As if you didn’t have enough reasons to vote Democratic this year, here’s one more: Obama is likely to extend an olive branch to the Castro Brothers and ease cultural exchange and travel restrictions in this tit-for-tat, penis-waving contest that is US-Cuba relations.

How does this affect you?

The fact that Americans at large being deprived of the closest, largest, most entertaining and ecologically and culturally diversified Caribbean travel destination should be up there with the seven wonders of the world, and a testament to just how much damage a few angry Cuban old men can do when they put their minds to it.

(Old, Cuban white men, because until Castro came along, Cubans were divided along class lines that were clearly steeped in race relations as well - wealthy descendants of slave-owning Spaniards, and black descendants of those slaves. Guess who fled stateside when Cuba went socialist?).

As you might have noticed after reading Fashionably Late, Cuba is a major travel destination (budgettravel destination, might I add) for Canadians and Europeans, and just about any sun-worshippers who like to inject their holidays with a lots of local flavour and culture, because that’s something Cuba has heaps of. As a matter of fact, last weekend I was reading an article in a travel magazine featuring Cartagena, Columbia, and rather than highlight bars with Colombian flavour, the author repeatedly referenced Cuban music floating to the street through the open windows of Colombian homes and restaurants, and described a fun evening she spent at “Havana Cafe” in Cartagena.

Even in the Cayman Islands, we draw much of our ‘cultural’ tourist attractions from chunks of Cuban national heritage: mojito and cigar bars, Cuban cuisine, and Cuban art.

Until the last generation of grumpy old Cuban men meets its maker, and a party with something other than pandering to lunatic demographic fringe groups comes into power in the States, I will be happy to relay to you, faithful blog readers, pictures and blogging entries I will be writing and uploading in two weeks’ time, as I go on a week-long press trip across a portion of Cuba’s northern coast! I will be starting out in Havana, driving through Santa Clara, Sanctus Spiritu, the achingly pretty and wonderfully conserved colonial town of Trinidad, and finally the white sandy string of keys to the north: Cayo Coco, Cayo Guillermo, and Cayo Santa Maria. This was a very unexpected, but very welcome opportunity.

So stay tuned for some travel blogging to come your way in November, and hopefully calm you down after these past few months of election frenzy.

Hasta Noviembre!

I think I might have overstuffed my brain with political blogs, newsfeeds, online commentary and anything election-ralated.

And my brain wants no more of it.

Then again, as Larry David recently blogged about at the HufPo (I told you my blog-surfing is out of control), I think all this over-exposure to information has gotten me so pumped (in a bad way) and jittery, I think I might just spontaneous combust the night of November 4th before they even announce the results.

And I’m not even American!

So, like a listless junkie waiting in a comatose state for her next hit, I have been too paralyzed by inertia and this constant blog-surfing to do any blogging of my own – and this when I have a book out! And when I’ve just recently been touring by some amazing fellow writers and friends!
Amazing. Just goes to show how such a torrent of information available to us in a constant, never-ending stream, can be so utterly paralyzing.

Well, I’m taking a break from the doom and gloom of the news cycle to bring you highlights of my latest interviews, and also to announce that my new favorite word is Schadenfreude.
(I didn’t even need to Spellcheck that. That’s how much I love this word.)

In case you’re like me and first heard “Schadenfreude” used sometime around the first of the Wall St. giants collapsed, and haven’t stopped seeing it everywhere since, “Schadenfreude” refers to feeling misplaced joy over other people’s misery. Or gloating. Something a whole lot of people have been indulging in lately.

Now for some of my favorite Q&As from my blog tour…

From Maggie Marr, who I had the pleasure of meeting in San Fran this year…

Q:What pulled you into this story, and as a writer made you think ‘I have to write this’?
A:My books tend to reflect whatever issues are haunting me at a given point in time, the problems I’m noticing people around me are facing. With Cutting Loose, I didn’t have much choice with the launching point since I knew it would be a spin-off of my first novel, Fashionably Late, that picks up Ranya’s story. Ranya for me represents the whole subset of girls that Jane Austen might have described as ‘silly’ and who we still see plenty of, whether it’s on those Girls Gone Wild videos here in North America, or these idle, wealthy, sheltered women in the Middle East who don’t seem to care about very much. It was challenging to make Ranya sympathetic, so I made her funny and self-reflective. The only way to put up with a snob is if that snob had a sense of humor! But when it came to the rest of the story, I was very driven by taking familiar stereotypes and turning them on their ear – Rio, the editor-in-chief of a Latina magazine, has a one-woman vendetta against the waif-ish, homogenous cast of most fashion magazines, Zahra is a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, possibly from one of the oldest Christian families in the world, and the boys are from a fifth-generation Lebanese-American family based loosely on the Maloufs of New Mexico, self-made multi-millionaires who own the Palms casino in Vegas, an entertainment channel, some sports team… Lebanese and Syrian immigrants also played their part in American frontier legend, and we don’t get to hear their rags-to-riches story often. The story Georges tells Ranya about how his family came to America and built their fortune is a historically accurate account. I feel that the story of each and every character in Cutting Loose is a thread in the tapestry that is North American culture.

