Peter Pouncey's "Rules for Old Men Waiting"

Peter Pouncey was born in Tsingtao, China, of English parents. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, the family reassembled in England, and Pouncey was educated there in boarding schools and at Oxford. He is a classicist, former dean of Columbia College, and president emeritus of Amherst College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his first novel Rules for Old Men Waiting, and reported the following:

I quite like my page 99, on which my bluff Scottish hero MacIver tells his painter-wife Margaret a bed-time story about another young woman painter who rescues a sailor from his wrecked yacht in a storm, in the cove she is painting. Page 99 slides slipperily past the rescue to a small erotic completion in a snug cottage out of the wind, which then MacIver and Margaret re-enact, to their joint satisfaction. Quite apart from the fact that MacIver is the sort of man who can barely open his mouth without telling a story, the point of the small episode is to show, in fairly concrete terms, the kind of tension between imagination and memory in a man trying to make sense of his life and his world. He is a Professor of History (especially of World War I) with a lot of anger, even violence in his makeup, but he brings himself, in his last reclusive weeks, past grief and rage to peace at the end.

Read an excerpt from Rules for Old Men Waiting and learn more about the novel at the Random House website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Solove's "The Future of Reputation"

Daniel J. Solove is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is the author of The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (2004) and Information Privacy Law (2006).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, and reported the following:

Open to page 99 of The Future of Reputation, and you're ensconced in shame. My book explores the privacy implications of the rise of blogging and social network websites. Today, anyone can create a blog or social network website profile in any name that says anything at all. For the first time in human history, any person can broadcast information to millions of strangers across the planet. Each of us has a permanent, searchable record — available instantly via Google for the rest of our lives to every employer, colleague, relative, neighbor, date, or friend. This is the future of reputation, and it will profoundly affect our lives.

The social practices of gossip and shaming have existed since antiquity, but they are taking on profound and alarming new dimensions when they occur online. What was previously fleeting is now permanent. What was previously localized is now accessible around the world.

Page 99 focuses on shaming, and it discusses one of the major problems of online shaming: "Internet shaming can devolve into vigilantism and violence." Shaming can and does serve valuable functions in society — it is a way of punishing people for transgressing norms. Shaming serves to maintain order in society by ensuring that norms are followed. But online shaming, because it often spirals out of control and takes on features of mob justice, can ironically thwart social order. It lacks due process or any sense of proportionality to the transgression.

In the book, I discuss what's at stake as people are increasingly expressing online details of their private lives — and the lives of their friends, family, co-workers, and others. The book contains numerous stories of people who were shamed or gossiped about on the Internet, and it discusses what we should do to protect people from being harmed. The rise of Internet speech is a truly wonderful thing, but there's a dark side that we must reckon with. We must establish a better balance between privacy and free speech, or else the freedom the Internet promises us will result in shackling people forever to their past mistakes or tying people to spurious rumors.

Read an excerpt from The Future of Reputation and learn more about the book and author at Daniel Solove's website, the Concurring Opinions blog, and the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terryl Givens' "People of Paradox"

Terryl L. Givens is Professor of Literature and Religion and James A. Bostwick Chair of English, University of Richmond. His books on Mormonism and American religious culture include The Latter-Day Saint Experience in America, By the Hand of Mormon, and Viper on the Hearth.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture, and reported the following:

Paradox is rife in any number of philosophical systems, faith traditions, and cultural practices. It could be that paradox is just a euphemism for the inconsistency so often at the heart of human ways of ordering experience. Paradox could be a sign of immaturity, an indication that our ways of articulating our values and preferences have not yet found a synthesis free of fault lines. Or one could see paradox as the sign of a voracious Faustian appetite, a response to Hegel’s tragic universe in which, confronted with competing Goods, we insist on having it both ways, and manage, perhaps, to do just that.

