This one goes out to you, Boss Lady.

I'm reading Jen Lancaster's first book Bitter is the New Black, and with the amount of talking she does about herself and looking fabulous, I was curious to find more pictures of her than the few on her blog Jennsylvania. So I googled "Jen Lancaster," clicked on the images button and came across a whole mess of pictures from events she either attended or was there to promote her book.

For whatever reason, this picture caught my eye. So I clicked on the tiny snippet and was brought to this woman's web site. Apparently she likes to read, and even more apparently, she likes to go to book signings and take pictures (I almost used the word "force") with the authors. If you click on most of them, the authors have a weird expression on their face, that says to me, "why do I have to do the book tour and have my photo taken with every numb-nut who stands in line?" If you don't believe me, look here (eek, the head touch), and here (the side sidle, can I take a picture?), and here (he just looks uncomfortable, and since I know he's gay, I'm certain putting her arm around her is like putting an arm around a meat slab (and no, I didn't mean it that way)), annnnnddd finally here (oh, the ever popular, let me stand 10 feet in front of the celeb so it sorta, kinda, okay not really, looks like this is planned).

Now, now...I took a picture with Penn Jillette the last time we were in Vegas (I write that like we go all the time, sadly, this is so not the case and the reason? His name is Mateo and she's also called a mortgage), so I've also done the "I don't care if I will ever know this person, I must get a picture with them" thing - and too bad my husband doesn't know how to focus because the picture came out so blurry it makes me sad to this day.

But that's beside the point - completely. While I did want to write a post about this woman and make fun of her, I then saw this name in her forced author picture list: Nancy Pearl.

I know Nancy Pearl doesn't mean a thing to most people. But she means a whole heck of a lot to us at work. Without going into much detail, my group runs a very small but quite successful library. So successful, in fact, that I wrote an article about it for our intranet site. Yes, this is big time, people. The weekend before the article was due, my boss came in to work with something she bought during the weekend: A librarian action figure:



This action figure is of a very important librarian (I guess): Nancy Pearl. Yes, the Nancy Pearl. Don't act like you don't know who she is. We planned on using her picture with the article, until we chickened out for fear of looking unprofessional (side note, recently another group used an action figure for their article picture - this makes me very sad not to mention jealous because my picture was way better; Nancy was standing in front of the San Francisco skyline!) and so we used a picture of a stack of books.

Stack of books? Nancy Pearl? Nancy Pearl, hands down.

Nancy has become dear to us all. We often make fun of her and her lesbian-looking ways; once I put a push pin in the hand holding the book (yes, it's removable, and it's aptly named Book Lust, which is the name of Ms. Pearl's book, but I'm not sure any of us knew that) so she took on a murderess persona; and my co-worker ran off with her and it took my boss several days before she found her again.

And if the real Nancy Pearl ever googles herself, comes across my blog, reads this and is appalled (although she must have seen it all, being a librarian), then please accept my apologies. You only became a real person to me today.