julia and minette...and other cats in the kitchen

Julia's Cats and/or Julia Child's Life in the Company of Cats by Patricia Barey and Therese Burson is a lovely little tail/tale about one of our first chef celebrities and all the felines who captivated her and husband Paul.  Starting with Minette who came in as a mouser at Chez Child in 1948, Julia was a cat lover who truly seemed to understand the curious quirks and ways of the whiskered ones.  If you're a fellow cat lover, you'll most likely read it in one sitting with a smile and occasional tear or two, and if you're a fan of Julia Child, you'll be even more so by the book's end.  And come to think of it, a birthdate of August 15th made Julia an astrological Leo -- and apparently all cats are regal and playful Leos, no matter what month they're born in.  

good luck, miss wyckoff

It looks like this novel by William Inge has been out of print for a while, with an original hardcover publication date of 1970.  Inge was of course best known as a playwright, penning famed stage and screen works like Picnic, Bus Stop and Come Back Little Sheba.  Born in 1913, Inge attended the University of Kansas then later taught English and drama at a Kansas high school.  He had especially keen insight into his female characters, particularly repressed women trying to reach for something beyond their claustrophobic boardinghouse lives.

Miss Evelyn Wyckoff of the Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff title is definitely an Inge woman.  She's a teacher of Latin in the 1950s at a Kansas high school, an intelligent, secretly passionate 35 year old virgin whose fairly progressive doctor suggests that she pay more attention to her physical being and become romantically involved with a man.  That her lack of healthy sexual activity is perhaps causing an early menopause and affecting her in other psychosomatic ways, and that she talk to a psychiatrist in Wichita as well.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot or the whos and whys of what happens following her treatment, but essentially the dramatic pivot occurs when Miss Wyckoff has her first encounter with Rafe, a young African-American man.  It's not a romance, it's an affair; Rafe isn't too likable, but he has his reasons for being arrogant and mistrusting and frustrated with his own lot in life.  And Miss Wyckoff, in her confused and heightened state of longing, justifies that this affair proves that she truly believes in racial equality -- unlike many of her fellow teachers or residents of Freedom, Kansas (yes, it's kind of a heavy-handed name but Inge himself was born in Independence, Kansas)   Perhaps seeking out other African-American men -- another teacher maybe -- with whom she could connect both mentally and physically would have been a better proof of racial openness, but Miss Wyckoff tends to think in intense but narrow spirals and she is after all a woman of the 1950s Midwest.

There are some nice turns of phrase in this novel, like when Miss Wyckoff recalls her college days and the "handsome fraternity boys" she'd observed "who seemed to live totally apart from her own world of eyestrain and study."  When she sees a husband and wife embrace and says to herself, "There but for the thoughtlessness of God go I."   And then there are some off-putting descriptions like "She bore the smell of aloneness in her armpits."  It's not a politically correct book nor a perfect one, but it does seem real and both suffocating and uncomfortably liberating at the same time.

A film version of the novel was made in 1979 with alternate titles of The Shaming, The Sin and Secret Yearnings -- but those come across as sensationalist and undermine Inge's original intention.  Inge opted for Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff because as Evelyn leaves Freedom with a couple of suitcases and a lot more baggage of scandal, her former landlady calls out "Good luck!" from the boardinghouse doorway.  Miss Wyckoff realizes that good luck "constituted her only hope for the future" and that she would "need lots of it."   But she at least does have a future and isn't jumping off a bridge or overdosing on sleeping pills.  Because in truth, she's had an experience, not a shaming or a sin, and with luck it might turn out to be an awakening and emergence into a bigger and more open-minded world.   Sadly, Inge committed suicide in 1973, but perhaps he wanted to give his fictional creation a bit more hope.