A woman hasn’t run a presidential debate in twenty years.

This boggles my mind. With all the women in business, journalism, politics, etc., NOT ONE has been named to moderate a presidential debate??? Other adjectives I can think of besides "surprising" include annoying, vexing, inappropriate, strange, or even (if I were of the paranoid persuasion) Highly Suspicious.

Well, three teenage girls from New Jersey apparently agree. Rather than spending their summer listening to Justin Bieber or hanging out at the pool, they amassed an astonishing 170,000 signatures on a petition to have one of the upcoming 2012 debates moderated by a woman. They then took their packet of signatures to the office of the Commission on Presidential Debates (the Commission will be selecting the moderators in the next couple of weeks)...

...and they were turned away, and told that they would not be permitted to leave the packages of signatures in case they contained dangerous substances.

WTF? Epic governmental fail.

Emma Axelrod, Sammi Siegel and Elena Tsemberis were interviewed about their experience on NPR today, where they spoke like mature, thoughtful, engaged young citizens about their disappointment with the way they were treated. (I applaud their self-control; I believe I might have thrown something large and heavy...)

Rather than give up, however, (quoting from themarysue.com): "[w]orking with Change.org, the girls have put together two petitions asking for female moderators–one targeted at the commission, and one targeting the Obama and Romney campaigns, who can also have a sizable influence over who is chosen to moderate the political showdowns. The former has 116,000 signatures, the latter 53,000."

These girls rock. If you agree, you can sign their petition and add your support. You go, girls!!!

An amazing piece on NPR's All Things Considered tonight. They're doing a series called "Winter Songs" where they invite various people to choose a song that evokes winter for them, and explain why. Tonight their guest was choreographer Bill T. Jones, who chose a Schubert piece called "Die Leiermann" (The Hurdy Gurdy Man), which is part of a song cycle called "Winterreise" (Winter Journey). Jones talks about how the song for him is bound up with memories of his father, in particular one winter afternoon when he saw his father from the window of his fourth-grade classroom. Go here to listen to it.

Is there a song (beyond the obvious, like carols) that you associate with winter? Oddly enough, for me it's Abba's Move On. I had just started dating my first boyfriend in October of 1980, and he had given me this album. I had to go away over Christmas with my family to south Texas, and I was convinced he would forget about me in the TEN DAYS I was gone so I listened to it relentlessly before we left. So there you go: Abba + South Padre Island = winter song.

Am currently overdosing on retellings of classic fairy tales -- Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling's Snow White, Blood Red and Black Thorn, White Rose, and Tanith Lee's Red as Blood: Tales from the Sisters Grimmer. Fairy tales (which are not tales about Tinkerbell, nor do the female characters remotely resemble the Disney princesses) are so endlessly flexible and malleable, as though they're a Platonic ideal of "story-ness" and all other tales derive from them. Tons of ideas percolating now (Red Riding Hood but with a male as main character? Rapunzel as a mother who refuses to let her daughter grow up? What if the seven dwarves were kidnappers? What if renewing magic in the world really did require human sacrifice? What if Prince Charming arrived too soon, or too late -- and what if he wasn't charming at all?). Am hoping to coax a few to emerge in a coherent form. You never know what you'll get when you dip into the great simmering soup of story!

Also, cannot let today pass without noting this afternoon's very funny (and honest) episode of "You Must Read" on NPR, by "a tweed-clad ectomorph" who reads Rosemary Rogers.