And this great question from my friend Marilyn Brant, whose ARC I am awaiting any day now…

Q:What’s a personality trait you love about one of the characters in your novel and why?

A:Hmm… this is a trait that both Rio and Zahra share throughout the novel, and that Ranya struggles with – resiliency. Rio and Zahra take a lot of serious punches, both throughout the plot development and behind the scenes, and they keep rolling with them one way or another. They may not always respond in ways we like, but when we meet them, we can imagine they’re already done some serious growing up which has left them scarred: Zahra is the only daughter out of five offspring who had the chance to escape a life of destitution in Bethlehem, in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. She’s now carrying the burden of supporting this family she left behind, which is the fate of so many immigrants in this world. Rio hasn’t had it much easier – taunted with the label of ‘illegal’ just because of the way she looks and the language she speaks, and this in spite of being a perfectly legal citizen of the United States. I find a recent study about the decrease of illegal immigration to the US very interesting – the stats did not go down because of better detection or deportation methods, but because the US is no longer an attractive beacon for employment. Hoarding doesn’t pay in the long run folks – sharing and empathy has a way of paying dividends while xenophobia does just the opposite.

Resiliency is just another way of saying “growing up” for me, and I admire both Rio and Zahra for it, and so does Ranya, as a matter of fact!

And this little bit of escapist fantasy, courtesy of Saralee Rosenberg:

Q: If you could get a rave review in “People” magazine, what would you want it to say about Cutting Loose?

A:“Hugely entertaining… file this one under ‘thinking’ beach reads… Dajani’s sparkling prose takes you from the boudoirs of petro-dollar heiresses to the Miami offices of Sueltate where sexual tension spills over from the pages of this Latin glossy to the lives of the cast of colorful characters who run the magazine, from the garbage-lined streets of a Honduran shantytown to despair in the Palestinian Occupied Territories… readers won’t know where fantasy ends and gritty realism begins.”

And finally, I’ll leave you with a little story about my 11-year-old self, courtesy of a question on Ellen Meister’s blog:

Q:What do you think readers might be surprised to know about you?

A: When I was eleven, I called the publishers of my favorite line if YA books (La Courte Echelle… it’s a Montreal-based line) and asked if they’d consider publishing a book by an eleven-year old. I can’t believe my 11-year-old self actually had the cojones to look up the number in the yellow pages and boldly ask if she could do this. By then I’d had a few writing recognitions at school and was confident enough about my writing that when I would read these hilarious YA novels, I would think: I can so do this!

Too bad I never finished that “novel” I was working on at eleven … but it’s this same sentiment that made me pick up pen and paper again some 15 years later when I read “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and thought – dude, I could SO do this!!!

Wasn’t that fun?

Okay, okay, the usual Nadine would be fuming and pontificating over yesterday’s presidential debates, but today is not just any old day… this week, it’s my turn to tour on the GCC network, and it has been so exciting (and a little exhausting, I won’t lie) conducting all these interviews… 18 in all! Crazy!

Going back to Cutting Loose at a time when I’d mentally shelved away that whole world and its characters in favor of working on my next novel, it was interesting to revisit the creative choices I’d made, to think about the publishing, promotion and craft insights I’d made in the ensuing months since I stopped working on it. That’s another really quirky thing about publishing - every time you think you’re totally done with a book, you’re not. There’s more to do. And you’re left scratching your head, wondering if you should go back and reread your own novel to remember all those thoughts and insights you had while you were writing it! One of my craft book advocates creating a binder for each book you write and dedicating some space for things like what inspired you to write about these particular characters or topics, how did you come up with the title, etc… Not a bad idea at all… maybe I should get myself a binder for my next novel!

