It’s A “Peyton Place” Kind Of Day
It’s 70 degrees and sunny in New York right now, so I think that qualifies as Indian summer. And in honor of that wonderful phrase, I’m going to share with you the opening sentences of “Peyton Place,” Grace Metalious’s unsurpassedly trashy novel, published in 1956, about the soap operatic goings-on in a New England town. The movie, starring Lana Turner, and the TV series, starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal, weren’t nearly as brilliant. Anyway, the novel’s opening lines: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.”
