Some people's lives are very dramatic, filled with passionate urgency, emotional outbursts, chronic wasting diseases, changing loyalties, betrayal by trusted friends. There do exist a few people who live as large as characters in an opera, folks like Nelson Mandela and the Pope, folks who make indelible marks on the world. However, if you are like me, you are more likely to know people whose lives resemble soap operas. Without warning you can sometimes even find yourself living in a soap opera. Be worried if you are having torrid affairs with people who've had torrid affairs with other people you know, and be very worried if anyone says to you, "Listen, we've got to talk."

My own life tends to be more of a comedy, which is a much easier genre to move around in. In a comedy you might be embarrassed that your faults are constantly being noted and made light of, but then everybody else's faults are too. Unlikely collections of people consider each other friends in a comedy, and even the obnoxious are tolerated for the comic relief they provide, and furthermore (if you're lucky) everybody around you has thick skins, so that you can say clever things without hurting each other's feelings. Perhaps you worry that nobody will take you seriously in a comedy, but that turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Though occasionally I hope my friends will listen to me--say, if I'm weeping and need comfort--but to be honest, it's a burden to have people pay too much attention to what you say. After all, what if you change your mind later and want to say the opposite? And of course in a comedy, things more or less come out okay in the end.

I have big plans to some day create a situation comedy for T.V., and not just because the extra income would allow me to hire somebody to clean this house. No, it's because comedy is sanity. And especially for those days when life does feel like a tragedy or a soap opera, I have an important ritual. When I relax in the evening, I open my 2002 journal (which contains mostly to-do lists), and I record the sitcom moment of the day.. Sometimes if I've been listening to too much world news or I've been taking myself too seriously, it can require significant thought, re-figuring, some new way of seeing, to come up with the crucial event that proves how funny life is, but there is always at least one, and as soon as I remember it, I drop about ten pounds. Here are the sitcom moments I have recorded during the past week:

Monday August 19: In Karate class, our manly and stoic Sensei seems a little slow in his responses, he slurs his speech. Turns out that his intense knee pain has driven him finally to take Vicodin. After we do our usual warm ups, he commands us to perform quadriceps exercises for twenty-five minutes, which is not humanly possible. These are all variations on squats, all the things Sensei can't do because of his knees: squat-and-kicks, duck walks, bunny hops, long walks, short walks, sidewalks. Some naive new white belt says, "I can't do this," and everyone else winces, because that means we'll do more. "We don't say that word in here," Sensei says, and we go on and do more. By the end, my feet are stone white, which means the circulation has been cut off completely, and for a while I am unable to walk or even stand. I am listless during the rest of the three hour workout. By the time I get home, I am in enough pain that I long for Vicodin. And the funny thing about this is that I go willingly to this class. Nobody makes me go to this class.

Tuesday: I awaken to the sound of my my three-legged dog peeing on the floor just outside the bedroom. Now if I had paid a lot of money for an oriental rug or elegant carpeting or wood flooring, it might be a tragic sound, but that floor is cheap rug over bare concrete, and when Re-bar goes the way of all mortal creatures, I will drag the rug outside and burn it. Re-bar can't stand up without my help, but I can't help him because my own quivering legs will not yet support my body. The dog whimpers and I sit on the edge of the bed and massage my quadriceps.

Wednesday: Miriam Webster's on-line word of the day is paean \PEE-un\ (noun): a joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving,or triumph, which, though it sounds an awful lot like "peeing," is the perfect word because today is the fifteenth anniversary of the plighted troth of self and darling Christopher. To celebrate we go to a late breakfast at Food Dance Café where we get pancakes with real maple syrup. Christopher orders the full stack, and so do I. For a while I think I can't finish the pancakes, but then I remember that can't is a negative, nonproductive word. Afterwards, I fall into a hallucinatory maple syrup coma in which I imagine my swollen, aching quadriceps separating from the rest my body. The funny thing is that nobody made me eat every single bite of those pancakes, soak up every drop of that syrup. I did it of my own free will.

In karate class this evening, Sensei is still on Vicodin and he commands us to do more and more push ups, sets of ten on fingertips, on fists, on the first knuckle, on the second knuckle, on the backs of the hands, with clapping hands and feet, with jumping over sticks. When people begin to moan, Sensei says that we can all do more than we think we can. By the end I'm calculating that we've done one hundred and twenty push ups. I feel listless during the rest of class, and at one point I notice in the mirror I'm drooling. By the time I get home my upper arms have swollen so that the skin around my biceps is stretched like sausage casings all the way down to my elbows. I can't brush my hair or floss my teeth. I can't take a shower until Christopher comes home because he has to get me out of my sports bra. Then he feels me up a bit, which is nice.

