G L O R I A !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's MS. Steinem, to you. We had "dinner & a conversation" with Gloria Steinem last night. She was appearing at Central Washington Univ., and as a fund raiser for one of the departments, she mingled and then sat down to dinner with 30 of us, before the speech. She is 72, and smart and funny and nice and caring, and gives even the lone blowhard a tactful answer. She zinged him a bit later. :)

Unlike our crashing of the Al Franken party, we actually paid for this gig. I imagine Gina will be getting even more solicitations from her alma mater. If so it will be worth it. Gina said the evening was one of the highlights of her life.

In fact, let's hear from our guest Blogger Gina now:

Gloria talked about a lot of stuff. One item was the fact that the term feminism is sometimes used as a derogatory term. She said the definition of feminism is the pursuit of equality. Therefore if you deny feminism then in effect you are ok with inequality.

Thank you, Gina. Well said. And so succinct.

I'm sorry I forgot to ask Gloria what's the furthest she's ridden a bike. There was much discussion of her famous line "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle". Yes, I did have the T-shirt in college. Gloria did fess up at dinner that actually she heard that line from some Australian woman. Then later a 20-something year-old woman got up and said her mother told her that a fish might Want a bicycle, but the fish certainly did not Need a bicycle. That got a good laugh from the crowd.

Jeez, then some gal got up to ask "what is NOW?". That got a groan from the crowd. I felt I should speak to the admissions director about who's getting into Central these days. We did meet the Vice Prez. of the college. The prez had a board mtg, as this gig had been re-scheduled from the previous week. (Gloria had back spasms) Of course, we dropped the tidbit of dad being a college president.


And we rode 30 miles today.
And we'll ride 30 more tomorrow.