I’m not one for analyzing my site stats, as that might interfere with my goal of being self-indulgent as to what I write about.

But my husband, he likes to explore the numbers. And he was noticing that a surprising number of people were trying to access an old essay of mine about the movie Pretty Woman. And that this kept happening, week after week. Odd.

He got curious enough about it this weekend to dig into it more. He discovered that there’s a college in Buffalo whose curriculum (on film studies, I guess?) was linking to my old essay as an example of what students in the course would be expected to produce.

Interesting, and somewhat flattering, I guess.

I had a look at the essay again, and reproduced in on my newer site: Pretty Woman: A Fantasy Theme Analysis. (I also left the older page up. Those people are having trouble enough finding it as it is.) I had completely forgotten that it was actually an oral presentation, not a written paper, so it’s much more conversational than most of my academic writing.

I also marvelled at all the pop culture research I’d managed to do for it, in those pre-Internet days.

And noted that I was awfully judgmental about sex work. (And also that I called it prostitution instead of sex work.)

But, I did no latter-day revising. I just fixed a couple typos, and took advantage of the web’s existence to add some photos and a YouTube video.

(Bonus: 19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Pretty Woman. My essay includes items 3 and 16. I wish I’d included something about item 4. But I was still years from seeing La Traviata…)