Levi-Strauss believed that all cultures are riven with fundamental contradictions at their heart, and myth becomes a way to overcome such contradictions. I have chosen to expand his approach, and look at a range of cultural expression in Mormon history, to find in art, music, literature, architecture, and the life of the mind, forums for the imaginative exploration and creative resolution of such contradictions. I call them paradoxes to reflect Mormon belief that, ultimately, the contradictions are more in appearance than reality.

Page 99 of People of Paradox provides a sampling of some of those manifestations of apparently irreconcilable difference in Mormon attitudes toward the life of the mind in particular. The practice of polygamy struck most observers as prima facie evidence of Mormon patriarchal dominance and devaluation of women. But Utah in the late 19th century sent more female students to medical college than any state in the Union. (Women comprised 50% of the class of Deseret at a time when the national average was 15%). Joseph Smith exhibited one of the boldest speculative imaginations of his age. But his successor Brigham Young wanted education more geared to producing turnips than thinkers. Mormon editorialists railed against “book-learning,” even as Utah children attended schools to get just that at a higher rate than children in New York, Pennsylvania, or the birthplace of public education, Massachusetts.

Journalist James Gordon Bennett’s jibe that Mormonism produced “saints and crockery ware” with equal enthusiasm actually hit the nail right on the head. Joseph Smith’s collapse of sacred distance created a theology in which commerce and consecration were fully compatible. Young’s remark that the transformation of the earth into a celestial sphere would be accomplished by angels well instructed in chemistry was but one further evidence that in Mormon conceptions of the universe, the supernal and the mundane blended into one another in sublime synthesis.

Learn more about People of Paradox at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Halpern's "Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence"

Richard Halpern is Sir William Osler Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan, Shakespeare Among the Moderns, and The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his most recent book, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, and reported the following:

Page 99 occurs in the middle of an especially weird chapter, on Norman Rockwell’s portrayals of children. Here I’m discussing a painting in which Tom Sawyer is getting flogged by a schoolmaster, who has picked Tom up, slung him over his thigh, and begun whacking away at his bottom. We don’t allow flogging today, and it was always a bit depraved. Rockwell’s portrayals of children, like this one, are often edgy and strange:

The looming schoolmaster, switch poised to strike (several broken ones already litter the floor) holds a screaming Tom aloft as he prepares to deliver another blow to the boy’s derriere. The girls look on in sorrow while the boys watch the whipping with unconcealed glee. A blood-red kerchief which emerges from the schoolmaster’s backside (and matches the dress of the girl at bottom right) embodies in its color the violence of the moment, and makes it look, oddly, almost as if the schoolmaster bore welts on his backside. This illustration, like many of Rockwell’s, owes a debt to the tradition of Dutch genre painting, such as a painting by Jan Steen depicting a schoolmaster rapping a young, weeping boy on the palm with a spoon. (Among Steen’s onlookers, it is a girl who, interestingly, seems most to enjoy the spectacle of punishment.)

Whipping had, of course, been a staple of education for centuries. The assumption of the painting, I think, is that it is an essentially harmless and quite possibly character-building practice. Sometimes rambunctious boys just need a good tarring. Good behavior enters through the rear end. But on the other hand, schoolmasters were sometimes appallingly cruel, and their paddling of boys’ bottoms took on a sadistic, even sexual cast. The renowned Renaissance schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, for instance, made liberal use of his birch rod, which he named “My Lady Birchley.” Mulcaster jokingly referred to beatings as marriage ceremonies between his Lady Birchley and his students’ buttocks. Thus the practice of whipping could–and often did--take on a perverse character. And this ambiguity of whipping, which employs a young boy’s bottom either for punishment or for pleasure in punishment, acts as the hinge on which the disavowal of Rockwell’s painting turns.

In my book I argue that America’s Favorite Illustrator has been badly misunderstood by both his fans and his detractors. Rockwell is not culturally or artistically naïve. Above all, he does not portray a bland style of American innocence. Rather, he is a canny diagnostician of innocence, which he exposes as a fiction based on various forms of denial and disavowal. Rockwell fills his apparently mayonnaise world with dark and disturbing details which he then dares the viewer to acknowledge. In exploring the underside of Rockwellian innocence, however, I do not aim to denigrate Rockwell or his work. Instead, I try to show that he’s a smarter, more complex and more accomplished painter than people generally recognize. His work is challenging in ways that we have yet to face.

