The Vintage Reader

I remember the first time I read Star Wars. I hadn't seen the movie yet; it was the fall of 1977, and the movie had been out since the summer, but my mother either didn't want me to go or just didn't want to go herself, and even my Star Trek-loving best friend had little interest in any science fiction that didn't have swoony Vulcans in it (she was the one with the pointy-ear fetish; I preferred Chekov and Scotty, myself).

So I hadn't seen the movie yet, but I desperately wanted to. My next-door neighbor had the book, and there were full-color photos from the movie in the middle of it so I knew what all the characters looked like. In any event, I had been collecting Wonder Bread's trading cards all summer, and had a sizable collection of them because my grandmother was saving them for me too. IIRC, there were only 12 in the series; I had one of each, but also something like three extra Chewbaccas, two Princess Leias, and about eight Grand Moff Tarkins. They were all beautiful close-ups of the actors, no action shots like real trading cards, and I loved them (and yet somehow lost them; in 1981 I bought an entire set at a science fiction convention, and then lost those too).

Anyway, the book--which I read approximately four at least two times between July September and October, when my mother went to Europe for three weeks* and my grandmother took me, at long last, to see the movie--is really very good. It says on the cover that George Lucas wrote it, but Alan Dean Foster has admitted to writing it (which confirms the long-running fan rumor). I can still read it almost as breathlessly as I did before reading it approximately 20 times and seeing the movie more times than that**.

EXCEPT.

There's a style convention that drives me absolutely. up. the. wall. And it's this:

ARTOO-DETOO and SEE-THREEPIO.

All through the book. And all through Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the sequel (also written by Foster, and full of Luke-and-Leia-before-they-were-related goodness for the shippers--which I so was in 6th grade, when it came out). I wanted to go through with a red pencil and write in R2D2 and C3PO every time they showed up. Not to mention all the talk about "little artoo units." Argggh!

It drove me crazy then, and it drives me crazy now. I am completely nutso about spelling out letters and numbers. I don't think it should be done. I hate "deejay" and "emcee." Even "okay" bothers me to some extent. But Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio are my all-time style pet peeves. I hope that whoever put that in the internal style manual, thus assuring its place in canon (I think; I haven't read a new Star Wars book since the mid-90s), gets to spend eternity listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, because to me, Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio are the visual equivalents of that.

Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

[Edited to clear up late-night posting confusion]

* ...on what she called an "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium"-style tour, and now that I've seen that particular movie, all I can say is OH GOD, I HOPE NOT! But I know my mother well, and I have to assume that she has never actually seen the movie, but believes that any movie starring Suzanne Pleshette is good wholesome family entertainment.

** I say that now, but I can't believe I actually saw it that many times. I seem to remember the twentieth time, sometime in 1981 or '82 when it came back to the theaters before the release of Empire and just sort of hung around for about a year, but I honestly can't believe I saw it in the theater more than 20 times before I was 16. Where did I get the money? Or the time? Or a ride to the theater? I have a feeling this is a part of my personal mythology that I exaggerated in 8th or 9th grade and then forgot that I totally made up.

This just in, from my former boss:

Go to the DeLorean web site. In the "parts search" bar at the top, enter part number 18851985 or 19852015.

I love stuff like this.

Was it the B-17 "Flying Fortress"? The bazooka? The atom bomb?

Well, okay, that last one wins hands-down. However, I maintain that number 2 should be a truly abominable homefront creation: War Cake (pictured at left). Honestly, you could lob a few loaves over the bow of an enemy submarine and the crew would surrender just to keep you from doing it again. Whole infantries would tremble before the prospect of eating this stuff for dinner. Or I suppose it could just be that mine didn't turn out right.

That must be the case, because I got the recipe from M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, which is one of my favorite books of hers. Written in 1942, the year that rationing was instituted, it's about making do with less than you're used to. Besides advice on cooking, she also has some interesting things to say about dishwashing (basically: she doesn't do it. She scrapes the dishes off, then runs hot water over them. No soap. No dishwasher.), soapmaking, and home economy during war or peace. My edition is a reprint of the 1951 revision, wherein she makes a lot of bracketed comments about her state of mind in 1942. Usually I find later revisions of a classic pretty pointless and stupid (Han shot first, dammit), but in this case I kind of enjoy her caustic musings on her younger self.

Judging by the vast number of War Cake recipes that were out there (off the top of my head, I know I've got two different ones, and if you Google "war cake" you'll find a TON of them--even some modern ones from current war zones), it was obligatory to include a recipe for it in any WWII-era cookbook, and one like this that is specifically about making do would just have to have had one. An eggless, butterless, milkless cake: what better example of creative wartime cooking? But she includes it grudgingly, noting that it was one of her favorite things as a child during the first world war:

(I am sure that I could live happily forever without tasting it again. There are many things like that: you recall with astonishment and a kind of admiration some of the things eaten with sensual delight at eight or eighteen, that would be a gastronomical auto da fé for you at twenty-eight, or fifty. But that does not mean that you were wrong so long ago. War Cake says nothing to me now, but I know that it is an honest cake, and one loved by hungry children. And I'm not ashamed of having loved it... merely a little puzzled, and thankful that I am no longer eight.)

I remember some things like that too. Wonder Bread with white gravy, eaten with fried chicken and mashed potatoes at my grandparents' house for lunch. Red punch in tiny glasses at the Piccadilly Cafeteria. Otter Pops. Oh, and those weird little chalky caramel-flavored snack sticks that were supposedly eaten by the Apollo astronauts: I think they were called "Space Food." [Note: you can still buy these things!]

I am certain that even at the tender age of eight, M.F.K. Fisher would NEVER have eaten Space Food. And I have to admit that War Cake is probably a little bit better.

Great news! After all the rumors and speculation, after getting my hopes up and having them dashed (but hey, I'm sure I'm not the only Kewpie doll to have his cupcake sat on), WKRP is finally coming to DVD! Rumor has it that they're going to use as much of the original music as possible, with soundalikes for some of the songs. I'm saving up my Christmas gift certificates for this one.

Does anyone else remember hearing the theme song on the radio? According to the Wikipedia article I linked to above, it peaked at number 65 in 1981, but I remember it from earlier than that--probably 1980. I remember it being played ALL THE TIME on the station I was listening to in 8th grade. Nobody I know who didn't grow up down the street from me remembers this AT ALL, which isn't surprising for a song that peaked at number 65. Maybe it was just a Tulsa thing.