January 31, 2021: Well, insert sigh here: I was already planning to use this Cloris Leachman photo for this post when I learned that she just died. I’m not prescient; I just know a great face, especially when it fronts a crackerjack performer, when I see it.

Anyway, my first favorite sorority gal is, of course, my daughter, who last year joined a sorority at her college despite my protestations of “Wha?” (When I was at NYU I was exactly as interested in sororities as I was in college sports, and if you’d asked me then, I would have insisted that my school had neither.) Hoping to get to the bottom of the daughter’s non-me-like interest in Greek life, I jumped at the chance to review Margaret L. Freeman’s Women of Discriminating Taste: White Sororities and the Making of American Ladyhood for the Portland Press Herald. You can read my review, which runs today, here to learn about the sort of club that wouldn’t have had me for a member anyway.