Read an excerpt from Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence and learn more about the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Lee Carrell's "Interred With Their Bones"

Jennifer Lee Carrell has won three awards for distinction in undergraduate teaching at Harvard, where she taught in the History and Literature Program and directed Shakespeare for the Hyperion Theatre Company. She is the author of The Speckled Monster, a work of historical nonfiction about battling smallpox at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her debut novel Interred With Their Bones, and reported the following:

Applied to Interred With Their Bones, Ford Madox Ford’s test brings us up short at the end of a chapter, very nearly at the end of the first act, on a page that sports only a few lines. Oddly enough, they coyly hint at a great deal of what my novel is about … though not, I believe, the quality of the whole.

In many ways, page 99 reaches back to the opening lines: “We are all haunted. Not by unexplained rappings or spectral auras, much less headless horseman and weeping queens — real ghosts pace the battlements of memory, endlessly whispering, Remember me.” Interred With Their Bones is about discovery, loss, and remembering — on many levels.

It is also a fast-paced thriller. On page 99, Kate has just made a major discovery, only to be interrupted by the sudden arrival of a British Detective Chief Inspector:

But Roz had known, of that I was suddenly sure. “I’ve found something, sweetheart,” she’d said. “Something big.” Bigger than Hamlet at the Globe, she’d insisted, her green eyes gleaming. And I had scoffed at her in smug derision.

The door buzzed, and I jumped.

As it opened, a voice that I recognized twined through it with strange clarity.

DCI Sinclair.

First and foremost, what’s on display here is the voice of my heroine, Kate Stanley — a young American stage director working in London. Layered within is the remembered voice that haunts both Kate and the narrative: that of Rosalind (or Roz) Howard — a Harvard professor who is “part Amazon, part earth mother, part gypsy queen.” Roz was once Kate’s mentor and a mother-figure, and her words (“I’ve found something, sweetheart”) hark back to a mysterious refrain that Kate finds even more potent: If you open it, you must follow where it leads.

The plot revolves around the perilous search for a literary treasure — but it’s also a modern take on the extreme passions and violence of Renaissance revenge tragedy. Hamlet, given passing mention here, is wound deeply through this novel’s soul, if a novel can be said to have a soul. It’s lightened here and there, however, with moments of comic — or at least absurd — relief.

That said, you don’t need to know any Shakespeare to enjoy and understand my novel. At the very least, Mr. Ford’s test shows that I haven’t written a book full of “forsooth’s” and “prithee’s.” I hope that Interred With Their Bones will entertain anyone who enjoys a good tale — and maybe, along the way, provoke readers to ponder what makes Shakespeare, or any great storyteller, so endlessly enthralling.

Read excerpts from the novel and learn more about the book and author at Jennifer Lee Carrell's website and MySpace page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Lamster's "Spalding's World Tour"

Mark Lamster is Editor-at-Large at Princeton Architectural Press in New York. His writing on baseball, history, design, and architecture has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Metropolis, I.D., and Architecture.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made it America's Game, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a fitting enough place to drop into my book, which is the story of a group of itinerant baseball players and their trip around the globe. There's actually a summary sentence on the page that had been in the original proposal when it was sent out to publishers:

In place of Phileas Fogg, [Jules] Verne's punctilious British protagonist, Spalding would be leading a charismatic gang of working-class heroes on a mission to spread the gospel of baseball, that most
beloved and potent symbol of the American way.

There's something further on down about one of the great deceptions of the trip, and I think it generally captures the tone of the book in its entirety.

