Post 8:
Meeting Wendy McClure!

Post 8: Meeting Wendy McClure!

From Tracy —

In April, I was lucky enough to hear author Wendy McClure read from her book The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie which I’ve been having great fun reading. That’s her seated on the left and the crazy bonneted girl is me. She came to Powell’s Books here in Portland, OR — only possibly the best bookstore in the whole world and a must see if you ever visit Portlandia. She had a pretty good turnout for a Friday night and immediately tossed out a few sunbonnets for us to don during the reading if we so desired. (Obviously I did.)


 

She announced her itinerary as follows:

— Reading
— Chores
— Schoolhouse Exposition
— Q&A

Her choice of reading was from her intro explaining that her book is about the books, not the TV series:

“It wasn’t until a couple years later, long after I’d gotten through my mooniest phase of Little House love, that I found out that the book and TV show were indeed related. By then I didn’t care much, though it was a little disconcerting to watch ‘Battle of the Network Stars’ and occasionally see some of the Little House cast members wearing tiny shorts and swimsuits. (You mean that woman with the Cheryl Tiegs legs was Ma?) Even if my family hadn’t been watching another channel I doubt ‘Little House on the Prairie’ would have been regular viewing in our household, which tended to favor smartass sitcoms and gritty cop dramas over heartwarming family programming.
Not that it hasn’t been sometimes confounding to have this parallel TV universe. More than once, a friend or acquaintance has gushed, ‘You mean you’re a Little House Fan, too?’ only to discover that we have two very different sets of memories. One of us is thinking of the time Laura taught a calf to drink from a bucket. The other is thinking about the ‘Very Special Episode’ when some kid named Albert got hooked on morphine. The ensuing coversation often ends awkwardly, with one of us a bit disappointed that the real Laura Ingalls did not have an opiate-crazed adopted brother and the other feeling, well, just depressed.”

 

Next up came “chores” which meant we were going to do some butter churning. I so wanted to see Wendy whip out a full-on wooden butter churner but she explained that was impossible what with TSA being such a stickler about such things. So instead she produced a small Mason jar filled with buttermilk that had been bouncing around in a car for most of the day. (Stomach churning.)
She also said it had once held kimchi. (Call the CDC stat.)

Wendy then gamely taught us an old folk song for just such a chore:
“Come butter come. Come butter come.
Children at the garden gate
wait for their buttered cake.”

But she gave us an alternative if we preferred something less traditional:
“We don’t mean to brag.
We don’t mean to boast.
We like hot butter on our breakfast toast.”

(— Rapper’s Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang.)

Next up was the “Schoolhouse Exposition” which turned out to be trivia. Here’s the question I answered correctly:

Which book is not a real book by cast members of LHOP?:
A) “A Prairie Tale” by Melissa Gilbert
B) “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch” by Allison Arngrim
C) “Falling Down and Getting Up Again” by Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush
D) “The Way I See It” by Melissa Sue Anderson

Answer: C. (The Greenbush twins played Carrie.)

For the correct answer I got some old timey candy in a little tulle drawstring bag.

Then at the end we got to drill Wendy with questions but we were a pretty tame crowd. Someone asked if she’d had any further adventures in homesteading since finishing “Wilder Life” and she told two stories. One about making a green pumpkin pie and the other about making a pig’s bladder ball.

Wendy explained that cooking up old prairie recipes is actually a lot easier now than it was even just a few years ago because of the increasing popularity of organic and locally sourced food. Still, it’s a challenge.

To make a green pumpkin pie, she had to stalk a produce guy at the farmer’s market who just couldn’t understand why she would want a green pumpkin when wouldn’t a nice ripe orange one would be so much better? Finally she got her wish but reported that the while the green pumpkin pie was pretty good, it couldn’t hold a candle to a regular ol’ apple pie and wondered why Ma bothered.

The funniest story she told was about making a pig’s bladder balloon ball. Finding a hip butcher was not a problem. Making the actual ball was. She related that she would have brought her ball in for us to see but it was “not really appropriate” for show and tell. And again she feared the TSA. Inflating it up was a disgusting experience especially as she feared “blow back.” And tying it off was murder. She was glad she went to the trouble to make it, but realized that the illustration in the book is very idealized. And in her child’s mind she had imagined that a dead pig was like a “big cereal box with prizes.” Not so much as it turns out.

 

 

Wendy also has an Kindle e-book called Don’t Trade the Baby for a Horse: And Other Ways to Make Your Life a Little More Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s just $2.99 and looks hilarious.

 

Oh and I wanted to relate that shaking a Mason jar full of room temperature buttermilk for about thirty minutes by about 25 people will start to produce bits of butter. It was rather magical. (If you didn’t think about the botulism.)

Thanks for coming to P-Town Wendy. It was nice to meet you.

From Anne —

That bonnet (and the innocent happiness it represents) makes Tracy look about twenty years younger, dontcha think!? [Not to romanticize: Ma forced Laura to wear a sunbonnets for the racist reason that tanned skin represented all that was uncivilized].

This blog is proof that one can love the books, the show and the real history — they’re not mutually exclusive! Admittedly, though, it is jarring when Melissa Gilbert turns up on “The Love Boat.” But also disturbing to find out that the pig bladder ball may have been overglamorized in the drawings of Garth Williams.

Congratulations on your trivia prize! What kind of candy was it? Please say horehound…
(From Tracy – yes there was some of that in the bag.)

Funny how the TSA has impacted Wendy’s liberty. Shouldn’t the right to bear butter churners and pig bladders be written into the U.S. Constitution?

Wonder what LIW would have thought of rap music?

Oh, I beg to differ with Wendy: A dead pig is absolutely like a cereal box full of prizes. Or at least a free source of gross raw materials. If you needed it bad enough, you’d make whatever you had to out of a dead pig! Don’t we value the hard-won more? As long as it doesn’t kill us?

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