Thursday: I awaken to discover I cannot move my arms. They have frozen up completely. I can only hope to gradually wiggle them back to mobility. And just as I get all the fingers of my left hand moving, I hear the wet noise that is Re-bar peeing on the floor. There is another noise I didn't tell you about before, a noise that I don't like to think about, and that is the accompanying sound of Rebar lapping up his own urine.

Not long ago, I heard that something like three quarters of the schoolboys in Russia think that drinking one's own urine has healthful benefits. And while we expect a good dog to behave better than foolish Slavic boys, the vet has informed me that Re-bar's urine is very weak as a result of diminished kidney function--that is why he drinks so much water, because it passes right through him. Later, after I manage to get Rebar outside and emptied and back to his water dish, I sit at my keyboard and enter "drinking urine" into the Google search engine. I get 2440 entries for that topic, and every single one of them advocates the practice of drinking ones own urine. This pro-urine stance says something about the web, but I am not sure what.

I march out to the garage to tell Christopher that the world wide web is telling us to drink urine, and I find him coated with grease, dissasembling his 1951 8-N Ford tractor front end beneath an elegant chandelier he has hung from the garage ceiling--it has those little flame-shaped light bulbs that are expensive to replace. Jaimy Gordon gave it to me when she remodeled, no doubt envisioning it over our living room table.

Friday: It seems appropriate that the word-of-the day from Miriam Webster happens to be blabbative (which means garrilous, chatty), just when I realize the first 125 pages of my next novel should be boiled down to 75 or fewer. Since nobody reads any more, the whole business of being a writer is a desperate one, and desperation, like pain or attempts at self-improvement (such as vocabulary building), is rife with comic possibilities, which I will think about later.

Despite the swelling in my arms and my limited range of motion, I go to weapons class and perform as well as I can with a six foot long stick. I have been trained not to allow myself expressions of pain, and so when Sensei says to me, "You have no passion today," I do not hit him with my stick. Later that evening, my arms are swollen worse than ever, and I notice a bulging region just above my right elbow. It is supple, filled with liquid, about the size of a breast implant. By the time I go to bed, my elbow has completely disappeared inside this fluid sac.

Saturday: I attend the Kalamazoo Scottish Festival where I have offered to help Jerry Campbell (no relation) with the children's activities. The festival is rich with sitcom material: men in skirts, long lines for meat pies and brinkies or blinkies or birdies, whatever the heck those Scottish ground-meat turnovers are called (my darling Christopher corrects me--they are bridies), and more men in skirts. Jerry tells me that Scotsmen are not supposed to wear underwear beneath their kilts but that he, Jerry, does. It occurs to me that Jerry is blabbative, and as I staple blank coats of arms to cardboard pizza-rounds for coloring, I listen to the Kalamazoo Pipe Band making a paean to the Highlands, which is followed by an announcement for the women's caber toss. I have been looking forward to taking part in this year's athletic competition, the hammer throw of course, but most keenly the caber toss. My muscles, however, are still so swollen I can't pick a thistle, let alone heft a 17-foot 150-pound telephone pole through the air end-over-end, so instead I go wait in the long line to procure another Blinkie. I notice, as do several children, that the fluid sac in my arm has slipped below my elbow, so that my forearm bulges kind of the way Popeye's does.

Back home I fail to pry my greasy husband away from the tractor, so I go alone to the Wagner family pig roast, a pean to the end of summer where I encounter many blabbative people drinking beer on the Wagner lawn. A horn honks intermittently while I am trying to disentangle my sunglasses from my hair without raising my arms. It turns out that a drunk guy named Vern has gotten into his truck to rest (his wife took his keys, don't worry). As he passes out, his head falls down into the steering wheel, onto the horn, which beeps loudly, and that sound awakens him and he picks up his head and leans back against the seat. When he passes out again, his head hits the horn again, and he awakens, to the same effect. And again, and again and again, creating a perfect bit of background burlesque.

