>A close friend snuck a sign on my classroom door last year when I wasn’t looking. In a typically artistic font, mounted on two colors of tagboard, and laminated to boot, it announced: “Caution: I have a tuba and I’m not afraid to play it!”
Well, it’s not 100% accurate. I did play tuba for a long time, but I haven’t picked one up in at least 20 years. I like to claim that I wasn’t a very good player, just enough of a musician to fake it. Sometimes I’ve even joked that I knew how to end up where the boys were — sitting in the low brass section of the band. At that time, (the mid to late 70s if you must know) instruments had not yet gone unisex. The one boy who played flute (now a professional musician) and the few girls who played trombone and tuba tended to be free spirits, those gutsy types who were willing to try something out of the norm.
My friends from those days are surprised to hear that I joined a traditionally female profession, teaching elementary school, got married and had kids, and now drive (gasp) a minivan.
But inside this teacher’s skirts you’ll still find:

• a politically active mom, passionate for causes that matter to my family and my students
• an environmentalist who thinks globally and acts locally
• a “pundit blogger” who will say what she thinks and grab the bull by the horns
• a closet biker who keeps threatening to buy a Harley for her midlife crisis.

I wouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and I’ll let all of you know — don’t judge a woman by her skirts. You never know what’s on her Blackberry, her laptop, but most of all, her mind.

Parent Bloggers Network and Girl Con Queso are featuring a new site called sk*rt. Sk*rt bills itself as a “new social bookmarking site for women (and the men who want to get in their heads)”. They’re sponsoring a creative Blog Blast this week under the topic, “What’s up your sk*rt?”