Thanks Chickadee and Unique. I made it home safely, although I didn't pull into my garage until 3 a.m. this morning. What an adventure JFK Airport was last night! Anyway, glad to be home.

Thought I'd start the day by shifting the topic away from nakedness--it's too COLD here in CT this morning to even think about taking any clothes off --back to late blooming. I've been passing along some of the tips the women in my book wrote last spring for a journalist who was doing a "best pieces of advice" article. Here's my contribution:

“When I was 20 years old and working as a secretary at Harvard University, one day I confessed to my boss, a geomorphologist named Michael Woldenberg, that I’d always been terrible at math. He considered my statement for a moment, and said, 'You know, anyone can master the hardest discipline by simply taking it step by step.' Until that moment, I had always thought of myself as math impaired. I had never considered that I simply might have missed bits and pieces of knowledge along the way. Later, remembering what he said, I taught myself algebra with some books that I found at a community college bookstore. I started at the beginning and re-learned all the basic concepts. In the process, I discovered that solving problems was not only rewarding, but fun. Mastering algebra and then geometry ultimately gave me the skills and the confidence to take advanced math and science when I enrolled at Georgetown University in my 30’s. Then I tackled college French the same way. Even though I had studied French in high school, I insisted that I be allowed to allowed to start over with French 101 at Georgetown. The same approach worked for me when decided to learn to play the piano. And finally, when I set out to write Defying Gravity, I remembered Professor Woldenberg’s words again. Although I had never written a book before, I knew that if I broke the process into steps, I would eventually accomplish my goal.”

Let me add a caveat to the above. If anyone on this forum wants to go back to school, it's not necessary to do the groundwork I did. Colleges have courses to help you fill in all the blanks that I filled in own my own. The subtext of what I'm saying is that much of what we think of as talent--and therefore inaccessible to most of us--is in reality a combination of acquired knowledge and hours of practice.

A very empowering theory, to say the least. What I didn't say above is that the first way I tested it out--and testing it out was exactly my intention--was by signing up for crochet classes. (I'd always been intimidated by ladies with knitting needles!) I followed my professor's advice, and ended up making an afghan. Not a very attractive afghan, but an afghan nonetheless.