Dancing Queen: The Bawdy Adventures of Lisa Crystal Carver

by Lisa Crystal Carver

Lisa Carver is America's horniest optimist. With Dancing Queen she writes an ode to all things that make her pants itch, whether it's a visit to the gynecologist, a look at Lawrence Welk's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805043926
• ISBN13: 9780805043921
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

This book changed my life!!

Ask people what books have changed their lives and you're likely to get a whole bunch of sheep extoling the virtues of Tuesdays with Morrie, or something equally sad and boring with an obvious "moral of the story". Well, to hell with that mundane, depressing business-in the words of the Bee Gees, you should be dancing! Dancing Queen is a joyous testament to really LIVING life. Lisa's wild, adventurous tales are hilarious and inspiring. Lisa breaks down preconcieved notions and societal norms to reveal an world teeming with delicious possibilities. As Carver herself said, Dancing Queen is a book about having fun. And what fun it is!

Inspirational

Lisa Carver, as a writer, makes it okay for us to embrace every part of ourselves. I think she is a better role model for teen girls that people like Brittney Spears could ever be. She understands herself, her sexuallity, and the world we live in (for the better and the worse). She takes the shame out of being poor, and encourages you to enjoy life. I could only call her inspirational.

Loving Lisa

I was late coming into touch with Lisa Carver. _Dancing Queen: A Lusty Look at the American Dream_ (Henry Holt) was published five years ago, and I didn?t know it. I got to know her writing from her uninhibited diary entries at the fine adult site Nerve.com (?The Community of Thoughtful Hedonists?). So, I was glad to take a look into _Dancing Queen_ in order to understand the past of this peculiar woman. It is a slim volume of her essays on white trash, kissing, other ladies? bodies, and more. It is enormous fun. What?s nice is that as different as Lisa is from anybody, she is happy and optimistic. ?I?ve done lots of stupid things, but I?ve enjoyed myself. _Dancing Queen_ is about _liking_ stuff. It?s about how pleasing it can be to be poked and probed ? by the hairdresser, by the gynecologist, by killer bears, by the thirty-six-year-old ski instructress in _Princess Daisy_.? She is impatient with those who don?t have fun; she cannot comprehend ?a whole essay by a woman who was upset that some men hooted at her, for instance. I _like_ to be hooted!? She gives us rants that certainly are self-indulgent, but you cannot expect anything different from someone who indulges herself with such lewdness, shamelessness, and fun.Not only are her opinions odd, but it is obvious she enjoys getting them into words. In the chapter about her sensual enjoyment of a trip to the gynecologist (?It is the _illicit_ pleasure caused by _necessary_ procedures performed by _removed_ professionals that gets my temperature rising.?), she says that a certain kind of girl likes a visit to the gynecologist as much as Christmas: ?It only happens once a year and she gets lots of things she wants. She skips to the clinic while visions of speculums dance in her head.? She gushes over the ghost-written novels of perfect specimen Fabio (?He?s always mentioning condoms in his pirate books?) and informs us that ?They contain bold lines like: 1. ?I am a man of the sea.? 2. ?Go hide in the fields, woman.? 3. ?Mayhaps she thinks I am doing something bad.??It was this sort of literature that fired her pre-adolescent fantasies: ?At twelve, I had as much sex drive as the entire U.S. Army and absolutely no idea what to do with it.? Not to worry; she has since learned. ?They sold me a roadmap to ecstasy covered in highways of trouble, and I couldn?t wait to visit every site on the map.?Lisa is hilarious when discussing just a trip to the hairdresser, or K-Mart, or Olivia Newton John, but the best chapter in the book is entitled ?An Iron Fist in a Polyester Glove: Lawrence Welk.? What is he doing here? Well, when Lisa was little, ?To me, the constant, ultra-close-ups of moist-lipped, moist-eyed, soft-bosomed lady singers lined up side by side in matching outfits like chickens to be plucked were an open call to perversion.? She has since made an extensive study of Lawrence?s several autobiographies, where she must have learned that he original

Did she sell her soul to write this well?

I admit to being insanely jealous of Lisa Carver. In the first place, she is getting a lot more sex than I am. In the second, she writes better than I do, too. Even though we grew up at opposite ends of the country (she in New Hampshire and me in Alabama), my own rural upbringing makes it easy for me to relate to her tales of the White Trash subculture. I know those K Marts and ''Lawrence Welk Show'' reruns too well. And what makes me even more jealous is that she has no formal training as a writer. She has only the hard-knocks experience of producing a 'zine. Her chapter on the difference between K Mart and Wal-Mart alone is worth the purchase price (even if I'm a Wal-Mart partisan, myself). The insanely brilliant discussion of the sado-masochistic undertones of Lawrence Welk is just an added bonus. I came away from ''Dancing Queen'' with a newfound respect for Trailer Trash -- even if I still have no intention of dating any.

damn!

it'll rock your socks...and you know you got your socks at k-mart...