My junior year of high school, the administration introduced a 15 minute “sustained silent reading” period each day. The dictionary definition of sustained that I think they were referring to is “be prolonged for an extended period” and I’ve always been a voracious reader so I found 15 minutes to be so far from sustained that I felt the need to be snarky and bring books like Where’s Waldo? to school with me (yes, I was 16 at the time). Then I discovered short stories where I could read the entire story in that limited 15 minute time slot at the beginning of calculus class.
One of the first short story books I read was The Rose and The Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block and since then I’ve been seriously hooked on the concept of looking at classic stories from other angles. This concept is why Ever After is my favorite movie and why when I first heard about the book Wicked in 2004 I was instantly hooked (though Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is probably better and actually my favorite of Gregory Maguire’s books).
I spent all of last week in New York sightseeing and attending the BlogHer conference. Get ready because it’s going to take me weeks to tell you everything I have to say about my trip.
Tuesday night, my mom and I went to see Wicked. I knew that one thing I absolutely had to do while in New York was see a Broadway show and even though I saw Wicked in San Francisco last year, it was so good that I couldn’t resist seeing it again.
I won’t spoil the plot details of Wicked for you but I will tell you that everything about the musical is amazing and you should first read the book (the beginning is slow but power through it because the middle and end are great) and then go see the musical. Even my brother has expressed interest in seeing it so I might go see it again in San Francisco with him and my sister who’s obsessed with steampunk and would thus love the set design and costumes.
Friday night, I got the icing on my Wicked cake.
One of the events during the BlogHer conference was the Voices of the Year community keynote where 15 amazing bloggers presented posts they had done over the past year live.
The Bitchin’ Wives Club sang and danced to a fantastic blogging parody of the song Popular from the musical Wicked.
Her live performance was even better than the video and anyone who was at the conference and skipped the community keynote really, really missed out.
Related posts:
Link Love: Torchwood, Wicked Miniseries, and more
Sparklecorn meet The Met #BlogHer10
Location Based Social Networking with Foursquare #BlogHer10
| Tweet |
 |  273 readers |  2935 followers |  490 fans |
Here at 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was my favorite too. I’ve not seen Wicked on stage. I am well overdue in a trip to Broadway!
Ugh, we had SSR at school too! Middle of the afternoon, when it was boiling hot and nobody could concentrate. There were beanbags in the library’s reading room (a room where each class went for their SSR session.) Everyone fought over those.
Like you, 15 minutes is in no way enough time to read! Once I start a book, I can’t stop. I’ll read in the bathroom, on the bus, until 3am, while walking home praying I don’t trip over something on the footpath.
Carrie,
I did miss the keynote speech, now you have me jealous that I didn’t get to see it. Unfortunately, that day I had to go back and take a nap and that’s when I went. I was exhausted as it was from no sleep and fell asleep in a chair so I guess my sleep superseded the keynote.
Oh, I KNEW I should have made time for Wicked. Everyone told me it’s the must-see show in NYC, and I know I would have totally loved it.
(sigh)
I guess I’ll just HAVE to go back now!!