In the last year of working from home, I’ve noticed that I am less and less in touch with popular culture. I don’t have a commute, so there’s no drive-time show to tell me which celebrities are going in or out of drug rehabilitation on any given day, and when I do have the radio or television on, it’s either NPR or the Discovery Channel or a movie that I’m half-listening to in the background.

In a way, this is bad, because I need to know some of this stuff for improv purposes, and because I feel stupid when I do socialize with people who aren’t my dogs or my ex-pat parents who live on the beach in Mexico. It’s truly frightening that Fuzzy knows more about which stars are dating or divorcing than I do.

This is part of the reason I’m looking forward to a three-hour salon session on September 1st (try saying that five times fast). I mean, yes, obviously, I’m looking forward to it because there’s almost no pink left in my hair and it looks ridiculous and my bangs are at the stage where I want to duct tape them just to get them out of my way. But there’s the other attraction of the salon: People Magazine.

This is not a magazine I’d ever purchase for myself. I consider it, like Entertainment Weekly, to be the kind of periodicals that are only appropriate while waiting in doctors’ offices or standing in line at the grocery store, or while there’s a bottle of pink dye soaking into your hair.

But for the couple of hours every few weeks that I read it, I secretly enjoy it.
Except for the book reviews. Because I don’t believe their reviewers actually read.