Someone sent me a personal email asking how I know so much after reading my post…Things You May Not Know.
At first I thought it must be code for, wanna have a cuppa coffee, since, what a silly question. But then remembered, he’s gayer than a showgirl on a Saturday night, realizing, she was being serious.
You always say, you never went to college, he wrote. That’s true, I never did, but what do you think people do in college Skippy, they read.
I’m a serial reader, I am, because nothing is quite like learning something inspiring you didn’t know.
Think of it as all the lights going on in your brain clearing a path for enlightenment.
My first self-taught course was on the American Civil War when I read The Killer Angels, a historical novel that won The Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975, about the Battle of Gettysburg. It was also the book inspiring Ken Burns to make his epic film, The Civil War. After wetting my beak, as they say, I read everything I could get my little manicured mitts on about The War Between the States, another name for that heart-wrenching war.
Years ago a salesman working at the long gone, Madison Avenue Bookshop, told me…reading is like any other muscle…the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
In other words, the more you read, the smarter you’ll be and the more interesting you’ll become.
Who knew The Vietnam Wall was opposed by so many? Not me, being quite moved by it every time I had the privilege of seeing it until reading, A Rift in the Earth, what Maya Lin, who designed it, called her vision.
The next time I visit, I’ll have so much more to think about.
When I read a book, words become a printed buffet, allowing me to take what I want to keep and remember. When I compile a list to share, it’s the meat and potatoes of my reading life.
Whether it’s naming all 6 of Henry VIII’s wives, or 45 American Presidents.
The Marquis de Lafayette sending George Washington the key to the Bastille, that still hangs on a Mount Vernon wall.
Actor Montgomery Clift loving to stroll down Fifth Avenue in a snazzy suit, eating caviar right out of the tin.
That Arthur Miller’s play, After the Fall, is all about his troubled marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and journalist Pete Hamill’s wry remark, that dating Jackie Kennedy was like taking King Kong to the beach.
I even know there are over 200 positions in the Kama Sutra, and no, I haven’t tried them all, but let’s just say, if it were a Jeopardy category, I’d leave my fellow contestants in the dirty dancin’ dust.
Whenever someone asked the late, great Bill Hicks how he knew something, he’d always say without pause…it’s cause ah’ read baba’.
That’s what I emailed back to the gay showgirl, then nicely asked if by any chance, he had a library card. 
SB