"You look the way I feel"...."Well, how do you feel?"

[the_edin_jerk]

Said the MC at the Out Loud poetry reading we went to last night. Never have I seen so many earnest, homely Brits gathered together. There was heckling, there was mild carousing, there was mediocre poetry. They all gushed over the woman who was publishing her first collection of poems. The poems were all right. I've heard better at Beloit senior readings (I'm talking to you, my friends). But Mike Ingham, the English professor who took us is charming (he looks like a tall Hobbit) and bought us drinks and drove us home to our doorsteps because it was raining. The bartenders gave me a hard time when I asked for a cup of coffee with a shot of Bailey's in it, what I thought was a simple request.

"You can't have that. You think this is Starbucks?" they sneered, but I put my chin in my hands and implored them with my brown American eyes and they caved and overcharged me for it.

If it had been Starbucks, I would have known because JOE WHITE would have been there. Because he is at every Starbucks. Omnipresent.