Sunday: I awaken to discover my biceps are loosening up, and that the pocket of fluid in my forearm is a little smaller, maybe an A-cup, and the word of the day is alienist, which means psychiatrist. Jenny the donkey has a foot fungus, and so once a week I must go to my mother's farm and treat the hoof with bleach. I don't know if I can ever live without donkeys--they are so stubborn and beautiful and funny. Because my dog is not long for this earth, I don't make him sit safely in the truck as usual, but I carry him to the barnyard so he can drag himself around and get the full experience. If he's lucky, he will still be able to detect the lingering smell of the skunk Susanna caught in the live trap four days ago.

Then up strut four roosters I have never seen before: big, fat, handsome, colorful roosters. Susanna explains she is keeping them for a guy who will be going to jail on a drunk driving charge. Later, while Jenny's foot is soaking in a bucket of bleach water the guy shows up.

"The black one there's the smartest," the guy says. "He can play the piano."

"That one there?" I say, nodding at the black rooster strutting toward him, out in front of the other three. I'm thinking, This guy needs an alienist.

The roosters seem glad to see the man, who reminds me a little of my karate Sensei, same solid build, same ready posture. Susanna has only just met the guy--she considers he might even jump bail.

"I got him this little toy piano," the guy says, "and I taught him to peck out Mary Had a Little Lamb." The guy taps the air with his own finger, Mar-ee-had-a-lit-tel-lamb."

"Oh." I fight the urge to say a chicken can't play the piano. Because who am I to say can't? The roosters fuss at the guy's feet, brush their feathers against his pant legs. Perhaps they can perform miraculous feats of intellectual strength for this man, push themselves beyond their limits.

"Chickens have pretty small brains," the guy says, "So I don't have high hopes for him ever playing much more than that first part."

Re-bar is chewing a piece of donkey dung for the first time in months, perhaps for the last time in his life--or maybe he'll live forever.

"Don't give up," I say. "Who knows what a chicken is really capable of?"

In truth, I can't imagine any sweeter music than a piano played by a chicken. Add the sound of a dog barking and donkey braying, a horn honking, some bagpipes maybe, and that could be the theme song for my sitcom. Jenny lifts her foot out of her bucket and kicks it over. I don't blame her. You see, unlike a human being or a chicken or a dog, a donkey will take only just so much.

Readers Write about Animals and, um, Other Animals:
From Carla Vissers: Well, the hedgehog is a girl, named Fiona. She's pretty cute, I have to say. I think she's finding it a bit hard to get used to people handling her, though, because when Leah tries to take her out of the cage she pulls her quills down over her eyes and makes a sort of huffing noise. Once she's out she's mostly okay, though. Except tonight she was crawling around on Leah, surveying the terrain, and decided to chomp down on Leah's hand. It didn't really hurt Leah's hand, but I think it hurt her feelings. I had to give her a little pep talk about how I'm sure the hedgehog loves her and didn't mean the bite maliciously. Fiona has the cutest little legs--you think they're going to be short and stubby, but when she gets ready to run it's like she's on a little hydraulic lift. Her legs extend and she takes off.

Mike Campbell's friend Angie writes: How is the donkey doing? Mike said you were duct taping her foot. I remember what a pain it was when my horse had seedy toe. He was lame for almost the entire year that it took the hole to grow out. Of course, he's a big baby about any type of physical discomfort. He had a gas colic once and he carried on so much that even the vet thought he had a more severe problem. While the vet and I were standing there discussing "options" ( exploratory surgery, euthanasia, etc.), Jay passed an embarrassingly large amount of gas and then looked at me as if he wondered what I was so upset about.

Carolyn Chute writes: My house smells like four years of dog piss ... no wait, 15 years of dog piss but since Florence developed Cushings disease, she drinks ponds of water, no oceans of water then psssssssssss onto the floor. Betty is scared of OWLS. She hears one and pssssssssssssssssss. Also moose have 3 times crashed down their pen, so she's not crazy about her dog door after dark for that reason, too, I guess. Margaret loves moose... or rather loves moose poops, but she doesn't go out at night either as she is good at holding her pee. She's a very good girl. And on the topic of summer in Maine, Carolyn Chute says: Poison ivy, dead and half dead animals in road, silly summer clothes, mean snooty tourists (some are nice, but there are so many!) Mold. Stink. Woodticks. Deer flies. Moose flies. Black flies. House flies. Mosquitoes. Spiders in the bed. Ants in the sink. Sneezing. Weddings. Hornets. Clothes on line don't dry for weeks. Sunburn. My favorite months are October, Nov., Dec., January, Feb, March and April. I used to love September but lately it's hot in September. There are a few good September days... Now I look forward to the first Heavenly flake dropped from above. You know that operating rooms are kept at about 50 degrees not just to slow germ growth. My heart doc said it is so they can think, that 50-55 is the best thinking temp. About 20 years ago I saw a chart which said that. Also sex and digestion and sleep were best around 50-60.

