Fun stuff: October 2007 Archives

If I were inclined to make a pie, it would probably not be a rhubarb pie. And if I were inclined to sew a quilt ... actually I pretty much know that I shall never be inclined to sew a quilt. This doesn't mean, however, that I am ill-equipped to become a Prairie Girl.

In the introduction to The Prairie Girl's Guide to Life: How To Sew a Sampler Quilt & 49 Other Pioneer Projects For the Modern Girl (Taunton, 196 pages, $14.95), author Jennifer Worick makes mention of making a rhubarb pie about three times. And she reassures us by addressing the reader (you, me): "You are a prairie gal."

I had a Shakespeare professor in college who loved to point out what he referred to as the bawdy parts of whatever play we were studying at the time. Entire class periods were sometimes devoted to these discussions, as you can imagine young English majors whose high-school exposure to the Bard hardly, if ever, "went there," as it were.

Dr. Ferguson would have loved — and probably could have co-written — Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (Penguin, 304 pages, $19.99) by Shakespeare scholar Pauline Kiernan...