What are these wonderful women doing now?

Here’s an update on some of the women I’ve mentioned in recent blog posts.

Flo saw a nurse at her post-operative visit Thursday (the wonderful Janet drove her, of course!) and everything looks good. Her wounds are healing well, and (most important to Flo) some of the hair on her head is already starting to grow back.

Nancy Faust left a comment on that post I published about her last week!! “I am simply overwhelmed over being the subject of your beautifully written baseball experience commentary,” she wrote. “Please visit me Sunday.”

Sandra Murillo is doing so well at University of Illinois that she started volunteering to assist with ESL classes for Urbana Adult Education. Until last week, that is, when an email from the ESL program landed in Sandra’s advisor’s in box. The note said the program was “concerned” that Sandra was “not getting what she needed” out of her volunteer work. The note suggested other places for her to volunteer, all of them places that work with people who have disabilities. Sandra says she respects the disability field, but that wasn’t what she had in mind when she decided to volunteer. She’ll continue volunteering, but now she’ll mentor Latino students at Urbana Middle School instead. Link to Sandra’s blog to follow her progress – interesting stuff!

Hanna Bratman was in the audience with her son during my debut at the disability cabaret. “My son was hoping to talk to you afterwards,” she wrote in an email message. “he wanted to tell you how good you looked.” Dang. Sorry I missed them.

Francine Rich, the wonderful wise woman who published Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, was so taken by the excerpt of Hanna’s writing (published here last August) that she offered to assemble Hanna’s many, many personal essays into a publishable format. Stay tuned, someday soon we may all be vying for a good spot in line at Hanna’s booksigning.

My sister Bev is home safe & sound (gee, what a great title for a book!) from South Korea. She never did have to eat raw horse, but her son Brian surprised her with a mystery meat one night: pig intestine stuffed with noodles. “I told the waitress to hold the rectum,” he wrote in a comment to my blog about his mom and dad’s trip. “Seriously. No joke. They eat rectums here.”

On that happy note, I’ll end this post and try to come up with some good song requests. Need to be ready when I visit my blog-reading pal Nancy Faust at the final White Sox game tomorrow, doncha know.