberant bursts, and she made us feel for a time that the world was right side up after all.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary