I know what you’re thinking: “How in the hell did someone as carnie-folk-bizarre as Lorca get herself invited to eat dinner with someone as classy as the Poet Laureate? There’s no way.” Well, you can just stuff it with your snooty self. I did, too, have dinner with the Poet Laureate and it was even at her private house and everything. So there. The really weird thing is I kind of only just now remembered that I had dinner with the Poet Laureate and I only remembered that I’d been to her house after I just typed all that.
See, when I knew her, she wasn’t the Poet Laureate (let’s see how many times I can type Poet Laureate in this blog post), she was just my Poetry professor in college. Anyone who has any delusions about my writing talent and my love of poetry can read my blog post about being forced to enter an erotic haiku writing contest. Needless to say, I did NOT do well in Poetry (and I did not win that contest).
But at the end of the Poetry class, we all got to have dinner at the professor’s house. I only got to tag along because I was technically still enrolled in the class and because I waitressed at a restaurant that made kick-ass hot wings and I could get them at a discount. Yup, I brought hot wings to the Poet Laureate’s house for dinner. She made these funky Middle Eastern dishes and I contributed hot wings to the soiree. Betcha can’t get guess whose dish got gobbled up first.
The great part about this professor being named as the new Poet Laureate of the whole country is that I know some really awesome dirt on her that I could potentially sell to all the tabloids who want to bring down the Poet Laureate in shame. Okay, I’m willing to concede that there probably aren’t that many tabloid staffers who know that we even have a Poet Laureate, let alone who she is and what she did. And I also concede that the only really juicy story I have about her is that she wore this brand new cerulean blue shirt on the first day of class and that it reacted somehow with her deodorant so it turned the armpits of her shirt hot pink. I wish I had thought to go digging through her drawers while I was at her house for dinner…
Lorca Damon 
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Great Story! My “close encounter” with a Poet Laureate is this: My poetry professor, Donald Davie, was considered the head (according to the Norton Anthology anyway) of The Movement in British Poetry. Philip Larkin, who was also in that group, was offered the position of Poet Laureate, but turned it down. As close as I’ll ever get!
[…] I Had Dinner with the Poet Laureate of the United States(lorcadamon.com) […]
I once had dinner with a guy who had an aunt who had been on a bus that had to stop at some traffic lights and one of the cars coming the other way had once been owned by a guy who lived next door to a man who had passed Ian Fleming in the street. That was a long and boring dinner I can tell you, though the waiter looked like Sylvester Stallone which brightened up my evening when I ordered a coke refill and told him to ‘Go For It!’ in my best Rocky impression voice. Yeah okay things are real slow in Devon!
Puh-leez. I live in a tiny town in Anniston. We still get excited when a cow is born with one extra leg.
You are one fortunate woman! I met Maya Angelou once. She sat right in front of me at The American Dance Festival in Durham, NC (we’re both from NC, BTW.) I didn’t actually meet her because too many people were already bothering her. I did smile at her though and she smiled back! It was soooo cool!
And it’s those little moments of fandom that make us smile for years to come!
so totally cool. I would have liked the hot wings better too. Goat burgers just don’t do it for us southern gals.
What’s this about the Poet Laureate?
Um, it’s is pretty self-explanatory. I ate dinner with the Poet Laureate. Didn’t you get your invitation? Musta got lost… 🙂
Is her name Natasha Trethewey by any chance?
It is! Don’t tell me you had dinner with her too???
She LOVES to eat… around. 😀
Sorry, all I got out of that was Erotic Haiku… What now?
*grins*
No, that is cool. I opened another page and looked her up. Very cool, indeed. And each time you tell that story the facts have to be stretched, right? It’s totally expected. You were her favorite student, you actually ghost wrote some of her best stuff; things like that…
-Jimmy
Of course. In fact, now I was on the committee that helped select her.