Celebrating Women, Erma and Humility

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.