I'm throwing myself softballs here but it's all in the name of habit-building! I got Tina Fey's Bossypants from the book-sharing wagon by our friendly local circus / occupied former industrial site (see pic) some months ago. I'd hoped it would be a funny quick read, but it got stuck in the literary traffic jam... "A masterpiece in comedy writing" raves the cover. Maybe not quite that? but for sure entertaining. A lot of the comedy-insider humor in the book goes over my head because I have at best a vague picture of the people involved. But "The Mother's Prayer for Its Daughter" is genius - I laughed, I cried, I read it aloud to my own female offspring, who incidentally tried to casually drop into conversation this morning that she "might do something tonight with my [boy?]friend from flute ensemble," at which point I felt like I should be giving her some sort of sage motherly advice about dating (good lord she will be 16 this year) but of course she didn't want to talk about it, and even if she had I'm not sure I have any sage motherly advice to give. We started watching the U.S. version of "Love on the Spectrum" instead.
On Being this week was a conversation with adrienne maree brown who points us towards Audre Lorde reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, which seems not at all irrelevant to a woman working her a** off to become a comic in a male-dominated world because it's what she loves. What do I love? Way back in grad school I had an article about Peg Phillips pinned to my bulletin board, which seems odd in retrospect because why would I have decided in my 20s to take as a role model a woman whose career took off in her late 60s? But there it is. Hope springs eternal.
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