Read an excerpt from Spalding's World Tour and an author's note, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maud Casey's "Genealogy"

Maud Casey lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. She is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come and Genealogy, and a short story collection, Drastic. Her stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Confrontation, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Sonora Review, and The Threepenny Review.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Genealogy and reported the following, beginning with the text from the page:

called him, and later he would hear the hint of relief, as if she was glad it wasn’t true that Marguerite’s first word was her brother’s name and not mama or papa. But Marguerite had spoken, Ryan knew it. She spoke his name. Soon after, she said “bzz” for fly and “caw, caw” for bird in front of their parents. But she only said “Ry” in front of him so no one ever believed him, and when Marguerite learned to say “mama” and “papa” before she ever said “Ry” in front of Sam and Bernard, Ryan learned for the first time to be content for a thing in and of itself and not in the sharing of it.

Then one day Marguerite stopped talking altogether. “She’ll talk again soon,” Sam reassured him when Ryan told her, alarmed. “You have to be patient.” Her parental tone, one she seemed to slip over her voice like a costume, made Ryan so angry he went into his room and punched a small dent in the wall. Bernard came down and tried to read him that young boy who wanted to learn what fear was bullshit, but only succeeded in making Ryan hide his head farther under the pillows. “Well,” Bernard said, laughing so that Ryan burrowed deeper under the pillows, “there’s a fellow who will give his father some trouble.”

Ryan watches as Hyuen connects the tubes to the incisions in the dead man’s neck and the gallons of embalming fluid begin to find their way into his artery. The language Hyuen is teaching Ryan is somehow comforting, even “ripping the corpse.” But Ryan’s favorite so far is the honey running through Alexander the Great’s veins. He imagines honey in his own veins, slow and thick and sweet.

“You don’t look so good,” Hyuen says, his voice cutting through the honey.

“Hangover,” Ryan says, and it’s mostly true.

Ryan dreads getting home later and shooing the fruit flies from his face, holding his nose to keep the dead-meat smell at bay. The pumpkin has nearly rotted through; the gray concrete laid almost bare.

When he calls for his messages from the pay phone in the hall, there are two hang-ups on his machine, and when the third message

I once read an essay by Alice Munro in which she claimed she could start reading a story from any page. Stories are not like roads, she said. They are like houses, built around the whispery, unnameable essence at its core (I think she called it the “soul” of the story; Flannery O’Connor would call it the “mystery”). So what room have I
wandered into on page 99? This is a terrifying test — what if it sucks? You hope you’ll pick it up and there will be a lovely room, beautifully appointed, and maybe a hallway filled with lots of beautiful light that will lead the reader to the next room and make sense of the room that came before. Yikes. That’s a lot of pressure. My first reaction, upon reading this page, was relief that it was not gibberish. My next was a sense of unfamiliarity — this isn’t a page I’ve ever read from at a reading. At first it seemed inconsequential, but as it turns out, it’s a page where a lot of the ships passing in the night collide, or at least pass each other on their way to eventually colliding. The title of the novel, Genealogy, refers to this falling-apart Hennart family and its hopeless genes, but it also refers to the very particular language they speak as a family, and gestures (I hope) to the inherited language of all families — jokes, gestures, stories, verbal tics.

There are a lot of references to language here. It actually makes the book seem coherent! The first word(s) of Marguerite, the mentally ill daughter who has run away from home — her brother’s name was her first word, but then her mother, so jealous of her daughter’s adoration of her brother, couldn’t bear to believe it. There’s a reference to the scary fairy tale — “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” — that the father, Bernard, also on the lam when the book begins, tells his son. There’s the language of the morgue, of embalming, a new language for Ryan, the son who has also fled the family (the only person who hasn’t left the state when the book opens is Samantha, the mother, and she drops dead in the first chapter).

So that’s the room we’ve entered on p. 99: a portrait of this talk-y family via Ryan’s memory as he listens to his new friend, Hyuen, describe the factoid about Alexander the Great being embalmed with honey. And there is, in fact, a hallway into another room, too, though it’s a little dim and menacing, not filled with luminous light: the hang-ups on Ryan’s answering machine will turn out to be Thompson, the carpenter with whom the mother has been having an affair, calling to inform him his mother has died. Thompson arrived on the scene to redo the bathroom in accordance with the dictates of a 19th c. article by Dr. Edward Strecker, “The Continuous Bath In Mental Disease,” because Samantha — before Marguerite took off — was trying to heal her through baths, having eschewed pharmaceuticals. And that, in a convoluted nutshell, is page 99.

