Hello, Lover. I've Missed You.

I love to read. I was an early reader and had a bookshelf brimming with books to choose from. I still have my first library card and can close my eyes right now and smell the stacks of the Westfall Branch of the SAPL from back in the day. I even wanted to be a librarian when I grew up - I loved those due date rubber stamps, the wooden card catalog, and just the perfect order of it all! Heavenly!

Flash forward to the college years, and my pleasure reading took a backseat to assigned works like the Entire Freaking Canon of Shakespeare (they're not all masterpieces, BTW), Theatre History from The Big Bang to The Great White Way (like, a shitload of history), and any number of post-war piece of crap plays whose names escape me now but that I was ready to perform in my best Standard English dialect at a moment's notice. Then in law school, reading hundreds of pages a week (even a night, sometimes) left me with precious little time or inclination to read anything non-legal. In fact, I remember quite clearly in my first year fighting sleep while I tried to glean the rule of law from a Vanity Fair interview with Sandra Bullock. Clearly, I was nuts.

Later, after scaring the hell out of myself (and annoying the hell out of T-Bone, though he would never admit it) with every pregnancy and parenting tome I could put my hands on, once Peach was born, my literary focus shifted to children's books, which I adore and would secretly love to write (shhh). Thanks to my obsession and T-Bone's mom's 25 years as a kindergarten teacher, Peach and Olive boast a library that is simply unparalleled, and they, too, love to wile away the hours with a stack of titles of their own choosing. They've had library cards since before they could walk, and of all the amazing things they can do, having them read to me absolutely moves me every time. Happy tears.

All this to say, since I left LawNerds and the hundreds of rancid, not-even-legally-or-historically-relevant-anymore cases I had to read each week, I've been trying to restart my reading habit, or at least extend it beyond the 10 minutes of People magazine I can get through before dozing off. Now, I'm not the speed demon she is, and I sure as hell can't read multiple books at once like she does, mostly because, really, I'm not very smart, and I have a hard time keeping all those characters straight and distinguishing between fantasy and reality, past and present, good twin, evil twin, etc.. So, I started off slow and have now truly rediscovered my love for the books, so much so that I'm on a first-name basis with most of the staff at my neighborhood Half Price Books. Granted, I'm not taking on anything too weighty at this point, mostly chick lit, mostly of the Southern fried variety, but I am enjoying myself and enjoying reading something that doesn't necessarily have to end up with a winner and a loser or a dead body and jail time. I know these characters - I've eaten their decadent desserts, I've seen their beautiful antiques, and I've learned those family secrets when a distant elderly cousin has too much wine at Christmas and brings the celebration to a standstill. I get it! And I love it!

So, I'm back with my old boyfriend, and he's already talking my into things I've never done before. Currently that would be: Attack of The Theatre People by Marc Acito, who I don't know from Adam, but when the blurb says that the main character gets kicked out of drama school in the 80s for being "too jazz hands for Juilliard," how can I resist?