April 1972 Issue
Samantha Says…
Q:Dear Samantha,
I’m a huge fan of yours, and I was devastated to find out your magazine will be shutting down. I truly hope you have plans to continue sharing your knowledge and passion at another larger national magazine, because I will surely follow you wherever you go!
Speaking of following, I’ve had a bit of a stalker situation. I’m a woman living alone downtown, and over the past several months I’ve been pursued by a man to no end. Even after confronting him, explaining in no uncertain terms that I’m not interested, he persists. Love letters, flowers, phone calls, randomly showing up at my door… he even tried to force himself on me when I was walking home from the bus stop one night. I find myself always looking over my shoulder, searching the shadows for him. It’s become a terrifying existence to be the object of his relentless affection.
No one seems to believe me, and those that do blame me for “leading him on” because of the clothes I wear. I sought protection from the police, but all they see is a single woman in a short skirt and her doting love interest. Instead of arresting him they urged me to give him a chance since “it’s not safe for a woman to live alone.” It is men like this stalker who make it not safe to be alone!
Any final advice before your column bids us adieu to help me get rid of my problem?
Sincerely,
Freida the Fan
A: Dear Freida the Fan,
I’ve recently had my fair share of stalkers, and it turns out they’re a resilient breed of human that is difficult to eradicate. For my own stalker I once fantasized about inviting him out for coffee, then spiking his drink with wolfsbane—its purple flowers are easy to identify in the mountainous Pennsylvania woodlands. The side effects of ingestion are swift and can be severe, including heart arrythmia, vomiting, and respiratory system paralysis. In fact, 20 ml of tincture could prove fatal. So unless you fear for your life, or he’s really getting on your last nerve, I wouldn’t advise that route.
Thank you for your encouragement to persist, a determination I had lost recently as I began to doubt my own calling. Although I feel as if I have failed you, my readers, I want to leave you with one last piece of ammunition that might help women force a necessary societal change. This will likely also pound the final nail in my columnist career coffin, but it’s a sacrifice I must make.
I recently discovered that Cook Pharmaceuticals has been manufacturing a drug that is known to cause cancer in women and their babies. If you are pregnant and your doctor has prescribed you DES, it is urgent that you stop taking it. If this has impacted you, please join me in my last battle against this mammoth company that has faked their drug trial results and led to the death of hundreds of thousands of women.
I will be loud. I will be proud. And I will expose the wrongs thrown at us. Men merely fight to win, but women fight to survive.
Sincerely,
Samantha
Chapter 40
The radio could be heard through the screen door and open windows as Sam toiled under the summer evening sun rebuilding her greenhouse. “Everybody Plays the Fool” by The Main Ingredient had segued into the “dad-ee-o of the rad-ee-o” Porky Chedwick’s news segment. He was saying something about a man dying unexpectedly in front of a café in downtown Pittsburgh. Investigators suspected it was poisoning. Unfortunately, the only witness, a woman by the name of Freida, wasn’t able to revive him before calling for an ambulance.
Freida. The name held a strange familiarity, and Sam instantly thought of her last advice column that Betty had managed to publish, as promised. Certainly it couldn’t be Freida the Fan with the stalker? And if so, how did she get her hands on wolfsbane so quickly? Sam couldn’t help but be impressed with the woman’s efficiency in problem-solving.
“Such a shame,” Miss Posey lamented from her back porch while she oversaw Archibald Maverick Emerson Posey the Sixth running along the fence line after Fido in a game of catch me if you can, which Archibald continued to lose and Fido continued to win.
“The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” Miss Posey added with a dramatic sigh.
The statement was clearly intended to bait Sam into conversation, and since Sam was a goodhearted gal who knew a cry of loneliness when she heard one, she left her greenhouse construction in progress and approached the fence dividing their yards.
Sam dusted the wood shavings off of her pedal pushers, sniffed the armpits of her psychedelic t-shirt, and pushed her sweaty bangs off of her face. She would need to finish the greenhouse within the next couple of weeks if she was going to have any kind of herb harvest to carry her through the winter. With her budget sapped and no job to fund it, the deadline didn’t look promising.
“What’s got you in a funk today, Miss Posey?”
“The news, that’s what. Tragedy after tragedy. Men dying in droves from poisoning.”
“Oh, there’s another one?” Sam asked, hoping she hadn’t spurred a wolfsbane murder spree across the city with her latest column.
“Sadly, yes. A couple days ago a husband dropped dead in the middle of eating his Watergate cake. The cops have no idea what killed him, but his poor widowed spouse, Sally something-or-other, sounded devastated when they interviewed her. She must be heartbroken.”
No, it couldn’t possibly be Supper Sipper Sally that had written her a year and a half ago. Suddenly Sam felt the weight of responsibility for advising all of these women to essentially kill their husbands. That hadn’t been her intention at all—well, not explicitly—but it wasn’t as if the world wasn’t better off without cruel people.
