Yo! Dorothea!

I'm heading home, early as I can, pulling double puppy shift today for some reason, and I'm driving up Midvale Boulevard and there's a young woman walking on the sidewalk. Now Madison isn't LA so it's reasonable to see a pedestrian or two in the course of a day but there's something about this woman.... She's like late twenties, early thirties but she hasn't given in to that thing women too often do on or around the thirtieth birthday; namely she still has lovely longish hair and there's no self conscious "I'm so mature you can tell by my perm" thing about her. No, she's an attractive person in a pants-suit walking near where Dorothea Salo lives. Somehow she looks grad student enough, professional enough, unaffected enough... the time is right and having read Dorothea's blog I know she's given to walking home from the campus. I pull over behind her and rolll the window down... "Excuse me," I can see she knows the car is there but she's barely aware I'm addressing her. Oh shit, this is going to be some kind of embarrassing quasi-stalker moment. I'm going to feel bad about this later, I'm convinced. But in for a thrupence in for a blort, or whatever the economists on this planet are given to say. If I can't get her attention from behind, I'll pull ahead. Luckily I'm driving Moonbeam, the Toyota, a harmless little car. If I was in some dark colored Buick she'd be dialing 911 on thecell by now. I get out of the car and approach her. "Are you Dorothea?" I ask. Yes. It is she. I introduce myself. We live within twenty minutes of each other, I've interviewed her on the blog, I went out to the zoo looking for her birthday party and came up empty a summer or two ago.

"How did you know? Do I look like my name?" I guess the answer is more complicated than that, but essentially, how do you meet people if you aren't willing to take a risk? It doesn't always work out, I guess. Ask JR about that night in Cambridge.

Meeting Dorothea like that, and my special moments last night at the City Council meeting where the sister city project was discussed have me thinking about b!X. b!X blogs Portland. There's no "Is blogging journalism?" question when it comes to b!X. b!X blogs Portland. Who blogs Madison?

Chris Locke is afoot (reminds me of the phrase "mischief is afoot"), and judging by the most recent entry, Chris blogs Boulder. Sort of. He also blogs mental health and mental illness, deep emotions, simple madness, art and literature. Well, he's a genius, why impose boundary conditions? I see by the speaker list that Locke and the accomplished Doc Searls are among the speakers at the BlogOn conference in Berkeley later this month. And Halley Suitt and Susan Mernit and several other fine people I am fortunate enough to have met through this blogging thing. And at some point I had to stick out my hand to each one of them and say, "Hi, I'm Frank Paynter." And you know, with a single exception in maybe three years or more of sticking it out like that, people have been okay with the introduction. One asshole in dozens and dozens of face to face connections isn't that bad really.

Which brings me back where I started. Dorothea seemed like a really nice woman.