Saturday, August 9, 2008

Little House in the Big Woods, deconstructed on Jezebel.com

Every week, Jezebel.com has a feature called 'Fine Lines', where they take a fresh look at all the books you loved as a kid, all the Judy Blume books, 'Go Ask Alice', and all the rest. Here is their take on 'Little House in the Big Woods'. This cracks me up, because I just posted about LHITBW a few weeks ago, and I do remember 'common taters on the axe'! It comes from 'Those Happy Golden Years', the book where Laura is in her last year of school, just before she and Almanzo get married. The whole town gets together every Friday night and has these soirees in the schoolhouse. One week they have a spelling bee (Pa wins, natch, on the word xanthophyll, if you must know, after Laura blows the ending because she is thinking of the word grecophil). The next week Pa and his pals dress up like "Darkies" with black greasepaint and all and sing a song and rattle some bones, and I just have nothing to say about that but sheesh. But the capper is when Pa walks up the aisle in his regular clothes, carrying his axe, with some potatoes impaled on the blade. Well, the whole town is stumped; he is acting out 'Commentators on the Acts' and not one of those townspeople can figure it out. That Ingalls has done it again!

2 comments:

ann daggett said...

your hair is the perfect color and length... looks great... love ann

Unknown said...

Very fine......