​by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.
4/30/22

Witches I Have Loved
I was thinking about why witches resonate with me so much. Here is what I came up with.
​Evidence
In the early 60s, I read all the books with stories about witches that were available at the Wenatchee Valley Public Library non-fiction collection.
My favorite character in The Wizard of Oz has always been the Wicked Witch of the West. I fell in love with her and her laugh from the moment I ever saw her. I can do a pretty good impression and know her final speech by heart. “Oh, what a world, what a world. . . who would have thought that a good little girl like you could destroy of my beautiful wickedness.”
As an adult, I adopted The Queen from Snow White for my Halloween persona. I had a wonderful half mask, really a devil mask from the nose down, but close enough, when combined with black clothes covered with a big black cloak and topped with a black pointy witch’s hat. I made a basket of apples with rubber snakes and spiders. I had a black glove with long black fingernails. I took my kids to the mall for trick or treating, (inclement weather made that the only real choice). At the mall, I always went up to the little ones dressed up as Snow White and offered them an apple. The parents loved it but the kids sometimes cried and then I had to take off my mask and explain that I was just an ordinary mommy.
I have made an informal study of witches that I expanded to include all popular culture female villains. I collected little action figures of them and used them when teaching fifth graders. I taught them about stereotypes in literature by having them brainstorm all the characteristics of a witch: black pointy hat, long noise, wart, red eyes, cackle, pale skin, and then had them describe the attributes of the White Witch in the Narnia stories, as a compare and contrast exercise.
Good times.

​Final Answer
But to the point of this essay, for me as a preteen reader, there were virtually no powerful female figures in literature or in life. Sure, there was Cleopatra; she used her sexy wiles to advance her cause and died of suicide by asp when her plots failed. Then there’s Jane Eyre, a powerless orphan who needs the help of a big strong dangerous man to complete her world. 

Who else do we have? Amelia Earhart, Nellie Bly, Florence Nightingale, and Eleanor Roosevelt come to mind.

I wasn’t reading Jane Austen at that point, so I had yet to meet Lady Catherine de Bourgh; Dicken’s Miss Havisham was also not yet in my realm. A Wrinkle in Time has a female hero, but she is not particularly powerful. And so it goes.

Some actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood carried power well or at least were outspoken and took no prisoners, giving as good as they got. They were smart asses or dangerous trouble, acting with agency in various roles: Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Ann Southern, Bette Davis, Mary Astor, and Rosalind Russell. From TV’s I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball comes to mind. These actresses played characters who didn’t take guff offa anyone, and they helped inform my notion of what a stand-up woman could do, even in a “man’s world.”

But witches . . . witches are another story altogether. They are powerful villains and only the most daring and bold can conquer them. They are the point of the story, the most interesting part.
Powerful female villains I have loved include the aforementioned Wicked Witch of the West and from the Disney oeuvre, The Queen from Snow White, as well as Maleficent, Cruella De’ Ville. I also love Angelica from Nickelodeon's Rug Rats.
I don’t love Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, but I do count her as a powerful female villain.
Other witches that impressed me are the witch at the top of The Glass Mountain and the witch at the top of Rapunzel’s tower. I am particularly fond of the wizened old woman who rewards the young adventurer in The Twelve Dancing Princesses; she is a witch in disguise who gives him a cloak of invisibility because he has shown her kindness. 

Not a bad lot really. They wield power as cruelly and vengefully as any male villain. They make a worthy opponent. And most of all, they do not sit on the sidelines waiting for Prince Charming to rescue them. They are women of action. That is why they are the witches I love.

Among the most popular things I ever post on Facebook are photos of the food I make. People ask me how I made the dish, so I have decided to share some recipes. I have started a new section of my website: "Recipes." So far I have shared two recipes, Stove Top Rice Pudding and Curried Sweet Potato Patties.

My interest in sharing recipes focuses on things that are good for you, things that are easy to make, and things that taste good. If it hits the trifecta, I like to share the recipe. The first two recipes are not draconian in their healthiness - they are just healthier than other foods I grew up eating. Rice Pudding with brown rice and not much sweetener can be just as tasty as the old fashioned version with white rice with sugar. Replacing white potatoes with sweet potatoes is a healthy upgrade.

Key issues for healthy eating for me:

• low or no sugar, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, et al
• anti-inflammatory properties
• boosts fiber intake

Easy to make means I can get it to the table quickly and produce something fresh even when I'm low energy and don't feel like cooking. Food delivery meals are rarely healthy and if they are, they are even more pricey than regular Door Dash. Plus Door Dash has gotten much worse lately, so that it arrives cold when it should be hot, melted when it should be frozen, spilled or tipped over, and with missing items. It's just not fun anymore.
So cooking has become more appealing.

What tastes good . . . is a matter of taste. There has been a fad in restaurant food lately of adding Siracha and Jalapeno peppers to food where it doesn't belong. If I order poppers, I expect a hot pepper, but when I order spaghetti and meatballs, I do not expect or want hot sauce in there.

Another thing that annoys me about recent trends in restaurant food is that they are adding a lot more salt than used to be the custom. The fact is that salt can and should be added at the last minute, by the individual. Not every likes a lot of salt; salt is a cause of illness in many, and it is unnecessary. Salt added at the last minute will fire those salty taste buds just the same as salt that was added at the beginning of the cooking process. Of course there are exceptions - baking requires precise measurement and sometimes salt is part of the chemistry. I would use caution before removing salt from a baking recipe. And adding salt to pasta water will cause it to boil at a lower point, so that may be useful. But as a general rule, let the diner add her own salt. Don't salt to YOUR taste, let the diner salt to HER taste.