Here’s a sampler of some of the blogs I’m on this week. First up is the adorable Jess Riley who shares my annoying-to-others tendency to shout AH! when she identifies a story manipulation element in movies to unsuspecting fellow audience members, Wendy Tokunaga who wins my vote for most original title for Midori by Moonlight, Roberta Isleib who’s got my characters on the therapy couch (which, let’s face it, they totally need), Amy Wallen, and Karin Gillespie who’s got me admitting to the entire world that I absolutely refuse to age gracefully.

It’s official.

There were rumors of this back in 1993 and I shook in my Aldo boots, but the calamity was sidestepped. Montreal clung, though by a hair, to its spot on the Grand Dames of Cool Cities list, alongside such Old Money, Young Crowds jet-setter destinations such as Monaco, Sydney, Italy, Spain, and Turkey, among others. Montreal, as the only North (or South) American showing on the list thus proved its status as the most “European” city this side of the hemisphere.

But no more. Montreal was knocked off the Formula 1 list of host cities for 2009. And probably forever.

Apparently the new capital of cool is none other than the desert fiefdom of Dubai. I find this ironic on many levels. First of all, the Gulf region (specifically Saudi Arabia, but to a lesser extent Dubai, too) makes a big appearance at the beginning of my new novel, Cutting Loose, as does Montreal (bien sûre). And, for all its cultural claims and image as a modernizing nation, Dubai is still a place where you need a license to drink and where a couple can be convicted of a criminal offense for having sex on the beach (you can probably get convicted of that in many American cities too, but they’re not on the Formula One list, either). Dubai, in other words, has bought its way on to the list with its spiffy new track, but is that enough to guarantee its spot as place for reveler and partying celebrities? Vegas, you are not, Duabi.

I noticed in the past year I spent in Montreal that the city had lost a lot of its vibrancy, and it’s really a big shame, not to mention living proof that being a snob doesn’t pay unless your snobbery is backed up by something tangible. Montreal has had a long rivalry with neighboring Toronto, for example. Actually, rivalry would imply that Montreal felt that it actually had something to prove, which it thought it didn’t. It did however spend a lot of time looking down its nose at Toronto. One of our sources of pride and superiority, we thought, were our fashion industry, our restaurants, and of course, the Formula 1, which brought lost of celebrities, tourists, and dollars to Montreal. Toronto can have its money – but only Montreal had the fun factor.

Sadly, Montreal has lost a lot of ground to Toronto in the fashion world. I still think that Montreal beats Toronto in the restaurants and night life category, but that’s based on the 6 months I spent in TO many years ago and the word on the street is that Toronto is catching up. Not only is it catching up, but it has become the premier Canadian city, with a fabulous film festival, exploding real estate market, and a growing financial services sector, not to mention a popular destination for American tourists and business people. And while Montreal still has the elegance of its Old World architecture, its sprawling city parks and general euro-charm, it gets harder to defend the city when both its citizens and government have grown so complacent they don’t seem to notice (or care) that they have been outpaced, not only by arch-rival Toronto, but by a desert city that when I was a kid, wasn’t much more than a couple of palm trees and a falafel shack (I keed, I keed… but seriously, it wasn’t much).

This is a very big loss to my home city, both in financial and ego terms. I hope Montreal gets a grip and realizes that there is more glory in working with everyone else, than feeling superior to them.

In a recent interview, asked why I was leaving the world of fashion to go back to finance I said: “I miss the glamour of the finance world”.

It was a funny statement, even to myself, but somehow, making money - real money - was in and making just average money or suffering for art and beauty was out. I’m not exactly sure when this change first came about… it probably began as a deep undercurrent, the effects of which were barely felt at the surface, but that was slowly getting stronger until one day, it would burst through as a full-blown storm.

In the eighties, Tom Wolfe wrote about Wall Street greed in The Bonfire of the Vanities. I watched the Tom Hanks/Melanie Griffith/Bruce Willis movie for the first time earlier this year. It was quaint. It smacked of a world of divisions and social hierarchy and aspirations towards something better. But ultimately, there was the feeling that there was something sinister about this world.

Then the 90s came along, and in spite of the recession in the early part of that decade, something changed. Somewhere along the way, my generation had been branded with the “be practical” stamp. Finance and engineering had yet to establish themselves as the new millennium’s vehicle to the top of the food chain, but they were ”practical” majors and they ensured a job in these tumultuous economic times. We weren’t perceived as greedy - just practical. A nicer word for “self-interested”. And in an environment of ”ownership” where it looked less and less likely that we’d have job security, a pension, or even a park bench to hang out on should we join the ranks of the unemployed, outdated, or just plain old, watching out for number one became the new responsible thing to do. You were not a burden on society - maybe just a parasite, since you took without giving back a whole lot, but again, this wasn’t greed at all - it was being practical. Because if you watched out for yourself, no one else would have to watch out for you.

