Masked Me & Laura Ingalls Wilder

Masked Me
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

So I bought some bentonite clay to use as a face mask, but I'm not too patient when I mix the clay with water, so it ends up all lumpy. That's fine. I mean, who's going to see me, right?

Little Houses

I happen to be a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. I read them every few years. Recently, the dreaded storage unit disgorged my copies of them--two copies of most of the novels, one incomplete set with the same covers as the set I owned when I was in elementary school, one set of the complete novels. (I'm only keeping the complete set.)

Re-reading the books recently led me to looking online for information about Laura and her husband Almanzo. That led me to the website of Dean Butler, the actor who played Almanzo Wilder on the television-ized version of the books and who has recently made a documentary of Almanzo's early life (Almanzo Wilder: Life Before Laura). All that in turn led me to youtube, where there are several episodes of the television show.

Now, don't get me wrong. I was never a fan of the show and I'm still not a fan of the show. I was actually a bit too old for it when it came along and I was fanatical enough about the books that I couldn't stand it when the show deviated so radically from Laura's story. Even watching now, I have to keep myself from getting all pissed off when the show does something like get the color of Laura's wedding dress wrong. (It was black cashmere, of course, which I'm sure you know.) How hard is it to get such a simple detail right? Grrr.

Anyway, the reason I've been watching some of the show now is because the woman who played Laura on the show, Melissa Gilbert, has a new book out called Prarie Tale (no, I didn't buy it, no, I won't read it) and in it she apparently says that when she first met the man who was going to play her husband (the fore-mentioned Dean Butler who joined the cast in the show's sixth season), she was sixteen and he was twenty-three and her first thought was something along the lines of Ugh. Child molester. (In fact, Almanzo really was ten years older than Laura and they did marry when she was in her teens.) That cracked me up a bit, yes, but it also made me want to go and see if the two had any onscreen chemistry.

Turns out, no.

However, Butler circa 1986 is really easy on the eyes. Not so easy that it makes up for all of the Little House TV garbage, but easy enough that I can half watch a few shows and pay little or no attention to when he's not onscreen.

So that's what I've been doing.

I also ordered a copy of John E. Miller's book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend. It's interesting reading so far, though it pissed off several reviewers on Amazon because it is not particularly worshipful of the sainted Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Though there is a dark, sometimes calculating, often pessimistic streak in her, which is why I keep reading the books.)