I’ve just come back from the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop. It was a wonderful weekend. I came away empowered, excited, and with a new perspective. Erma was the first mom blogger–I ran around in high school thinking that I would be the next Erma Bombeck. That did not happen. I was not a mother, I was Jewish, I was a teenager, and I was a New Yorker, not a Midwesterner.
Then my dad got cancer and took a year and a half to die. While I got into lots of schools. I went to Barnard for college, not because it was single sex, but because it was close to my mother, and cheaper than Brown or UPenn.
I could have stopped shaving my legs and become a raving feminist, but I didn’t. I used Nair, and I stayed away from the “womenin” courses, you know Women in Film Women in Religion, Women in Literature. I used the fact that I placed out of Freshman English to take Shakespeare. My first trip to the Columbia Bookstore I bought two huge books–an unabridged dictionary and a Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I also took a JTS course on “Pirke Avot–Ethics of the Fathers,” that semester.
Onecakebaker 