two sidelights

[walkitout]

Having slavered all over Okrent's book, I now want to make a couple of minor, largely irrelevant remarks about it. First, there's a little story about a young woman during Prohibition who got unconscious-drunk in the company of a young man/men and her parents got a little letter on the subject. That young woman then grew up to become a house mother at a sorority. "But to look at Pauline Izor at sixty -- or at a photograph of one's own mother or grandmother -- and to try to imagine her as a falling-down drunk is unfathomable." Yeah, so, Okrent? Grow the fuck up. Altho the story does go a little ways towards explaining how college drinking culture might replicate itself over time. A bit overdetermined, but still.

There's a quote about Al Smith: ""Al is really a very stupid man," an admirer once said. "All he can see is the point.""

I would be a happy woman if someday, someone said something like that about me. I'm also looking forward to Stanley Walker's _The Night Club Era_ arriving from Better World Books via Amazon used books. I found it by searching on that phrase in google books.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I'm reading _Last Call_ now (that's how long it took to get a library copy), and I just realized that Pauline Izor is just about an exact contemporary of my great-aunt Iva, who was at Ann Arbor (class of 1921) and used to lend her car to the rumrunners getting booze from Canada. So it could even be Iva's fault that Pauline got so drunk. I don't think they were in the same sorority, however.

*snicker*

[walkitout]

That is awesome.

Re: *snicker*

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, knowing they both turned out okay it is. Whoa, I just looked it up -- Ann Arbor to Windsor is only 44 miles per MapQuest. Didn't realize it was *that* close. Here I'd been thinking she was getting all kinds of wear and tear on the car, on top of everything else.