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Headline seen on the obituary page of the April 4, 2001 edition of the Duxbury Clipper: Louisa May Alcott to Visit.

The Clipper is an erudite, cutting edge information vehicle published somewhere in southeastern Massachusetts, faithfully read by about 4000 sour Ivy League graduates and wannabes who discovered five years after graduation that competing in the real world is harder than it looks and they need all the informational help they can get.

According to the article that accompanied the headline Ms. Alcott was scheduled to give a reading from Little Women on Sunday April 8. We're not sure if she gave a killer performance, or died on the stage.

Little Women, the novelist’s most famous novel, has recently taken on a whole new meaning to Ms. Alcott. Apparently, the author died in 1888, some 113 years ago, by this reporter’s watch. Ms. Alcott is apparently now truly a “Little Woman,” as over a century of decomposition has taken its toll. All of the flesh has long since been consumed by various flesh-eating bacteria, and many of her pre-twentieth century calcium-deprived bones, have broken up, and now would be of little use to anyone, except maybe for a teething porcupine that could use the bones to gnaw and halt the growth of its perpetually-growing molars.

When asked about this weird occurrence of a long-dead figure arising from the grave and giving a poetry reading, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop responded, “what the hell are you asking me for? I haven’t been Surgeon General since 1989. Now what did you do with my artichokes?”