Karen Miller writes from Evanston IL: Unfortunately, since I last wrote, my darling (German Shepherd) Sheba has been diagnosed with cancer. She has a ping-pong ball-sized tumor in her nasal cavity. We decided not to take her to radiation therapy, which is the best option to treat it, because it would involve 15-20 visits, each a 90-minute round-trip to the specialty hospital, an hour of treatment and anesthetic each time. Besides that, the possibility that she would lose her eyesight completely (it's not that great now), be in pain from the radiation and have a wrecked immune system. If she were a truck ride-loving dog, I would have probably done it, but she acts like she's going to have a stroke every time we go in the truck and I didn't want to subject her to that kind of stress. We are giving her a palliative treatment recommended by our regular vet and a regimen of holistic treatments from the local Chinese medicine specialist (I would call him a Chinese doctor, but he is not Chinese. He just practices Chinese medicine. I think he is also not a vet, but I do call him that.) So far, she seems to be in no pain. Her symptoms have been some nosebleeds and an occasional runny nose. The nosebleeds are not getting appreciably worse, so I am hoping that means the cancer is on the run from the Chinese medicine. We've purchased her some expensive, all-natural canned dog food and are trying to spoil her within the limits of the diet prescribed by the holistic vet. This morning she finished off a can of duck, which she enjoyed so thoroughly that she turned around and asked for more. Anyway, I've cried my eyes out over her and finally got so sick of crying that I decided I would will her back to good health.

Sheba is on the far side of 13 now (if not 14; the animal shelter wasn't very specific) She's pretty hard of hearing these days and sleeps very, very soundly. Sometimes when we come home unexpectedly, we have to call her many times before she awakens. Occasionally we will come in the back door and walk through the house calling her, only to find her sitting attentively at the front door, certain that she hears (or maybe smells) us, but unaware that we are behind her. Occasionally she is so difficult to waken that we put our heads close to her nose to make sure she is breathing. The silver lining to old age for her is that she rarely hears thunder any more, so doesn't suffer from storms. Also, she has become rather manipulative, the clever girl, and has gotten our dogsitters to feed her cheese along with her kibble through strategically timed howling. I have to give her credit for being an excellent communicator. Well, speaking of the pooch, it's time to take her for a walk. As David puts it, she's more interested in the idea of a walk than a real walk, so we've had a lot of walks recently that were just around the block. Has your dog ever thrown a temper tantrum because you wanted to take a route other than the one he preferred? Mine has. Picture the black velvet painting with small child & donkey. We could get her a little Mexican blanket and a sombrero for me and we'd be in high kitsch. It's fairly mortifying when it happens in public. Also a bit dull to walk the same route every, single night. But it's for a good cause.

Email from neighbor Lynn Meredith: You must be enjoying sitting on the screen porch without the mosquitoes eating you alive! They are terrible this year. I finally broke down and sprayed our yard. Hate to do that. Chemicals are nasty, but it was just getting so bad. We've been trying to breed our dog all week. We can't find the right day, evidently. Either that or our dog just might be gay. We have a great mate for her. They are both virgins and he found everything but the right spot, and she planted her butt firmly on the ground and wouldn't budge. This is the second dog we've tried with her. The puppies are spoken for and they aren't even in existence yet. So, if you see me flying down the road, it's probably because her temperature says she's ready and I'm trying to get her to her "date." Heidi Bell writes from Aurora: I have to clean my cat-hair covered house. It is truly disgusting how much these cats shed. I brushed Lefty's bushy tail the other day and now it's half the size it was. Oh, did I tell you that Pancho's eye swelled up almost closed a couple of weeks ago, so I took him to a new vet only blocks from our house and the vet said that Pancho has a cat virus that will cause chronic upper respiratory infections probably for the rest of his life? Vets really don't know how to treat the illness, since you can't kill a virus, so they mostly work to control the secondary infections that result from the weakened immune system. Poor little Pancho. After I got him on antibiotics, he got so energetic that I realized he'd probably been depressed for a few weeks, feeling bad. But he's okay now, and the vet says that the best we can do is chart how often he gets eye goop and sneezing and then treat him regularly with a pulse of antibiotics. I know it can't be good for him, but what else can you do?

