A Little Note To Say You Are Humongously Fabulous

Elegant Reader!

The joy I feel in our little clique, our famous Conflab—solving the problems of our correspondents together, laughing at one another’s jokes, feeling stabs of pain at one another’s sorrows—we seem to move in invisible harmony.

In an inhuman world, we have our little tribe!

So I want to thank you with a little audio gift.

Today The New York Times is running the audio of Cowgirls All The Way!

Yup! That’s Yours Truly in her Montana Days……

It’s the story of the Miss Rodeo America Pageant—the first piece I ever published. It appeared in Outside magazine in 1980 (!!!) The Times is running it today because it is a brain-fryingly clear-eyed, no bullshit look at beauty pageants AND cowgirls; and, as the illustrious Lisa Chase, the editor of the piece, says in her charming introduction, “It feels like it was written last week.” Lisa also says the writing has undercurrents of “rage” at the way women are treated in these kinds of competitions—something Conflab knows a bit about, eh?