Monday, August 6, 2012
movies & tv / Books Golden Girl gets the illustrated encyclopedic treatment
Posted by Adam Carlson on Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Jody McFerren loves “The Golden Girls” and Jody McFerren loves Rose Nylund, the “chucklehead” played by Betty White, in a house of Floridian retirees.
Rose is famous for her Betty White brand of dumbness — and also for being from fictional St. Olaf, Minn., a town of aqua midgets and giant black holes.
Facts like these and more — Rose’s sayings, Rose’s recipes and many, very many, of Rose’s stories about St. Olaf — have been gathered together in Back in St. Olaf... An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Stories, Idiotic Sayings & Home Cookery, McFerren’s compendium-cum-tribute to White’s character.
McFerren — artist, columnist, cook, Atlantan — took on the writing of the book as a labor of love, having tossed the idea around for more than a decade and spending six months researching both “The Golden Girls” and “The Golden Palace” on DVD, but it’s borne fruit: Though McFerren hasn’t published the book yet, he is promoting it. Blake’s on The Park will host the first official release party for Back in St. Olaf... on Aug. 7 at 6 p.m. More than 20 of the book’s recipes will be on display and large prints of the book’s accompanying illustrations will be exhibited for purchase, with proceeds to benefit AIDAtlanta (a nod to Rose’s own AIDS scare) and Atlanta Queer Lit Festival.
The book is “written very campy,” McFerren says, and it’s exhaustive: he’s included more than 185 recipes and 100 illustrated stories. The chapters list a breakdown of St. Olaf’s points of interest, special events, and holidays as well as glossary of the town’s characters.
It hasn’t exhausted McFerren’s love, though: explaining this-or-that St. Olaf oddity to me, he still cracked up.
And still: Rose isn’t McFerren’s favorite Golden Girl. That title belongs to Blanche — who he hasn’t forgotten. If Back in St. Olaf... is successful, McFerren says, “She’ll have a book of her own later down the road,”
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