Favorite part of the conference I went to last weekend, upon reflection...

I think my favorite part of the conference I just went to was this one women's history panel, where I sat in back and this one early 50s black prof whose work I had read (which I realized after I saw her nametag after she had sat down; I had never met her before or even seen her picture anywhere, as I remember) sat down by me and while wearing a vaguely African yellow-and-orange top and a shorter skirt and a scarf on her head kicked off her high-heeled shoes and stuck out her stubby little nyloned legs and rested them straight out on the chair in the row in front of her and all the time she was there talked to me and did that black call and response thing like she was in church. When one prof on the panel was talking about how lots of women religious revised their orders' rules after Vatican II but their liberalizations were struck down from Rome, the prof next to me looked over to me and just shook her head and said loudly, "Men," and then she held up her fist and moved it down quickly and diagonally and was like, "BAM."

Another time when they mentioned some woman's name and a few people in the room giggled, I asked her what that was about, and she asked me how old I was, and when I told her, she told me that she was the evangelical woman who said in an advice book that you haven't lived till you met your husband at the door in Saran Wrap and whipped cream.

Another time during the panel when a prof was saying she was interviewing nuns who had been involved with civil rights work, one of her intervieweees, a white nun, started crying and talking about how she held Jimmy Joe Johnson or Jackson (I can't remember in his name, everyone else seemed to know who she was talking about) in her arms because she was nursing him as he died, and she realized how the United States made African-Americans die for justice, and she's never gotten over that. Anyways, as soon as the prof said the nun had said she held this activist in her arms as he was dying, the prof next to me's voice got deep, and she just looked out and shook her head and was like, "good lord, good lord," and kept shaking her head for the rest of the story.