Clarissa's Blog

Answers to the Game

Here are the answers to the most recent questions of our “How well do you know Clarissa” contest:

1. When I was 13, my mother took her entire class on a trip to Moscow, and I went with them, too. It was 1989, and the perestroika was already transforming Moscow profoundly. My mother got us all tickets to see Gone With the Wind in a huge movie theater. This was when I saw Vivien Leigh for the first time and no other woman ever since could compete. So I had to limit myself to men since then. 🙂

2. I named this blog after my grandmother but, as for my real name, my mother named me after her favorite doll.

See more photos from this great collage here. The linked blog is in Russian but that doesn’t matter because the collage (titled “Motherly Love”) needs no words.

More questions and answers will follow. I’m keeping a tally with all the scores, so don’t worry.

Addressing Spouses

Melissa at Shakesville is commenting a question that people asked of Bill Clinton and says the following:

That’s fucking gross when it’s a salesman who refuses to ask me a direct question and instead asks Iain, like he’s my owner and can read my mind. When it’s the Secretary of State being treated that way…OMG.

I’m not in any way disagreeing with Melissa but I kind of do the same thing as the salesman in her example. When I’m talking to a hetero couple, I always address the woman. Even if the man is my close friend and I barely know his wife, even if the question I need to ask is supposed to be answered by the man, I still turn to the woman and address my utterance to her. In the same way, I think it’s wrong when women address my husband and not me when I’m present. It feels rude when they do that.

The point of this post is not to say anything about the Clintons, politics, or anything of the kind. I’m just wondering if my approach is some sort of a cultural thing that I just do without even noticing it.

How Well Do You Know Clarissa: American Presidents

Which of these presidents do I dislike the most:

1. Harry Truman

2. JFK

3. FDR

4. LBJ

5. Bill Clinton

The one you immediately thought about is not here because that would make it too easy. 🙂 And the second one you thought about is not here either. But you can get extra points if you guess the names of these two presidents that I dislike even more but whose photos are not here. You need to get both of them, though.