Learn more about Genealogy and its author at Maud Casey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Perrow's "The Next Catastrophe"

Charles Perrow is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University. His books include Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism and Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. He has worked as a consultant for the U.S. military, the White House, and the nuclear-power industry.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters, and reported the following:

The third paragraph of page 99 goes as follows, illustrating just one of the many problems with the new Department of Homeland Security:

A glaring example of thoughtlessness, on-the-fly reorganization occasioned by the birth of the new department concerned a particularly important sector of first responders -- the effective National Disaster Medical System (NDMS). It deployed and coordinated volunteer teams of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel in a crisis, some 7000 volunteers. It had been moved from the Department of Health and Human Services to FEMA by the original DHS designers. HHS felt it belonged in HHS, not in FEMA, and tried to wrest control of the NDMS during Hurricane Isabel (September 2003). It did not do well in FEMA and was starved of resources. Its paid staff had shriveled from 144 to 57 and did not even include a physician. NDMS volunteers complained about FEMA’s unpaid bills, faulty equipment, and intransigent leadership.... It warned that two years after their move to FEMA, they were less prepared than ever.

This quote is representative of my criticism of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. The failure of these organizations and many others in the public and private sectors is a major theme of the book. It argues that we cannot expect much from organizations when it comes to preventing disasters of all sorts -- I discuss natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters -- and thus we should spend more of our resources reducing the size of the targets of nature's fury, the industrial accidents, and vulnerable parts of our critical infrastructure. Instead of the Department of Homeland Security, which should be dismantled, we should establish a Department of Homeland Vulnerability that examines the risky concentrations that are vulnerable to all three sources of disasters.

We should deconcentrate populations that live in risky areas instead of waiting for more Katrinas to do it for us at immense human cost. We should deconcentrate the hazardous substances in urban centers; our cities are littered with weapons of mass destruction. And we should reduce the concentrations of economic and political power that sit astride our electric power system, our nuclear power plants, our concentrated food supply and our telecommunications, in particular the Internet. They present easy targets for nature, accidents, and terrorists.

This will require stricter regulations and meaningful enforcement, something we have been able to do in other sectors of society, notably in the areas of health and crime, where our government is moderately strong. It is weak regarding settlements in risky areas and building standards and evacuation routes. That could be changed. We once had antitrust laws that stemmed the concentrations of economic power that favor the concentrations of hazardous materials. We could re-enact them. Until very recently we considered the Internet to be a common carrier open to all, but concentration in telecommunications will make it more vulnerable to hackers, terrorists, and accidents. The domination of operating systems by Microsoft's Windows, which domination allowed it to pay little attention to security, has made our banking system, military establishments including intelligence, and even our power plants vulnerable to hackers, terrorists, and software failures. We could require secure operating systems and software for our critical infrastructure.

We have not been able to prevent or greatly mitigate disasters, and never will be; our organizations are simply not up to it. We will always have disasters from the three sources, but we can greatly limit their size and consequences by reducing concentrations.

Read an excerpt from The Next Catastrophe and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Nuzum's "The Dead Travel Fast"

Eric Nuzum is a recovering pop culture critic, VH1 pundit, and author of Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula, and reported the following:

Unfortunately, the page 99 thing holds for The Dead Travel Fast … here’s why: Page 99 of my book features me trying to find a way out of attending a vampire-themed topless revue in Vegas with my Dad. Oh, I was planning to attend. I just didn’t want to go with him.

