From: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org (lucy-list-digest) To: lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: lucy-list-digest V4 #194 Reply-To: lucy-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk lucy-list-digest Monday, August 26 2002 Volume 04 : Number 194 In this issue: Re: [lucy-list] a new thought on reviews [lucy-list] of aspirin and book clubs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 09:23:05 EDT From: Bn2Synthsz@aol.com Subject: Re: [lucy-list] a new thought on reviews In a message dated 8/24/2002 11:57:11 PM Eastern Standard Time, benruth@earthlink.net writes: > Wow, I'm so inspired now! I feel like I could review those California shows > myself! The fact that I've been in New York the whole time is only a minor > obstacle. > Benay, you are too funny. Just have to love your enthusiasm. I'm sorry you're having the work fortnight from hell.... from one editor to another, Kathy ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 17:55:31 -0400 From: "Benay Bubar" Subject: [lucy-list] of aspirin and book clubs Surprise, it's me again...interrupted in my work by my old friend Moderate Headache, and thus waiting for the Excedrin to do its job. (It is a shame I am not a celebrity. This is true for many reasons, but one of them is that I could do a great job endorsing Excedrin. I carry a 100-count bottle with me in my bag at all times when I leave home, just in case I need it. Of course, I also have a tendency not to completely close the childproof cap on said 100-count bottle, which means I spend a considerable deal of my cherished free time cursing mildly under my breath while rooting around in my bag, furtively picking 98 pills out of the seams, dusting off the lint, and putting them back in the bottle. Once last year, having arrived way early for a Lucy concert, I entertained myself for a good long time with this task...I had uncharacteristically forgotten to bring a book, so at least this meant I wasn't bored. Also I did it once last year on a plane, somewhere over Phoenix I think, and as soon as I finished putting the last pill back in the bottle, I managed to drop the bottle cap way down between the seats such that it was COMPLETELY gone, forever, and I had to put the open bottle back in my bag, where all the pills immediately spilled out again. Talk about tragic. Therefore I think I would be particularly suited to endorsing what I believe should be the next major advance in pain relief products: Magnetic Excedrin, in which the bottle, the cap, and the pills themselves all attract one another. I've even got a slogan for them..."Magnetic Excedrin: The only thing you'll lose is your headache." Yes, just remember, you heard it on the Lucy-list first.) I wasn't actually meaning to talk about Excedrin, though. I was meaning to mention how my review template doesn't seem to have shaken out any Lucy reviews from this week. Maybe I should have tried Plan B, which was to post something like "I hate California and Nevada and I bet Lucy does too" and then wait for the indignant replies to roll in...i.e., "Hey, I live in California/Nevada, and you are an idiot, and Lucy loves it here, she just said so"...and then pounce..."HA! You were there!!! You SAW her this week, didn't you? And you didn't TELL us about it, did you?" But I realized I would probably just get a lot of angry responses from people who USED to live in California/Nevada, or people like Peter who still live in those places and didn't see Lucy there this week, and they'd just all hate ME. So that idea was out. And incidentally, I DON'T hate California or Nevada. I've never been to either state, but I like them both very much based on hearsay. I hope to see them both for myself someday. And I also wanted to mention that the book A Beautiful Mind has finally come in for me at the library, so I'm getting it tomorrow and am finally going to get to read it now that Lucy has been recommending it from the stage for months. Not that I base my reading selections on what my favorite singers recommend...OK, so I did read Pam Houston because Nerissa Nields talked about her (I liked her autobiographical essays but wasn't as wild about her short stories), so perhaps sometimes I DO read books because my favorite singers recommend them...but I read LOTS of other things, too. And hey, it occurred to me we could have a Lucy-list book club. Of course, the only books I can think of that we could read if we had a Lucy-list book club are A Beautiful Mind and Lipschtick by Gwen Macsai (the book by Lucy's childhood friend that mentions Lucy's childhood and, as I recall, reveals the deep dark secret that in her youth, years before Lucy became the Lucy we know---lovely, talented, and really nice---she was...lovely, talented, and really nice). Book clubs can be scary things, though. I have been in two book clubs in my time. One was a book club in which everyone except for me enjoyed Immensely Weighty Discussions...any time we were having a conversation I could understand, it was quickly deemed too shallow. We read books such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, a title which I assumed referred to the amount of time I would have required to actually get through the entire tome. (This despite the fact that I once WAS an English major...an experience the Wellesley College English Department probably still hasn't quite recovered from...actually, they probably don't recall me at all there because I raced to finish up my English major by junior year and ran screaming---figuratively, of course---to the psychology department to do another major THERE, which made me much happier, if also much more likely to diagnose myself with every possible personality disorder I read about). Anyway, then there is the book club I am currently in. There are four people in my current book club, and it's nice how we all have a role to play. Member #1, my turtle-owning friend, relates every aspect of every book to her childhood. Member #2, whose partner is expecting, relates every aspect of every book to babies and child care. Member #3 relates every aspect of every book to her sex life. And then, after ten minutes or so, the book is entirely forgotten and the three of them all settle into discussing the sex life of Member #3. And me? My role is to announce that I will self-destruct if forced to read any more Popular Romantic Fiction or self-help books and beg that we read something else next time---at which point I am promptly outvoted---and then stare affectionately yet bemusedly at all of them and pour myself a fourth cup of coffee. It's quite something, my book club. Hmmmm, let's see if this one makes it under the posting-length limits... Benay ------------------------------ End of lucy-list-digest V4 #194 ******************************* This has been a posting from the Lucy Kaplansky mail list digest To unsubscribe send mail to Majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe lucy-list-digest" in the body of the message