u/Charlotte_Braun

Of course Laura went into a lot of detail about food, after all the food insecurity of her youth. Farmer Boy is the real extravaganza. What was it, the Fourth of July or the county fair, where Father and Almanzo got unlimited food for fifty cents? "Then he drew a long breath and ate pie. When he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else." Mr. Braun and I sometimes go to an AYCE place for Thanksgiving/Christmas. With Almanzo as an example, I try to pace myself, so I'll have room for dessert! And even when I was a kid, I never had to wait for twenty other people to be served before I could start on a holiday meal. Usually someone would say "Dig in!" and a half-dozen or so people did just that.

Then there's Big Woods, with the sugaring-off, and Christmas in July at the end of Long Winter, and the "wasn't a sociable. It was a New England Supper." What are your favorite food-porn scenes?

It was 1987, and People Magazine was doing an issue about 100 years of Hollywood. (Not 100 years of movies, just 100 years since Hollywood, the town, was incorporated.) One of the features, among many, was supposed to be a joint interview with Lillian Gish and Molly Ringwald.

"Oh, I heard about that!" you say. "Yeah, Ringwald totally blew off the interview and didn't even care." NO. Molly very much wanted to be at that interview. It was a cascading disaster that prevented her from being there, not arrogance, laziness or any other negative attitude.

According to MR, (in Premiere magazine and elsewhere), it went down like this. First, this was happening in New York City, a place MR was not familiar with. She was staying in one place, and was supposed to find her own way to Gish's apartment, in the UWS or wherever. (Seriously?!) Well, MR was all ready to go when she got her hand caught in one of those heavy security doors. Sounds funny, but not if it happened to you and your hand is swollen and bleeding. Then she tried to get to the interview from the emergency room, not from her original spot, and that pretty much doomed the whole endeavor.

It’s the kind of thing you usually hear about happening in reverse, with a native New Yorker going to L.A. and being stranded because they can’t drive. In this case, it was an L.A. native, used to driving herself everywhere, and now being at the mercy of a no-speak-English NYC cabbie. He just couldn’t find the address. And there were no cell phones in those days. And Gish didn’t have unlimited amounts of time to wait. So there was nothing MR could do except send flowers and a well-meant apology. And meanwhile, the crew from People Magazine was in Gish's apartment, watching her eagerness turn gradually to disappointment and then hurt. She put away the plate of cookies she'd brought out, and sighed, "I guess she doesn't care because I'm old."

They did not have to print that quote! Of course Molly cared! Shoot, I remember seeing her on Letterman, promoting Sixteen Candles. Dave complimented her outfit, and she said, "Thank you; it's twenties-style -- I looooove the twenties!" She very much knew who Lilian Gish was, and very much wanted to meet her. Things went wrong, that's all, but not because she "didn't care". I blame People Magazine the most in this. If the interview was so bloody important, why didn't they send someone to meet MR, and bring her to the interview? Did they really not take into account how hard it is for someone not from NYC to find their way around? Did they give her directions -- good directions, not just scribbled on a napkin? Did she not have a publicist they could double-check with? (Okay, maybe not, in 1986.) It galls me to this day how the magazine unilaterally decided that MR didn't appreciate this opportunity to be judged.

Anyway, just wanted to get that out there, because apparently there are still people who think MR was sitting in a suite at the Plaza, filing her nails and saying, "I don't wanna meet some OLD LADY!". Not. Even. Close. To what happened.

Just curious. To be precise, I'm thinking of the young-ish, War of the Worlds/Citizen Kane era Orson Welles, not the maxi-sized, Paul Masson-shilling version. Anyway, I know Hader did a brilliant Vincent Price!