Then the recession ended, and things started to take off. First it was dot com companies. Suddenly there weren’t enough computer engineering grads to fill the spots at nascent firms rushing to cash in on the latest gold rush. I was still in college back then, arguing with friends about the merits of accounting over finance, and more than a little jealous of those geeky, awkward computer geniuses who looked like they might inherit the Earth.

The bubble was short lived. Just as I graduated, those computed whizzes were being shown out the doors of their hip, laid-back offices, cardboard boxes containing bobble-head figurines and mini-nerf balls in hand, and I gloated. Boy was I happy I was in accounting. It was stable. Practical. I was right all along. Everyone else might have to worry about finding a job after graduation but not me. I was smart. I had taken “ownership” of my future.

Two years into my accounting career I moved offshore where I discovered the finance dudes were right all along - that was where the money was. And being so practical-minded, having attended a university that flaunted the motto: “Real skills for the real world” as opposed to, say, “Real learning for the good of society” or something, I found the transition into finance seamless.

Sure, it wasn’t exactly me dream, but dreams are the stuff of romance and chick lit novels, not real life. Even though everyone around me was starved for some form of fulfillment, which most sought in their families, they craved it. They looked at me with awe when they discovered that I’d been writing alongside my finance job. They applauded me when I took the leap into fashion, because I was going against the grain. I was being impractical.

But these Masters of the Universe came along at a time when we were all very impressionable, when artists who riled against the establishment had become irrelevant or had been commercialized into irrelevance. When our moral compass had gone completely haywire and we’d written “greed” right out of the vocabulary and replaced it with such a lovely, friendly word, “practical”, that everyone aspired to it. We aspired to it so much that we didn’t notice when owning a Fendi handbag and diamond stud earrings to wear to work became as essential as the right pair of black pumps.

You know, as a chick lit author, I have to assume my fair share of blame for this. It’s incredibly hard to go against the grain, and to recognize when things have gone out of control when no one around you realizes it. Ali, in Fashionably Late, was a young auditor who lived with her parents and spent every penny of her disposable income on those “bridge” lines of designer clothing which are supposed to be accessible to regular people. What those lines really accomplished during their reign, is getting people used to the idea that each and every single person on this planet was a complete loser if they didn’t own a piece of luxury… look at how affordable it was now! It’s just a few notches above Wal-Mart! What does it say about you if you can’t list at least ten different brands of celebrity jeans?

Finance did become “glamorous” in the sense that people aspired to be us, just as I looked up at the software dorks of yesteryear. And just in case you’re skeptical about my claims of finance and glamour going together, the subject of Candace Bushnell’s latest novel is not a fashion designer/Hollywood mogul but, you guessed it, a hedge fund manager. And most of the audience she’ll be addressing tonight at her reading are hedge fund accountants.

Isn’t life hilarious?

Speaking of Candace Bushnell, I’m feeling a little bad for her… it’s been raining cats and dogs since yesterday. A perfect weekend to stay home and write.

I will leave you with a great article by Tom Wolfe in the New York Times to ponder.

The late comic genius George Carlin had one such very famous, or should I say infamous, list. Just to refresh your memory, they are: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and tits.

Apparently, in some archaic past that many of you reading will not remember, you weren’t allowed to say these words on TV. Or was it the radio? Maybe at the time George Carlin sat down to pen this rift, it was about words you couldn’t say on the radio. Because times have certainly changed. This was abundantly evident at yesterday’s vice presidential debates, as some words from George Carlin’s list have exchanged places with words that were once part of everyday vernacular, but are now very, very dirty.

Let’s put this into perspective, people – I cleared m whole Thursday night schedule for yesterday’s debates.

I cannot remember a time in my entire existence (and I did live through two Bush presidencies in my adulthood, and I certainly had opinions on that) that I knew about VP debates in the first place, much less plopped in front of the TV at 7 pm just to make damn sure (more on “damn” later) that I did not miss this TV event.

And make no mistake, for yesterday was a television event. Bigger than Miss Universe, the World Series of Baseball and the Superbowl combined.
Because, seriously, who outside the USA actually watches the “World” (WTF??) Series of Baseball or the Superbowl?

That’s right: nobody.

