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In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948 -- on a five-year-old girl. --The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, cited in The Vagina Monologues |
Sunday, February 13, 2000 V-Day, CDs, Spam, and More So I went to see the second annual V-Day benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues at Columbia University. I'm supposed to be reviewing it for the college paper, in fact, and I'm not sure what I'm going to write about it. Oh, it'll be a positive review, but what angle to take, and what to say? I don't really know just yet. I wasn't really in its target audience, that's for certain. And I know there were bits of it that I wasn't able to appreciate properly, both because of my gender, and my cultural/experiential background. With that having been said, it was directed, staged, and performed very well. And it's certainly given me food for thought. And the audience in general seemed to like it, although I admittedly didn't interview anybody else. (I wondered if I should have, but I didn't have the foggiest idea of what to ask, so I decided to skip it.)
Anyway, on the way back, I stopped by Tower Records, where, after much dithering (and after making the disheartening discovery that a $25 gift certificate doesn't buy you much these days), I walked out with Garbage's first (self-titled) album, and a 4-CD classical music set of "the 46 greatest classical hits of all time", paying $5.29 over the amount of said gift certificate. Thank goodness for really cheap classical collections... the whole set cost much less than the one Garbage CD. From there to Barnes and Noble. Yes, they're evil, but they were right across the street, and I really needed some books for school. Particularly Defoe's Roxana, which I started reading on the subway ride home.
On an unrelated note, I finally got around to checking my Hotmail mailbox after an absence of several months. I have over a dozen e-mail addresses, you see, although I don't actually check most of them very often. The Hotmail one used to be my designated backup address, but that stopped being the case long ago. I don't use it at all these days, but I check on it every few months, just in case. Anyway, I opened the mailbox to find 78 new messages. Of those, 77 were spam; the one remaining message was from the MSN Hotmail staff, informing me that they now offer a choice of languages in the interface. To quote Professor J, "Zowie."
My answering machine message has been changing every day or two. More often than not, it consists of a song parody, made up when I get tired of the previous message. Currently, in a sort of tribute to Valentine's Day, it's to the tune of "Stop! The Love You Save May Be Your Own":
Stop! And leave your number at the tone Well, I never said it was W.S. Gilbert.
You were a good man, Charles M. Schulz. Rest in peace.
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