"A face like a pancake": Wayne's broadcast verdict, read into the record

texture · 17 Nov YDAU

• When: 17 Nov YDAU (the endnote's own dateline), in the aftermath of John Wayne's on-air meltdown.
• What: Not her act but her portrait in another's mouth: among the insults Wayne aired over Troeltsch's accidentally-live broadcast, deLint — reading to Pemulis from the sheaf, between the Longley and the late-Founder entries — finds hers: "On Mary Esther Thode: 'a face like a pancake.'" And Pemulis remembers the broadcast running longer than the transcript's capsule: "The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode's face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on." The book's cruelest word on Thode, of a piece with the kids' demonology — and carried here strictly as Wayne's utterance in deLint's reading, not as description.