From mathematician Art White: Liz and I have a literary cat, named Charlie--as soon as we saw what a little Dickens she was. Now 16 years old, she has already been traumatized by two sabbatical absences by her parents (how she thinks of us), and we hesitate to plan further sustained travels away from her home. I'll just mention three ways she has endeared herself to me: she wasn't quite weaned when we got her from a farm near Richland, so she survived psychologically by suckling the web between my thumb and index finger. Then when she went into labor with her first litter, she eschewed the towel-lined box we had prepared for her and leapt into my lap. (I returned her to the box, and when she tried to leap out again, it was too late.) Lately, when I try to read the evening paper, she taps me on the shoulder (human-like) to indicate that she wants some attention too. I could go on, but you get the idea.

POSTCARDS: Laleli Lopez writes: Greetings from Kona on the big island of Hawaii, famous for coffee and the iron man competition. I'm training for my 1st NYC Triathalon this year. Whatever it is they say about positive thinking... I'm positive I'm exhausted. Mary Szpur writes from Hemmingway House in Key West Florida: "Hi guys. What was Ernest so depressed about? He had a huge beautiful home here, a beautiful wife, interesting house guests, blue water, good weather. It's nice here, very friendly, lots of cats. Mary also kept us informed about Nancy Garrity's fifth Chicago-Mackinaw race sailing: The storm near the finish was terrific. The boat "broached," meaning she leaned way over onto her side, the side metal riggings of the mainsail were in the water, the boat took on water, and they became quite alarmed, but eventually she righted. Her crew is safe. Back in June, Susan Ramsey of Athena Books wrote: I've been preparing for a High School Graduation Open House and am completely demoralized by tidying an untidy house only to reveal a dirty one which, upon cleaning, reveals a shabby one. Cat pee is an ongoing theme, as is water damage leading to mildew whose removal reveals rot. And I strongly suspect a new round of cat pee, the ingrates, despite a newly cleaned box...They, in turn, regard me with surprise -- "Since when isn't this okay?" My daughter responded by deciding our downstairs bathroom needed the wallpaper changed. I was so punchy I agreed and she stripped it (revealing the reasons it was papered -- cracks, patches and chipping), spackled it, primed it and gave it two coats -- when I got up at 4:30 she hadn't been to bed, but instead of brown calico stripes peeling off of landlady green it is now a (slightly textured) pale periwinkle. Maybe I'll send all the guests in there.

From Lisa Lenzo, Saugatuck MI: Besides writing, I've been spending a lot of time, at work and in the evening, embroidering and appliqueing, am now on my second wall hanging. A couple of local galleries have offered to show my work. So now I have another creative outlet at which I can't make enough to live on--$750 for a wall hanging whose hours work out to less than I'd make at Burger King. But I really like doing it, and I do get to work when I'm at "work" and supposedly working.

Jean Gilreath writes from Lansing Michigan: My health is up for grabs these days--I have more doctors than you would believe and something new pops up weekly. I am incredibly weak and fatigued and sleepy. The rheumatologist says I shouldn't be given the amount of prednisone I am still on. The hematologist wants me off the prednisone, the gerontologist wants to give me more and now it seems that it (between the prednisone and the diabetes) is affecting my optic nerve and I'm going to see a neurologist. This one really scares me---my mother was blind as a result of low tension glaucoma. There's also something going on with my lungs so if I do anything at all I gasp for breath. There must be a story here somewhere. The good news is that my blood platelets are back to normal.

NOTES FROM MEN: Peter Brakeman writes from downtown Kalamazoo: About a week ago I got an insect bite behind my ear which swelled up the next day into a big discolored abscess. I figured it's just a bad spider bite, until someone convinced me that it was probably from a brown recluse, and I could have severe damage to my lymph nodes, since the bite was on my head, and the skin around the bite could die and never "grow" back. For a few days there I thought I might wake up dead, but alas, I'm still here, the swelling has gone down, and I don't even think my ear will fall off. From Jesse Green in Lansing: It seems as if deaths come in bunches, I lost my best friend from high school, an aunt, my cat and my grandmother all within a month (not in any order of priority) and have been ignored by death ever since. Jim Coe writes from the Florence Crane Correctional Facility in Coldwater MI: I'm going to school. They pay me 57c a day to go to G.E.D. school. I'll be working in the kitchen in food service in 90 days. I'm on top lock today because I got in trouble for using the telephone in the yard while coming back from med line.

