When Bridget Met Sally ~or~ The Adventures of Sally*

I’m not generally a fan of romantic comedies.  There is something about them than that makes me twist uncomfortably inside, or, even worse, brings out my inner realist who wonders how on earth a particular couple could even think that things would work out given either a disparity in age, geography, or the various commitments they have to others.  Every Christmas though, I have annual viewing of two romantic comedies that have continued to tickle me: Love, Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary.**  I cannot remember how I got sucked into Love, Actually but I know that I initially watched Bridget Jones because that book is one of the few that has reduced me to a puddle of hysterical laughter and I wanted to see if the same held true for the movie.***

One of the things that I like best about Bridget Jones is that she’s not perfect.  She’s astonishingly human and makes some very poor decisions, but with a certain amount of intelligence so that you don’t completely give up on her.  I found myself thinking the same about the heroine of this month’s Wodehouse, the aforementioned Sally.  She goes through a series of events, including one massive downturn in her romantic life where she learns that her fiancé has married another woman.  Her reaction rang a bell in me: she responds by acknowledging that she should not have any feeling about the event, but then allows herself to go a little wobbly.  Emotions are sneaky suckers and, if you think that you’ve managed to cope with a situation without having them, they have a rather nasty habit of hitting you when you least expect it.  Sally meets up with this desperado fiancé later on and, while she gives him a hand, she does not melt back into his arms.  Bridget has a similar scene also, and both times I found myself liking these women even more.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to call Wodehouse a feminist, but he certainly has a great deal of sympathy for women.  In particular, he seems to have a lot of time for American women, which is always a nice thing to hear.  The emotional truths of Sally reminded me so much of Bridget (and some of the women from Love, Actually, most notably Karen, the one played by Emma Thompson) that I would pay to see them together, and it is this element that has rocketed The Adventures of Sally into my list of Favorite Wodehouses, which is unusual for a one-off.

Some things that amused me:

-Sally’s description of a would-be suitor: “ ‘You remind me of one of those portraits of men in the eighteenth century, with wooden faces, who look out of heavy gold frames at you with fishy eyes as if you were a regrettable incident’ ” (p. 71).

-Another description of the same character, who really seems to have lit Plum’s creative fire: “He was the sort of man who always has a pencil, and the back of old envelopes never entered his life” (p. 74).  I sympathize, as the last list I made was on the piece of cardboard that had formally hosted a pad of paper.  I have also been observed making notes in programs during concerts.

-On page 80, we meet a dog named Toto.  Since The Wizard of Oz is a childhood favorite, I was a little amazed because I always thought that it was unique to that story.  maybe it was and this is merely a reference to it, but it is something that bears further investigation in my copious free time.

-Such is Wodehouse’s natural sympathy towards women that, when Sally’s brother utters this line: “ ‘My dear child, as I said before, women cannot understand these things…’ (p. 147)” I knew that his business would be a flop, which it was and continued to be until he married a sensible woman. 

*Read June 2016.  There have been a number of horrible events that have rocked the world in the last week (writing on July 11, 2016).  While I want to note that these are indeed times that have tested the populace’s soul, I am going to take a page out of Wodehouse’s book, so to speak, and not dwell on them in this blog.  I have noted that while he wrote during two world wars, a global economic depression, and a host of other depressing events, he rarely mentioned them in the action of the books.  This is a blog about an entertaining author.  For those who require other topics to be discussed, I would direct you to the multitudes of other places that provide more astute analysis than I could ever hope to offer. 

**Sometimes, The Holiday makes this list.  There is something about Cameron Diaz in this movie though that irritates me.  Then I get to wondering how she could ever hope to make her business work in the UK, what short of permissions she would have to obtain, etc., and would she really be happy leaving California for the English countryside (I mean, I would be ecstatic, but I think that I’m beginning to gain the title of “noted kook” in my advancing years).  Perhaps I was a bureaucrat in a former life. 

***In case you’re wondering, I refuse to acknowledge that the other Bridget Jones films exist.  I have the same mentality for the Sex and the City movies and, increasingly, the seventh installment of the Star Wars saga.