And yet, last night, the whole world tuned in, hoping to catch the next potential (probable?..) leader of the planet’s current Superpower butcher names of important people and places (which she did), mix up the leader of one country with another, display her ignorance about the economy, foreign policy and basic history, and just generally make an ass out of herself.

Which she didn’t, to her credit, so I think Ms. Palin can safely add the following to her somewhat scant list of Reasons Why I Am Qualified to be Your President: may not contain one solitary original thought in that pretty little head, but can parrot back entire swaths of party talking points and is every bit as adept as the big boys at evading serious questions while keeping ridicule of self and affiliated party at a minimum.

Way to go, girl!

But I digress, as usual.

What struck me about the content of yesterday’s debates were the talking points that Palin kept hammering in, messages carefully designed to inspire a strong reaction from the people listening, much like George Carlin’s selection of gasp-worthy words.

I believe America should update Carlin’s list for the new millennium since “fuck” and “shit” and “cocksucker” have become about as offensive to the senses as chicken noodle soup.
So here they are, the seven words you cannot say in America – or if you must, say at your own risk:

1. Liberal
2. Regulate
3. Spending (when used in conjunction with “government”)
4. Surrender (when America does it)
5. Feminism (and all of its derivatives)
6. Taxes (when it comes after “increase”)
7. Damn. Specifically, Goddamn.

There you have it, the updated list of words offensive to Americans, if Sarah Palin and co. are right. Because every answer Palin gave yesterday was not designed to answer the question (by her own admission), but to make sure Americans understand that under the Palin/McCain ticket, there will be no liberalism/regulation/increased spending/taxation of any kind/surrender under any circumstance/a place for women as decision makers as opposed to handmaidens/use of the word “damn” ever again, GOSH DARNIT!!!

Can I ask you something, my dear American friends?

Did Sarah Palin realize the she was addressing adults last night? Has she been hanging around kids so much that it has affected her speech patterns? And though we may like people who like kids, do we really want a Vice President saying things like:

“Well, Mr. Kim Jung Il, if you don’t dismantle your nukular program right now, hockey moms of America will NOT stand for it, gosh darn it!”

Because that’s the image she very carefully tried to project last night. She purposefully made herself sound like a kid, and let Joe Bidden be the adult in the debate. Which brings me to dirty word #5: Feminism.

Books have been written about the usage of this word, which should mean no more than believing in women being allowed to have as much decision power over their lives as men do.
Is there anyone in the western hemisphere (and chunks of the other hemispheres) who has a serious problem with this? We believed in before it had a name, people, we just hadn’t made it into law.

I have a crazy thought: whenever people hear the word “feminism” they conjure up a world full of muscled Amazons with hairy armpits wielding knee-boots and whips, and holding the males of the Earth in indentured servitude.

Or maybe, it scares men who think “feminism” will mean they have to help with dinner and dishes every night instead of plopping down in front of the TV.

I don’t know. But clearly, there’s a problem. And in great old fashion women-bashing-other-women, I’m going to throw this one right at Sarah Palin’s feet. Because as I watched her last night, I could not help but notice how child-like she seemed in comparison to Joe Biden, and how she deliberately chose to pimp out her status as a mother for the promise of a little bit of ill-begotten power.

Palin had long reminded me of a book by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, called The Handmaid’s Tale.

I don’t know if the reason this book isn’t studied in classrooms the world over as an example of truly relevant anti-utopian literature alongside Orwell and Huxley is because Atwood is a woman, a Canadian, alive, or all three. Because Brave New World has got nothing on The Handmaid’s Tale.

And Atwood came just as close to foreshadowing the phenomenon of Sarah Palin as Orwell did towards exploring propaganda and manipulation of people in 1984.

I will leave with another blogger’s take on the relationship between Palin and Atwood’s fearsome “Aunts”.

Welcome to Gilead, Governor Palin
by Cynthia Boaz (truthout.org)

If you’ve ever read Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” you will recall the key role that was played by the women assigned to be the “Aunts.” The story revolves around a futuristic American society in which fundamentalist Christians install a gender-based caste system where each woman is assigned a specific societal function. It is a commentary on the dangerous erasing of the line between church and state in the contemporary United States. The merging of religion and government is carried out by a group of older, white male “commanders” whose propaganda demands that citizens be constantly terrorized into submission and obedience. The resulting regime is Atwood’s vision of the worst-case scenario: an American police-state theocracy where every woman’s identity is reduced to her sexual attributes, and each is assigned to a category based on her physical qualifications. Subtle references to racist philosophy are mixed into the literalist religious rhetoric.

