Laws Against Ugliness

            Every morning, about halfway through my song practice, a westbound streetcar stops in front of my building and the driver goes inside the donut shop to get a coffee. Recently he’s started to look up at my window while I’m playing and on Tuesday, on his way back into his vehicle he turned, looked up, called to me with a smile and gave me the shaka “hang loose” hand gesture with thumb and little finger stretched out and the three middle fingers folded in. That made me feel good.

            I worked on doing research for my essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I wanted to try to find a link between child neglect and violent crime but the statistics that I’ve found to back that up are modern. One thing interesting that I came across is that it was actually a crime in the 19^th Century to be ugly in public. People with grotesque features or unsightly physical deformities were not allowed to hang around on the street. As recently as 2004 a beggar with a large and ugly growth on his neck was kicked out of a small English town. And so if the monster had not been superior to other human’s in every way but in his aesthetic appearance and thereby able to avoid detection or capture, he probably would have ended up in prison, a workhouse or a freak show.

            I skimmed through a few chapters of Violence and Crime in 19^th Century England and I re-read the introduction to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I jotted down some more ideas for my essay, though it’s all still a bit of a mish mash.

I had six chicken legs in the fridge but only had room to roast five of them so I put the other one in the freezer. I had one leg for dinner with a potato and some gravy and watched an episode of Rawhide.

In this story Rowdy gets sick around the same time as two of the cows and so they think it might be anthrax. They need to drive the cows through a town but the town authorities forbid it because of the anthrax. Rowdy gets worse and so Gil goes to the town looking for a doctor. It turns out there is only an apothecary but the druggist is away. His daughter Betsy though is a nurse and she insists on going to treat Rowdy. As the fever doesn’t change after the next day they hear thunder. Betsy says the worst thing that could happen is for Rowdy to get wet, so Gil and Betsy take Rowdy through the blockade to take Rowdy to the only dry option, the apothecary. The townsmen don’t shoot because they don’t want to hit Betsy but they surround the drug store and promise to shoot anyone that leaves. Betsy and her father Amos treat Rowdy as best they can. When morning comes Rowdy has broken out in a rash and so they know that he has cowpox and not anthrax. Cowpox is not infectious and so the town lets the men drive the herd through.

Betsy was played by former child star Margaret O’Brien. She won an Academy Award as a child actor for her role in “Meet Me In St Louis”. Unlike many child stars, when she became an adult she still got lots of work in film.