Damn Those Clever Bloggers! / Get Yer Cool Sexy Proud Bookworm Badge Here

I visited a new blog on Saturday night. It is wonderful. Damn. I hate it when that happens, because then there’s one MORE thing to keep me from doing what I’m supposed to do. Professor X looks very glum when I tell him I found a great new blog. I think I will stop telling him. So anyway, the new blog is called That’s Why. It's chock full o’goodness. Lisa is a very clever writer and she has so many interesting things. Damn her.

I discovered a really fun thing at That’s Why. I might not have even read it, but I was sitting on the sofa with Professor X, and he glanced over and said “Woo! That is one nice looking woman!”

Here is the woman:
This is a special badge which Lisa received. It was bestowed upon her by La Belette Rouge, who is ALSO an awesome blogger. Damn, damn, and a double dose of damn. But really this is all on Professor X’s head, because he said “Woo!” So he will just have to deal with the unmade bed.

The original rules for this bookworm honor were to do the following: pass it on to five other bloggers, and tell them to open the nearest book to page 46. Write out the fifth sentence on that page, and also the next two to five sentences.

But Lisa gave it a twist. Instead of tagging five others, she wrote “let's do this...if you have not received this award and you are sitting within three feet of a book, consider yourself tagged.”

I love this idea. Because everyone can play. So, play! And share your book passage with me. Because I just don’t have nearly enough to read….

Here’s my book and the sentences:

How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater by Marc Acito

The party almost has the feeling of a summit meeting (granted, a very rowdy summit meeting) as we acquaint ourselves with people we’ve never even dared speak to. People like Amber Wright, who arrives with a posse of Barbies, each swinging a six-pack like it’s a purse. In an effort to affect a kind of Rat Pack coolness, I greet them at the door wearing a silk smoking jacket and sucking on one of those pipes that blow bubbles, but they just breeze past me like I’m lucky to be at my own party.

Then there are people like Thelonious “TeeJay” Jones, who is, to the best of my knowledge, the first black person ever to enter my house who wasn’t there to clean it. TeeJay shows up with some of the black guys from the team (or SOBTGFTT for short) and I find myself completely overcompensating to make them feel welcome.

I’d admired author Marc Acito for a long time, listening to him read some of his humorous essays on a local radio show, Live Wire! (The name of the show includes an exclamation mark at the end. So don’t think I’m being weird with punctuation.) Then I attended his panel at Portland’s amazing Wordstock event this fall. Speedy quick, I bought his books (his other title is Attack of the Theater People) and asked him to sign them. We got to chatting and he mentioned he was teaching a class on story structure this winter on Sunday afternoons.

Guess where I’ve been spending my Sunday afternoons?

He’s a great writer and a great teacher. His books are hilarious and you should totally buy them. And I’m saying that because I really think so. The class isn’t for a grade or anything. Here’s a very nice publicity shot of him. His hair is currently blonde, but I suspect this picture shows his natural color. If you want a very big laugh, check out his Museum of Hair. When he teaches, he looks pretty much the same, except he wears shoes. Really cool designer model shoes. He has a perfect size 9 foot. And just to keep things symmetrical, he has a second one.



So now I have a really big incentive to ignore the siren lure of blog reading. Because I want to put into action all he’s teaching me by writing my own fantastically funny novel.

If only I weren’t so weak. I really like reading good blogs. And books.

Damn!