The attractive young women of reproductive age are the “handmaids”; the attractive but infertile middle-age women are the “wives”; the dark-skinned women of any age are domestic servants, and so on. All women are forbidden from reading or writing. The country is renamed the Republic of Gilead, a reference to the biblical homeland of the patriarchs. And the Aunts - who are middle-aged white women of some previous prestige and education - are especially sinister characters. The primary job of the Aunts is to keep the handmaids (the childbearers) subservient. They go about this by convincing the handmaids that they are powerless and can only contribute to society when they fulfill their God-given responsibility to serve the commanders. The Aunts’ job, put simply, is to exploit other women by keeping them submissive and telling them that it’s for the good of all (and even more insidiously, that in obeying, the handmaids “empower” themselves.) What makes the Aunts so remarkable is their collective failure to realize that they are simply being used by the commanders to keep other women in line, and their willingness - glee, even - at doing so is simultaneously sad and terrifying. So what compels the Aunts to become traitors to both their sex and their country? First, they believe that their contribution to the repressive social order is righteous, and second, they’ve found that under this rigid system of social control, they have the illusion of a tiny bit of power.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Governor and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is the Gileadian “Aunt” manifested. Her sudden emergence onto the American political scene, accompanied by a burst of enthusiasm on the part of many American women, is a surreal example of life imitating art. Much of Palin’s rhetoric, tactics and personal philosophy seem to be taken directly from the Auntie training manual. By accepting the position on the GOP ticket despite her astonishing lack of qualifications, Palin signaled that she was prepared to be used - on the basis of her sex alone - in exchange for the promise of status and power. Refer to Palin’s RNC convention speech, which was mostly a fawning homage to McCain’s patriotism and leadership, sprinkled with condescending references to Obama as “our opponent.” Although the lines were delivered with Palin’s own folksy vernacular and over-enunciation, it was not Palin, but McCain - or more accurately, the GOP elders at whose feet he finds himself on election eve - who wrote the speech and whose voice echoed through the hall that night in St. Paul. Women who find themselves drawn to Palin because they think she epitomizes the classic “woman who has it all” might want to take a closer look. Sarah Palin was picked for the ticket solely because of - not despite - the fact that she is female. By keeping her sequestered from the media, McCain has confirmed he does not have faith in an unscripted Palin’s ability to represent the campaign to the world. By going along with it, Palin is telling us that she’s perfectly fine with being controlled by her male superiors. And by portraying herself as the candidate of the empowered woman (while simultaneously promoting policy that is openly hostile to the interests of working and middle-class American women), she reveals the sad truth about how little progress we’ve actually made.

Lest we think that Senator McCain is hesitant to keep pushing this stereotype in the face of abysmal performances by Palin in news interviews, the most recent reports reveal that his campaign intends to hype the expected wedding between Palin’s pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, the date of which is apparently being set just prior to the November election - with McCain and Palin sitting in the front row. Is it possible that Sarah Palin is just blissfully un-self-aware, or is it that she so eager for any illusion of power that she’ll allow herself to be marketed no matter what the cost to the dignity of all women? If Palin were truly an empowered woman, she would have refused to allow herself and her daughter to be used in this manner - to assist a party whose rhetoric and imagery promote the ideal woman as deferential to established norms rather than acting as an independent - or critical - thinker. If her selection was intended to signal to American women that empowerment is possible, why is Palin being kept under lock and key? Clearly, this is not an individual whose intelligence or perspective McCain respects, or else he would permit her to speak for herself. To continue pretending that Palin’s selection was anything other than an attempt to manipulate the voting public on the basis of a straitjacketed view of sexual roles is a dangerous lie that no American of any gender can afford to abide.

Today happens to be the OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE for CUTTING LOOSE!!!

WOO HOO!

And I’ve managed to get my new site up just in time!

Please forgive me for any quirky behavior folks, as I’ve changed platforms for the site (and the blog, as you may have noticed) and this new program and I are getting to know each other : )

If you’d like to update your links, my blog now lives at:
http://www.nadinedajani.com/blog/

So please bear with me and visit often as I add more features and fun stuff to both the site and the blog.

…and here’s a review from Harriet Klausner, just in time for the release:

“…the key to this superb character study is (that) cast members all are fully developed and seem genuine as each seeks happiness although none appear to know how to obtain it… Readers will relish following the escapades of the women and the two brothers who chase them whether it is Canada, Florida or London. Nadine Dajani provides a wonderful contemporary tale.”

Harriet Klausner