If you are amused by this blog post and/or if you like the recipes in the recipe section, PLEASE leave a comment. It helps me understand what people find useful on this website.

Hugs,
​Dr. P-J

I have been writing again. If you look under Non-Fiction, Memoirs, you will find a new piece, "Growing Up a Pineo." If you like it, please leave me a comment, here. If you don't like it . . . well we don't need to talk about that, do we? 
If you look in Poetry, you will find something I wrote about Easter/Ostara. 
I am working on a ghost story right now. It's about 2/3 done and a bit longer than most of the pieces I produce. 
I greatly appreciate learning what writing appeals to my readers, so do leave a comment to encourage me to write more.
Love to all,
Dr. P-J

I wrote a new piece of fiction in a genre I am calling Madge-Noir.
You can read it here: "White Out"

I wrote another short story yesterday. You can find it under the Fiction pull-down "A Day Late and a Dollar Short." This is the first thing I've written about Madge in a long time. Madge is back! I'm not sure if I'll ever explain her back story, how she got to that place, or if it will be revealed what happens next. Madge came to visit me and that is what I captured.

My writing recently seems lately to take a dark turn more often than not. I hope readers will find it entertaining, but will perhaps need their own road map to get back from some of the more difficult places I'm driving through or to. (Through which I'm driving. Bah.)

I have plenty of cheerful life-affirming things going on in my life . . . but as Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By this I mean that all happy stories are alike . . . and not often very interesting.

I find that I do not generally have the capacity for long works of fiction. I did write a novella when I lived on Noyo Court; It's not book lengthy but is the longest work of fiction I have produced. I would like to find it to share here. First things first; I'm working to organize this website so that the good stuff is not buried three layers down in the Archives section.

I have certain ideas that WANT to be told, stories that come to me with intensity and realism. They are like crazy people (nuts) escaping from the asylum (nut house) and they deeply desire to be seen and heard. The character Alex, from No Way Out is like that. I had a vision of how he looked and his whole back story was just there. I knew this man like a boy I watched grow up.

I think of what I write as "vignettes." I hope the reader will be taken to a different place and dragged around against their will, always wanting to read the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph until "boom." It's over. You're dumped back on a sandy beach with waves lapping up against your ankles. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? The short answer is no.

I create art and measure its effect by the number of views and responses I get from my audience. Facebook is currently throttling my account, so that my posts are pushed down in the newsfeed - which is where my friends are most likely to see my posts.

My FB account has been restricticted for weeks now. The number of days it will be restricted never goes down from 90 days. Perhaps in May the throttling of my posts will be lifted, but FB is vague in its sentencing. My current crime is posting "false information."

The first item on the list is something I shared from a reliable friend of mine. I cannot see the whole post to fact check it. I cannot review why it is considered to be untrue. Robb Wittman supported Trump through thick and thin and I have shared many examples of this over the four years of 45's presidency. Wittman was the only Republican Congressperson from Virginia to attend the fascist-in-chief's nominating convention. The photo below is a rare picture of the two of them together - at a speech 45 gave at a Naval base. We know Wittman (Wittless?) loves the Navy. Well not so much the sailors, more the contractors who supply the Navy.

The next item is something attributed to Anthony Hopkins about how to deal with people  who are bad for you. After I learned that it was not actually written by Hopkins, I changed the comment to mention that fact and said that the text was still worthwhile and worth reading.

The next item is a post about Clarence Thomas' wife Ginny. I ask if the meme is true that she helped organize the January 6, 2021 Insurrection. 

The next item is truly bizarre. It is a meme drawn from news reports about the number of days the Berlin Wall has been down. The day it was published, it was true. The next day it was dated. To label this as "false news" and then punish me for sharing it is a consequence for no crime.
One can say the same thing about Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. "Four score and seven years ago . . ." is a LIE. 

The final item on the list - well Facebook can't be bother to tell me what it is. The information on phone is a somewhat different list, oddly. This item could be their complaint that I shared false information when I blamed CEO salaries and corporate price gouging for inflation. Their source relied on a think tank funded by our corporate masters.

Facebook also marks as spam my efforts to share my website blog, so if you are reading, PLEASE leave a comment. Or at least a like. Otherwise, this tree that is falling in the forest will make no sound.

Miriam Toews has written a lovely piece, published in a recent New Yorker. She described on incident from her past: “ . . . how my father died. He stepped in front of a train.“

That is so much more elegant a way to say that one’s father took his own life than it is to say that one time my father drank an unusually large amount of whiskey, then ate all of his prescription medication, and finally, woke up dead next to my mother, sleeping beside him. Except he didn't wake up. Like Elvis, he’d left the building, but unlike Elvis, he had left behind a corpse for my mother to find, cold and lifeless beside her in the bed.

So my mother called me up - I was living about an hour's drive away from Primrose Drive, in Lake Elsinore. She told me a long story - took at least five minutes, describing in great detail all the events of the previous evening, finishing up with "and I think he's dead."
​
That was the first point in the story that she got around to the most salient detail . . . "I think he's dead."

My hair stood on end and I said something to the effect of "Oh my god, Mom, go take his pulse! Call 911!" 
She corrected herself and said, "I know he's dead. He's dead."

And we proceeded from there.

But I think compared with stepping in front of a train, overdosing on pills is a much more polite way to leave this painful vale. What a mess to leave for someone else to clean up. How selfish.

My father was in charge of his own boat the whole time I knew him.
He didn't get into anyone else's boat.
He didn't let his boat just wander down the stream, unmoored and unsteered.
​He commanded his life story, right up to the end.

And he was generally very polite - as can be seen in his summary actions.