Lake Winnebagauches

ONE LAST SEPTEMBER  

          Liz doesn't cherish her modern-day Santa Fe cowboy, 
who is underwhelming, unexciting, unappreciable.  
She has hazy hopes and needs of something else and better, 
based on 'choice memories' of childhood.  
So she abandons Ken for one last September 
at the lodge in Minnesota with her family, 
all of whom have attained status as rarefied 
as her vague idea of whatever is not Ken.  
Omitting Ken, Liz packs everything she has and is 
into twenty-four bags and a 'fortnighter.'  
          Hite's Liz is both likable and unlikable.  
Actually, she's mostly unlikable—a daring idea for a woman 
existing in the radioworld of the 1950s.  
Going beyond the defiles and defines of the word 'adult' 
as fenced off by Meston and Macdonnell in their Gunsmoke landscape, 
Hite gives us a female character who isn't 
necessarily likable wife material or whore; 
and to whom something else might happen 
besides being wedded or raped.   
Yes, something else could happen to a woman, 
beyond languishing lonesome or riding a buggy to domestic dreamland.  
          As a matter of fact, that might be the most significant point 
in Liz's journey from Santa Fe to Minnesota and back—  
she gains an appreciation of her man, but neither of them 
particularly want to kiss or swoon or get married in the last scene.  
Amid the male writer's world of the 1950s, 
Hite's Liz and Ken don't get gunned down or walk off towards happiness.  
They just want to go home to Santa Fe.  



July 27, 2011  



Copyright © 2011 E. A. Villafranca, Jr.  
All Rights Reserved