Sexy Cow and Lines Lost Among Trees

My co-worker Beth who's truly a Drama Queen (she teaches drama) has a line she uses with her sketch comedy class:

"If you're going to put a sexy cow on stage, you'd better be prepared to f--- it."

I first became aware of this quote when one of our mutual students put this quote in his end of the quarter reflection letter, where he was supposed to discuss what things he'd learned over the quarter, blah, blah, blah. Now he wasn't the most articulate of writers so I didn't quite get why he used Beth's quote but later on, I asked her about it and the situation was that she had Daniel in her sketch comedy class and in one skit, some of the students put a sexy cow on stage but were too shy to do the dirty deed on stage. They begin going off stage when Beth screeched the unforgettable sexy cow line.

I recently read in a NY Times article entitled "Sexy Ruses to Stop Forgetting" that the best way to help with memory retention is to visualize whatever it is that you are trying to remember. And "exotic, erotic, and exciting visualization is best" says author Joshua Foer.

So as we were again discussing reflection letters at the end of this quarter and the importance of following up on one's ideas, a decidedly unexotic, unerotic, and unexciting topic, the sexy cow came to mind. Students would drop lines like "This is not the first college I attended. I also went to Walla Walla University for awhile before going to work at Taco Bell. Then I came here" and not follow up. Now I'm not sure if they just weren't aware that telling your audience you dropped out of college was an idea that needed development or if they were afraid to get too personal or detailed. But, if they want to put a sexy idea like dropping out of school in a paper, then they'd better be prepared to explain it. Just like if you're going to put a sexy cow on stage, you better be prepared to screw it. I think they were impressed. And one student used the term in the next day's writer's workshop to mean "develop your ideas," which just goes to show that Foer has a point. I need to start using this analogy earlier in the quarter....

On a marginally-related note, here is a lovely poem by Billy Collins on forgetfulness:

Lines Lost Among Trees

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem-
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

--Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning