Joss Whedon

I was inspired to post the fortune cookie below after dining last night with friends whose non-Catholic daughter is about to start Catholic school and isn’t quite sure what to expect. This reminded me of how passionately Mary McCarthy writes of the superior historical education she received at her convent school. That education was effective, she found, in direct proportion to its high-pitched subjectivity: the conviction with which the nuns cast historical actors as heroes and villains and the inculcation of a powerful rooting interest in the students. The cookie below is part of the chapter of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood that describes this education, "C’est le Premier Pas Qui Coûte." What I wasn’t expecting when I plucked this staple of the OGIC canon from its shelf tonight, however, was to find a reference there to a business with essentially the same name as a character in Buffy. No doubt a coincidence...or could it possibly be that Joss Whedon was reading McCarthy when he wrote the fourth season of BTVS, the season in which the Slayer’s love interest Riley Finn is introduced? We know Whedon has paid homage to other aesthetic heroes in the Buffy saga, and I can personally vouch that a taste for Sondheim is highly compatible with a taste for McCarthy. Ah, I’m probably delusional. But that name sure jumped out at me like a neon sign.