Here is why I say it is “unfortunately” accurate. When I was a little boy, I dreamed of being an author when I grew up. In my little brain, that meant sitting around in a big comfy chair, probably smoking a pipe, stroking my professorial beard, snacking on cheese cubes, and thinking big author thoughts (basically, being lazy for a living). The unfortunate reality of my real-life authorship (if that’s even a word) is that I spend my time drinking my own blood, hanging out at chain restaurants with people who like to drink other people’s blood, running off to Romania with a tour of vampire enthusiasts, and attending a Dark Shadows fan convention (filled with people who don’t even have the social skills to be Trekkies). All this to answer a relatively simple question (or what I thought was a relatively simple question): Why are vampires interesting?

Alas, despite the book’s success, I don’t have a comfy chair, I don’t have any time to sit around (let alone think), and I don’t even have the damn beard. I do love cheese cubes though, so that part worked out okay, I guess.

So, if someone were to pick up The Dead Travel Fast, turn to page 99, and see this situation play out…they’d get a good taste for the nonsense that fills the other 235 pages.

Actual text from page 99 of The Dead Travel Fast:

It was my dad who first told me about Bite. “You know, they have an adult revue in Vegas about vampires,” he offered, almost managing to suppress the smile on his face. “If you are interested in going, I’d be happy to go along with you.”

I jumped into the other room to do some quick online research and learned that, yes, there was a topless show in Las Vegas called Bite. At least two other times that evening, my dad offered to attend the show with me.

My father is a great guy and I love him a lot, but there was no way in hell that I was going to attend an adult revue with my dad. There are lots of fun things to do with dads: fishing, baseball games, carrying heavy things for Mom, lawn work — the list goes on and on. However, nowhere on that list is staring at naked breasts. Going to a topless show with him just felt creepy. Once I’d heard about it, there was no doubt that I was going — the question was how to deal with Dad.

“Why can’t your dad come? When did breasts become creepy?” asked Katherine, who had already decided she was coming too.

“Okay, imagine this,” I offered. “You’re sitting there watching this show, then you look over at your father-in-law and you see a big grin on his face.”

Read an excerpt from The Dead Travel Fast and learn more about the book and author at Eric Nuzum's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

E. Lockhart's "Dramarama"

E. Lockhart is the author of The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, Fly on the Wall, and Dramarama.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Dramarama and reported the following:

Dramarama is the most glittery, most ridiculous, most theatrical of my books, and as such it's dear to my heart. It's about two theater-mad, self-invented fabulositon Ohio teenagers.

One boy, one girl.

One gay, one straight.

One black, one white.

And SUMMER DRAMA CAMP.

It's a season of hormones, gold lamé, hissy fits, jazz hands, song and dance, true love, and unitards -- that will determine their future, and test their friendship.

Page 99 is an audition scene. Sadye, our narrator, is describing the "meat market" -- an initial dance audition at drama school that will determine placement -- and romantic possibilities.

Farrell, Demi's hall counselor and a voice major at Carnegie Mellon, stood by the door with a clipboard and made sure that our names and numbers matched up properly. "Keep your number through tomorrow!" he barked loudly. "You're going to need it! Don't throw it away or you'll have to have a makeshift one and everyone will know you lost it!"

When everyone had filed in, Tamar taught the whole school an easy jazz combo, and then had us come up in groups of twenty to perform it four times, each time sending the front line to the back so new people could step up. Nanette was number 14, Demi was 15, and I was 16 – so we were in the first group.

Nanette was good. I couldn't see her much out of the corner of my eye, but I could tell she had years of lessons behind her.

Demi was his usual ridiculous self, sticking his butt out and wiggling it like a lunatic when he messed up the steps.

I nailed it – if I do say so myself. We took our seats again, flush with the thrill of dancing to Kander and Ebb (the song was "All that Jazz") in front of more than a hundred people – and glad to have gone early because now we could watch the meat.

Blake from Boston was in the next group, and he looked ridiculous.

"Oh, I have to shut my eyes!" whispered Demi. "I'm losing all desire for that poor man."

Read an excerpt from Dramarama and learn more about E. Lockhart and her books at her website.

--Marshal Zeringue