"Oh, Rose, you're so stuck up."
[some personal news, plus]
University of Chicago Press is reissuing Sally Benson’s charming novel Meet Me in St. Louis, and they’ve allowed me to write the foreword, and I would take it as a great personal kindness if you’d all preorder this book so hard that you frighten the publisher.
And if you think that I don’t make a fuss over “Oh, Rose, you’re so stuck-up,” you’ve got another think coming.
Thanks! (In advance!)
P.S.
Foreword FAQ
Q. Are there footnotes?
A. Yup.
Also, check out the title page of the original Random House edition, and look at that illustration very, very, very closely.
Sally Benson wrote a real winner here, and the resulting movie owes a lot to the fact that it came out when WW II was ending in Europe. As it happens, I saw the movie in Washington, DC, visiting an aunt during Christmas vacation. The aunt, as it happened, was an officer in the WAVES, whose day job was in Navy personnel, and whose night job, we learned much later, was as a cryptographer for Admiral Halsey. She left the WAVES with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
My impression is that the phrase "Oh, Rose" appears in the texts of both Gypsy and Street Scene, but I'm not 100% sure I'm on safe ground here.