Can I Play Glamour, Too?

(this is really Sally Thomas, but if you want to call me Anchoress 2.0, that’s okay)

I think Danielle, Simcha and I are having an unofficial contest:  who’s the . . . what was that word, Simcha? The Gummo? I think each one of us is convinced that the other two are Superwoman Glamourpusses, while we ourselves are having this interesting dream in which we got invited to stand in for The Anchoress, and any minute now we’re going to wake up and discover two feet of standing water in the bathroom.

Actually, what I also keep thinking is that we sound like the beginning of a joke. Simcha, Sally, and Danielle walk into a bar.

And their collective twenty children stand outside shouting, “Stop it, you’re embarrassing us.” Or else, “Let us in! If we all stand on each other’s shoulders, they won’t card us!”

All joking aside, I too am beyond thrilled to be here. My own blog is a modest little thing, mostly daily this-and-that, but some bigger thoughts have been knocking around in my head waiting for a reason to become prose.  What better reason could I think of to try and make them smart thoughts, and the prose good prose, than that I’m trying to wobble around in Elizabeth’s shoes for — she says it, and as a daily observer, I think it’s true — the best readers on the internet.

All the same, just because I’m putting on the big-time shoes, I shouldn’t get the big-time head. We’re two weeks into our homeschool year, and I realized today that my first-grader thinks her last name is spelled Thomes. I mean, the other day she wrote chlorophyll, so all is not lost, but still. On the other hand, I have a senior in my house this year — as in high school, not citizen;  that would be me — who wants to go for walks and tell me all the reasons why Dorothea, in Middlemarch, is a twit, which is far more delightful than it sounds. When you’re a senior in high school, you think lots of people in books are twits, even when you can’t get enough of them. And your mother, who has loved you more than her own life since before you were born, and who realizes that after this year you are gone, baby, into a whole new life, can’t get enough of whatever you think about Dorothea, or of the long walks in the dark with the dog. And for the mother-figure, all that’s kind of humbling, too.

Anyway, as Danielle says, we can’t all be in Rome. On the other hand, who says you have to leave home to find adventure? I’m looking forward to the collaboration, the conversation — and if there’s some glamour going begging, I could always use a little of that, too.

P.S. My husband has just asked me a trivia question:  Who was the first woman to cross the threshold of the Great Hall at Peterhouse College, Cambridge?

Answer:  Southern novelist Eudora Welty, in 1955.

Facts to relish, remember, and repeat.  Anyone else got a good trivia Q-&-A?