Iowa Diary #1

Dearest book,

I’m going to give you our tour of Iowa in FOOD, since that seems to be part of the focus of our latest version of “Feminists Are Funny”. We arrived in Waterloo, Iowa on Monday March 28^th where the snow lay in huge, dirty piles all along the road to Cedar Falls. Since Subway has overtaken McDonalds as the largest restaurant chain in the US, Subway is our new favorite lunch spot and Cedar Falls did not disappoint with 3 of them! Our first day here we didn’t really have much to do so we decided to check out Wal Mart – especially since the Supreme Court was hearing arguments the very next day in the class action suit brought by women against Wal Mart for discrimination. There is no Wal Mart in New York City – we’ve kept them out so here we go, a little exploration of just how much can we buy in Wal Mart for how cheap.

Audrey and Edith don shopping sacks and away we go down the gia-normous aisles.

First of all, it appears that everything is a dollar! That’s right, those prices are truly slashed and everything is a great value!

You don’t have to buy your vodka and cranberry in separate boxes, they come together.

Found a huge sack of honey buzzers, whatever those are.

Whipped cream for all those pies we throw in our new food show.

Laundry detergent that will last a few years.

OK, enough with the Wal Mart.

We’re hungry. Off to downtown where we had a swell meal at Bourbon Street – another chain, though not as well known – with yummy New Orleans inspired entrees and fried pickles to start. Never had em, now I crave em everywhere I go.

Tuesday, March 29^th is show time day. We check into the University of Northern Iowa where Gloria, our grad student assistant brings us peanut butter cookies with M and M’s! Awesome. The tech crew is one of the best we’ve ever had and we have plenty of time to spare to dip into our back stage snacks.

The show is awesome…! Edith Evans, Audrey Hepburn and I rocked the rockin’ packed house of on your feet feminists! OK, so I was wearing my brand new yellow shoes and I did fall off the stage. But hey, anything for a good laugh and my follow up was funny. We head back to our favorite Quality Suites hotel and share a bottle of wine (that we got for cheap at, you guessed it, Wal Mart). Edith, Audrey and I have good laughs over some of the ad-libs we did during the show. The next day is a travel day – flying to Duluth and the driving to Canada – to Lakehead University at Thunder Bay! To be continued….