I recall how stunned I was as a teenager when I bought a used paperback copy of Fredrick Kohner’s novel Gidget with a photo of Sandra Dee on the cover. Though I had grown up with Gidget–my stepfather wrote the Gidget movies’ theme songs and incidental music, I had watched the TV show reruns as a little girl, we lived just minutes from the beach, and friends of mine surfed–I didn’t know that Gidget was (loosely) based on the adventures of the author’s daughter in the summer of 1956.