The first weekend my mother met Ethan, we all went out to see Boogie Nights together. She was totally unphased.

And yet, she stopped taking movie recommendations from me for almost a year after I suggested Heavenly Creatures.

Freak.

(In my defense, I was totally not thinking of that part of the plot when I gave her the DVD. But I can see how it might have stood out if my daughter had given it to me.)

I was born in Cincinnati and lived there until I was three (1972-1975). My father moved back (he grew up there) when I was in college (like, 1992?), and I (coincidentally) went to grad school there from 1995-2000.

And then I moved away and THEN you and I met!

I am positive I've told the story here: as a middle-schooler, I earned my lunch money every day by passing around Judith Krantz books in various classes with the good parts marked. A quarter per 5 minutes.

Ha ha, that's great.

Man, Tiger Woods is all over the magazine stands. My family shares sport more than fiction. Golf sex scandals we can talk about in detail.

Private Practice: what Jesse said about the first hour. This is one of the frustrating things about this show, they seem to try so hard to show all the different sides to anything remotely controversial, but do't mention really obvious things that might actually simplify matters. Seems like it happens a lot.

I got started on reading romances in sixth grade while sitting in the cafeteria. One of the teacher's aides who was assigned cafeteria duty would sit at my table with a book, read for five minutes, then get up and do her walkaround. While she was gone, I'd pick up her book and read--it was a Rosemary Rogers bodice ripper (she was the big romance writer in 1976/77). After that, my aunt gave me her batch of Harlequin Presents (got hooked on Janet Dailey and Charlotte Lamb) and Barbara Cartlands (talk about a change after Rogers!).

My older female cousins read Mills & Boon romance (primarily nursing), so I did. My older male cousins read Playboy and Hustler, so I did. My mother read spy thrillers, so I did. My father read political texts, so I did.

Now, I leave it up to the reader to decide how much I got out of each, but I did my best. I was not a discerning consumer. It wasn't until my mid-teens that my book tastes became independent--lots of sci fi and fantasy, historical romance (where did that disappear to?), mysticism (similarly disappeared, but the stuff I was reading was pyramids-sharpening-razors crap), but still my mother's thrillers. She's had (and discarded) some pretty impressive (and thematic--the Moscow apartment was all post-Glasnost Soviet thrillers which really helped with my local geography) collections.

My father was the one who started me on sci fi, from the 2001 novelisation he picked up in an airport, and my mother tried to get me off it, but she attemtped so counterproductively, but giving me Doris Lessing's sci fi, and introducing me to Octavia Butler. I'm not sure what she thought would happen.

Michael Whelan

That's him!

Ooh, Heavenly Creatures! I need to rewatch that -- haven't seen it in years.

Also, I don't remember Jennifer's Connelly's boobs from MD at all, but now I have a strange yen to look at them.

Also, I rented Basic Instinct when it came out, and my mom came in when I'd just started it...it was not a comfortable viewing.

Of course, mom has just gotten into J.R. Ward and paranormal romance erotica in the last couple of months -- there are MOUNDS of them beside her chair -- and I just have to kind of...blank out that part of my mind.

Somehow, my mom digging the hard-core vampire/werething sexxoring is way more a mental no-no to me than "regular" romance humpbumping.