GOULASH TOURS NEWS: From world traveler Patti Kellerman: my trip to Vietnam was so wonderful. What a beautiful place. Started in Saigon and biked to Hanoi. It was a 17 day bike trip. One night over night on a train. Biked in Bao Loc, Dalat, Phan Rang, Nha Trang, Lak Lake, Pleiku, Quinhon, Hoian, Hue. A lot of French influence. We swam in the China sea. We rode on Highway One that we heard about in the American War, as the people here call it. We visited My Lai, the sobering war site massacre. I cried to think of all our men in the war...We had tailors make us things, for me three pairs of pants and a dress. The food was wonderful, a little hot at times, but lots of it. We had a wonderful bike leader and all the people I biked with were great. Only one American, the rest being Vietnamese, Canadian, English, and Australian. All but me under 40. Oh, and since I got home I just did a 60 mile walk for breast cancer. Started in Ann Arbor to Detroit. We raised 5.2 Million. It was hot, but I walked every mile. For several issues of the LP I have somehow misplaced this missive from Wayne Beebe who wrote and sent photos, one of himself with "Bike Friday," a bike which folds into a suitcase, and another with girlfriend Jan. He writes: Jan and I went on a Bike Adventure Club tour this year visiting Austria. It was a nice tour going down the Danube on the bike path, but not to be compared with our (Eastern European) adventure tour of 1983. When I think about that trip it seems like a novel. It was a great privilege to be a part of it. It was one of the high spots of my life, and I've been on many tours since, 20 or more, at least one a year, but none were as much fun as that one. But now I'm getting old so I substitute cruises for the biking, stay in nice hotels instead of cheap ones and eat gourmet meals that don't taste as good as the bread and cheese and stolen cherries I used to eat sitting on a curb by the roadside, on the 9th week tour of 1983.... We just returned from Klezcamp in Phil. Jan plays the accordian and flute. It was lots of fun. Wayne says he's planning future cruises in South Carribean and one beginning in Spain and ending in Istanbul. Wayne also sends word of Walker Reid (also from 1983 trip) in the form of a "Reid Productions" brochure for Shadowlands, produced and directed by Walker M. Reid.

On her recent visit to Japan, Jamie Blake visited the Ritsumeikan University where she joined the women's judo team workout, and recorded the following in her trip journal: I jumped in with their warm ups and did uchi komis with one of three girls recently chosen to represent this prefecture at the national collegiate tournament (a much bigger deal here than in the U.S.) She was really a good sport about my lack of language/communication skills. She made my falls comfortable and was forgiving of all my errors. Their system for randori is: no break, and every five minutes you get ten seconds to fix gi, bow, find a new partner, bow, and hajime. I went for five minutes and thought I was going to die. I'm such a softie. My partner was nice enough to allow me to get up and re-grip before tossing me again. I had to excuse myself for the second round.

A smaller, very polite woman invited me out for the 3rd round. She was brutal. I landed on my back, thump! Getting up, I was too late to even get a grip--I rolled from my shoulder to my back and trying to take a breath was impossible because I was in her crushing pin. Getting up, I decided not to take time for breathing and gripped with one hand (a small victory!) And charged ahead for a foot-sweep. Too late, thump! I was down again but rolled to my stomach--not good enough, as this girl is a master of the triangle hold/turnover & choke (sangaku jime). Getting up and praying for the buzzer to ring I had enough time to see that there was a minute thirty remaining before the room spun again, thump! She must have noticed Ron in the corner with the camera because as soon as I was back on one foot getting up, she pulled me right to the corner to do her Sports Illustrated pose with me (twice her size) up over her head, helpless and flailing before the biggest thump. I hoped the shutter click was for some other throw in the dojo, but looking back I'd like to see if she had time to straighten her gi and smile while I made my way from ceiling to mat.

WRITING NEWS: Well the most exciting news might be that Q Road somehow got named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book. Q Road should by now be available at your local bookstore, as is the paperback of Women and Other Animals with its gentler cover and kinder price. Some of you have asked about my tour schedule. You are all invited to the book release shindig on Saturday, September 14 (coincidentally my birthday), but you and your friends should also come see me on the road, where I'll undoubtedly be hungry and weary.

Send news and notes to The Letter Parade, Bonnie Jo Enterprises, PO Box 52, Comstock MI 49041.