The picture to the right is a montage of a bunch of us women who put on our goofiest hats and picketed the St. Pete Times and the St. Petersburg ACLU for sexism. After picketing, we entered the banquet hall and plopped ourselves down at our reserved table, circulated amongst the sourpusses we had picketed, and handed them fliers rebuking their sexism. They were not amused. Boo hoo.

The St. Pete Times had hardly any women on its masthead, and most of the front-page bylines were male. The ACLU turned down the plea of St. Petersburg's Planned parenthood to intervene in the anti-abortion crazies' harassing women going into abortion clinics but took instead the case of a one-legged man's right to dance in public places (I'm not making this up). We reamed out the local Pinellas ACLU and sent a copy of the invective all over the state to embarrass its members with other ACLU chapters. I wrote the Columbia School of Journalism to rat out the Times's sexism. Fun was had by all. lee

Analysis comes from the mail:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Ms. Olson: As is your wont, you muttered crit...":

The reason people like Candy Olson do nothing about corruption is that they want to be able to ask for favors from the ROSSAC administration. If a person is friends with Candy she can get Candy to do something about the problem she is having. If Candy were not backing up the downtown administration, their favors to her would stop. So she looks the other way and defends the administration and screws the taxpayers, so she can have a little bit of power to show off to friends.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 4:44 PM

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Heavens, I didn't think Candy an adept at such labyrinthine politics.

The school situation fits loosely a piney-woods Guelphs and Ghibellines scenario. Dante was involved in that struggle on the Guelph side. During that period in history, the Italian Guelphs and Ghibellines traded sword wounds, insults, and interdictions.

I am a great admirer of Dante's poetry, not his politics, so we went to Ravenna to see his tomb. My husband took a picture of me in front of it. I can't find the picture, or I would mount it at the top of this page.

Dante's Guelph sympathies opposed the Ghibelline line-up of his hometown of Florence. So Florence banished him. He pined all his life to go home. He died in Ravenna at 56 unrepatriated but not before writing The Divine Comedy.

That great first poem in the Italian dialect, not Latin, made him Italy's premier poet. So, lo, then the Florence politicos wanted him disinterred in Ravena and brought back to Florence to be put in the fancy tomb the city fathers had waiting for him. Dante was now a tourist attraction.

But the city fathers in Ravenna said no and had the monks hide Dante's bones so Florence couldn't swipe them. Florence's city fathers finally turned to other matters and backed off from trying to make off with Dante's bones. So the monks took Dante's bones out of hiding and put them in his Ravenna tomb, where they still reside.

The tomb in Florence remains empty. You can hear tourists there say, "Now who were these guys the Guelphs and the Ghibellines?"

I like to think of those Ravenna monks' hiding Dante's bones and of the Florentine city boosters' fuming about the situation. It makes me smile every time I think of it. It sounds like a dust-up between the city and the county.

I now am rereading a new version of The Divine Comedy, in which a different poet translates every canto.

I can't decide to which circle of hell to assign the ROSSAC crowd. When I hit that circle in rereading the poem, I will say, "Bingo! Here's where those asses at ROSSAC belong."

lee

lee