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Beam and Howard

the breakfast table
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from: Alex Beam

Nice Hair!

Posted Friday, Sept. 11, 1998, at 2:53 PM ET

Wow, Margo, you saw Scott (The Preacher) Harshbarger at your beauty parlor! Maybe he was having his nails sharpened for the final gubernatorial debate...

Hold the presses!!! I just read the wires! According to the Starr Report, Clinton received the Full Monica while talking with members of Congress! How salacious! How outrageous...how...disrespectful of our nation's solons. Remember how shocked we were to lean that Dick Morris and What's-her-Name pleasured each other while he reviewed the State of the Union with Mr. Bill.

Secretly, I wanted to talk about Stanford, my fave university. One of the papers has Chelsea staying in D.C. for the upcoming fall semester, because, it is suggested, she photographs well alongside her beleaguered father. Likewise, bumping into Ken Starr's daughter at the World Wrap on University Ave. doesn't sound toooo appetizing right now.

Stanford is very much on my mind, 1. Because I wish I were there, 2. The Wall Street Journal takes yet another whack at Stanford's admittedly silly "core curriculum" (you know, they read Spiderman, that kind of thing) and 3. Because along with the instruction manual for my new bicycle, I read the Stanford alumni magazine in bed last night.

Best thing in it--it's somewhere on the web, for those not seeking out the Starr report--was an interview with the writer Tobias Wolff, whom Stanford was very happy to lure onto campus when I was there, two years ago. As my 6-year old would say: it was good and it was bad. I wish they had asked Toby, as it's hip to call him, about his brother Geoffrey (taught at Brandeis, by the way), whom I dig to death. No, I've never met him.

Here are the two most interesting things I've heard today. 1. Bill Weld knew, in the social sense, Monica Lewinsky. (My source describes this information as solidly "eighth-hand.") 2. That man you and I both so admire, the president of Brandeis, has a book coming out. His co-author has been dead for eight years.

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243
from: Alex Beam

Nice Hair!

Posted Friday, Sept. 11, 1998, at 2:53 PM ET
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Margo Howard is Slate's advice columnist. Alex Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe.
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