Bernice Bobs Her Hair

I had a literary earworm* yesterday — a sentence that rattled around in my head like dice in a dicebox for hours and hours and hours.

"There are only three topics of conversation: you, me, and us."

It knew it was advice about flirting with boys, advanced by a young and socially successful woman to her gauche, naive cousin. I was certain it was F Scott Fitzgerald, and I was fairly sure it was in the short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair". So I went in hunt. I don't own a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald short stories — although I am always on the lookout for one, because I particularly love the stories based on his precocious, privileged and melancholic boyhood. Instead, I looked on the internets.

I found "Bernice Bobs Her Hair". The girl with the advice is the fairylike Marjorie Harvey, "justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven," and her gauche cousin in Bernice, pretty and with what Fitzgerald calls "high colour" — rosy cheeks, I've usually assumed — but boring as batshit. I located what appears to be the relevant passage:

As Bernice took down her hair she passed the evening before her in review. She had followed instructions exactly. Even when Charley Paulson cut in for the eighth time she had simulated delight and had apparently been both interested and flattered. She had not talked about the weather or Eau Claire or automobiles or her school, but had confined her conversation to me, you, and us.

It's just that it's not right, it's not my earworm. Somewhere in my memory Marjorie gives Bernice the advice; in the story, the advice is only found in Bernice's reflections. I'm so convinced that's not how it happened I keep thinking I must have read another, earlier version of the story. Or perhaps a page of the manuscript was lost in the last couple of years and I'm the only person who has noticed it. Or isn't there a school of thought that says the whole universe dissolves every second and magical goblins are constantly rebuilding it, and when you lose your keys but later they turn up somewhere you're sure you've already looked at, that's when the goblins forgot for a minute? Well maybe that happened to a paragraph in a F Scott Fitzgerald story.

But I guess it's really just that when I first read the story it was so real to me that I heard Marjorie's flirting advice, and I've never forgotten it.

And there my story ends. Having written it, I now realise it wasn't really quite interesting enough to blog about. Oh well, you've read it now.




Meanwhile, moving on, I was just wikipediating a few interesting facts about The Bill** recently, when I came across this little nugget:

In November 2006, thieves stole editing machines and master tapes from the shows studios in Merton, South West London. Posing as a worker and wearing a high-visibility jacket, one of the thieves followed a real worker into the studios and took the equipment, walked out with it and was driven off in a getaway van. This caused continuity problems for all storylines between 2007 and the end of time.

Well, let's face it, The Bill will run until the end of time.



* Next time you get a musical earworm, relief is at hand.

** Yeah, like your life's so amazing.