Quote of the Day (Susan Orlean, on What She Learned During Super Bowl Week, 24 Years Ago)

“I learned that the Super Bowl and the week of revelry leading up to it feels exactly like prom week—if you had happened to go to a high school with seventy-four thousand in the graduating class and your prom had been televised to seven hundred and fifty million people worldwide and your parents had been liberal about your curfew and you had accessorized your prom outfit by wearing on your head a piece of polyurethane foam shaped like a thunderbolt (if you were a Chargers fan), or a miner's pickax (if you were for the 49ers). The only difference--which in the case of most Super Bowls turns out to be a minor one—is that most proms don't feature a football game.”— Susan Orlean, “Super-Duper,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 1995, collected in her My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (2004)

(Photo of Susan Orlean taken at the 2011 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, Oct. 22, 2011, by ©Larry D. Moore.)