Hot 100

Well, I don't know about hot, but this is my 100th post. Someone should win a prize.

Tonight is Mona's Open Mic with featured reader Tom Dukes, better known to me as Dr. Dukes (he calls his students Ms/Mr, so it doesn't seem right to call him anything but Dr.). I'm super excited to hear him read, since the only poem of his I've read is the one in RHINO.

I'm doing a presentation tomorrow on Sharon Olds' "Rites of Passage." Currently, I'm procrastinating from my preparation because I really don't want to do it. I blindly signed up for this poem without having read it, and frankly, I much prefer Olds' when she writes about being a young woman, lover, daughter, etc. than when she writes about being a mother. Unfortunately, when we signed up, I knew I wanted to do Olds but hadn't read any of the poems on the list of possibilities (and I thought I was a fan!) so I picked one at random, and it didn't work out. I guess I should stop complaining and start explicating.

I watched The Color Purple last night for the first time since I was a kid. I didn't mean to watch it--it was supposed to be background noise while I was working on my papers, but I got sucked in. It was really strange to see Oprah and Whoopi circa 1985, and even stranger to finally understand what the hell was going on, because the last time I saw it, I was too young to totally understand the sexual abuse and way too young to understand the Albert-Celie-Shug love triangle. Now I want to read the book again, cuz I'm pretty sure it's better.

By the way, I love the name Shug.