The best "take-away" I got from my education was a job. I spent my last two years of high school at Madeira, a girls’ boarding school in McLean, VA, just outside of Washington. Not only did I work harder there than I ever have since, I literally worked, as part of the school’s co-curriculum program, otherwise known as the "Wednesday Jobs Program." Freshmen and sophomores were given social work types of jobs — reading to the blind, bathing the handicapped, whatever. We were all pretty lucky and spoiled, so I thought it was a genius stroke to force these girls to see how the less fortunate coped. During our junior year, everyone worked on Capitol Hill. I worked for Jim Buckley, Bill Buckley’s brother and a senator from New York until he lost, and then I worked for Jack Kemp, who was hilarious.

At one point during that year, a close friend from school asked me to accompany her to get an abortion (she had gotten knocked up by a guy she sang with in church choir who was in college somewhere south of us in Virginia), and I had to tell my supervisor in Jack Kemp’s office why I needed the afternoon off. Looking back, I cannot believe I told the office manager (or whatever she was) in the office of this conservative congressman that I was going with my 16-year-old friend to get an abortion, but I did, and she didn’t flinch. My, how times have changed. This was in 1977 and we went to the Women’s Health Center and then we took the bus back to school. If my mother is reading this now, she is having a small stroke but, as usual, I digress.

In your senior year, you were expected to know what you wanted to do with your life and I knew I wanted to be a journalist, but they weren’t snobby — my roommate said she wanted to be a housewife, so the school found her a job in a florist (now she’s a massage therapist, but she has always had really nice and creatively put together places to live). The school had a long-standing deal with Newsweek, since Kay Graham (the mag’s owner) had gone to school there and her parents had donated most of the gorgeous land overlooking the Potomac that the school sits on. Anyway, they put me to work in the library where my job was to clip newspapers. There were stacks of them everywhere — the Times, the Washington Post and the Washington Star, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal. There were no computers yet, so there was no Lexis/Nexis and certainly no Google. The prehistoric equivalent was a wall of overstuffed file cabinets full of tiny file folders filled with even tinier folded-up news articles that the librarians and me had clipped and marked and filed: "SALT II/Gromyko"; "Carter/Human Rights." It was a great way to learn about the world, but progress, understandably, was slow, mainly because the staff consisted of me once a week, an assistant librarian and the chief librarian, Norma, a slightly crazy white-haired lady from Texas who had once been a White House reporter with Helen Thomas and that generation.

When Norma developed a rather pesky crush on LBJ, she was banished to the library and I think I was the first person to talk to her, to listen to her stories (which were great), in years. So when the school year was over, she asked me if I had applied to any DC colleges. Thank God my father, against my will, had forced me to apply to Georgetown and at the last minute I had sent in my application from Madeira via taxi. Anyway, I had no intention of going (I had planned to go to Brown), but then Norma convinced the bureau chief to give me a part-time job because she didn’t want to lose the company. I ended up working in that bureau for six more years and the people who were there then are still like family to me. So is the magazine itself, where I am, happily, a contributing editor. It was one of the luckiest, best things that ever happened to me. And I owe it to Madeira, and to what all Southerners know — be nice to the eccentric old ladies. Somehow they always hold the power.