A few years ago, in “The Sparkle of a Star“, I wrote: “When I last watched [Bewitched], in my late teens or very early twenties, I naturally identified most with Samantha. But on this rewatch, I found myself identifying with her mother, Endora…” But Bewitched isn’t the only show about witches I’ve loved, and Endora not the only no-longer-young woman character I find myself increasingly identifying with as I myself progress into cronehood. Obviously, this isn’t surprising, but I do find it amusing.
I ran into another example of it recently when I decided to revisit Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch series. My own period of reading YA fiction was short, and largely confined to when I was 8 to 9; by 10 I was mostly reading light adult fantasy and sci-fi, mixed with some of the juveniles written by more typically adult authors like Robert Heinlein (Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, etc) or those borrowed from the library by my younger siblings whose covers caught my eye (which is how I discovered one of my favorite books, Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun. And by 12 there weren’t many even in that category. So though I was of the right age to read Witch’s Sister when it was published in 1975, it never popped up in the Scholastic Books flyer we got at school, nor did I spot it in the library back then. In fact, I only discovered it in a rather roundabout manner, through my habit of scanning the new TV Guide magazine each week in search of anything I might enjoy (since in the days before home video, that was the only way to discover treasures). One week, in the spring of 1980 IIRC, I noticed a listing in the Saturday morning show Big Blue Marble (which I didn’t watch even before I gave up on Saturday morning fare) for a 6-part TV movie called Witch’s Sister. Naturally the title caught my attention, so I watched it and was immediately hooked; besides being an interesting story, I identified with both 10-year-old Lynn Morley (because I had a hyperactive imagination at her age also) and her 16-year-old sister Judith (because I was Goth before there was such a thing, and like her enjoyed spooking my younger siblings).
It only aired once or twice (I only saw it once) and I despaired of ever seeing it again, but during a short period when I had free premium cable in 1988 it turned up on Showtime as a unified TV movie. I of course taped it, and on a rewatch during my time as a librarian I noticed in the credits that it was based on a book; we had it in the library so I read and enjoyed it and its two sequels, which had been published in 1977 and 1978. Sometime later I transferred the movie to DVD and discovered several more sequels (published in the early ’90s) and bought them on Amazon, but never got around to reading them until recently. The reason was simple: after starting this blog in 2010 I had very little time for pleasure reading, and that only changed a year ago with Grace’s death. So for the past year, I’ve been scanning my shelves for books I own but had not yet read, and a couple of weeks ago realized I had never read those later books in the series. Since it had been over 30 years since I read the first three I started with them, and discovered to my amusement that while I still remembered feeling like Lynn as a tween and Judith as a teen, I now found myself more than a little sympathetic with Mrs. Tuggle, the elderly Englishwoman who was Lynn’s nemesis in the books! Though in the later books she was definitely a wicked witch, in the first (and IMHO the best) of the series that was portrayed with far less certainty (and in the movie which inspired my love for the stories, she was almost certainly not a real witch). So as I read, I started thinking about how I’d feel if a couple of nosy 10-year-old girls started making strange accusations, sneaking into my house to steal my things, and terrorizing my cat. And now I’m a bit wary of watching Bell, Book and Candle again.
I’ll watch Bell, Book and Candle just for a rewatch of Kim Novak in that turtleneck dress. Rowr!