Joyce Wadler

A Wadler Classic: “My Jud Fry Problem” (with an advertisment for herself)

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned this for a few hours, but my comic novel, “The Satyr in Bungalow D”, comes out today.

My Jud Fry Problem

Laurey, in “Oklahoma!”, telling Jud Fry he’s got to be kidding as he explains sex.

I was watching Oklahoma! on TCM last night and naturally the old question popped up: How could anybody go for a simple-minded twit like Curly when Jud Fry, the alleged bad guy, is so much more attractive?

Yeah, there’s the porn addiction and he’s living in a smokehouse, but I figure he’s got interesting reading material in there: Henry Miller, Kerouac, Hubert Selby. Plus a pin-up of the stripper he messes around with when he’s in Kansas City tacked up on the wall.

Also, Jud, as played by Rod Steiger, is hot.

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On Thanksgiving, I Miss My Family (I had a dream of being the only person in America receiving both Social Security and Chanukah gelt.)

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My grandmother, Gussie Belinsky Wadler, and my uncle, Artie, in 1950 in the Catskills.

I grew up in the Catskills, in a fading resort town called Fleischmans, where the population in the 1950s exploded in summer with refugees from Hitler.

There was, in fact, a story I came across on a Facebook group, that two sisters, who had assumed the other to have died in the concentration camps, discovered each other at the movies in Fleischmanns.

“Then everybody around them hollered, ‘Sit down!’ Herb says when I tell him about it.

Herb is not a sentimental guy, especially around families.

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“There wasn’t any funeral,” Jimmy the Weasel says, “We buried him.”

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There was a time in my life, back when I was in my thirties when I was a crime reporter. Perhaps you are familiar with them from the movies: they are always two steps ahead of the cops, they put their lives at risk, and they are awakened at their crummy apartment at 6 a.m. by the lead detective, with whom they were in the army.

“Got anything to drink in this dump?”, the detective says.

Then the detective and the reporter toss back a scotch and the reporter does not worry one bit about not having any cheese or nuts in the house to go with it.

This was never me. It violated Wadler’s first and most important rule of journalism: Never put yourself in a situation in which people might shoot at you.

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