Thanks for Shirley Jackson’s “The Bus”, which like the Wodehouse story elsewhere in this issue is an allusion in “Arsenic and Old Lace”. Elaine Harper is the name of the woman Mortimer Brewster marries at the beginning of the film and, presumably, also the play, which I haven’t read in forty years and don’t remember as distinct from the film. “Arsenic and Old Lace”–its initials, by the way, are AOL– was written in 1939 by the American Joseph Kesselring and opened on Broadway in January, 1941. (Just FYI, arsenic is element #33 in the Periodic Table of the Elements. As for the phrase “you can’t go home again”, that is the title of one of American author Thomas Wolfe’s best known novels.) The story also reminds me of two other films, “North by Northwest” and “Psycho”. The toys in the closet that provide E.T. camouflage in the eponymous film may also allude to “The Bus”.

The story was a sucess and I liked it