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I have loved Sandra Tsing Loh since I first heard her on This American Life. Her essay, “Bad Sex with Bud Kemp” is a classic. Loh describes her friendship with the kindly Bud, how they knew each other in college and how they stayed friends. Other members of their clique drifted away but Bud and Sandra didn’t. Gravity kept them together, going to the movies on Thursday nights, clutching their separate containers of popcorn.

Then one night Sandra noticed how nice Bud’s hands were and it occurred to her, this Bud Kemp could be used for sex.

It didn’t go well but it was funny.

Now Sandra Tsing Loh has grown up and settled down. She is married and has two children. She still tells funny stories on the radio, but they tend to revolve around her household budget and her daughters’ tiny socks. Along with thousands of other NPR listeners, I was horrified when Loh was fired from her KCRW gig for using the F-word on the air. She was talking about having sex with her husband, which really ought to count as a family value.

Since I’m a longtime fan, I was thrilled when I received a package in the mail a few weeks ago (Thanks, Gena!) and opened it to find a copy of Loh’s new book, Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! It is a memoir of Loh’s quest to find a kindergarten for her daughter.

After being turned down by a second rate school (”My ex’s assistant’s son goes there,” says one of Loh’s rich Hollywood friends,) Loh’s daughter is accepted by a great one (features include musical instruction via the Orff-Schulwerk method, open-air dance and movement studio, trips to the Getty with Ph.D.-level art docents) after she mother becomes a First Amendment celebrity. Unfortunately, Loh is a writer and her husband is a musician. They can’t possibly afford the tuition. Eventually, Loh’s odyssey leads her to her neighborhood public school, and she becomes a veritable public school activist.

The descriptions of the people Loh meets on her quest are hilarious:

You know, Jonathan and Aimee are those insane types of parents who played Mozart in the womb, festooned their baby cribs with black and white mobiles, and forced their sons from the age of six months into strange yuppie art forms like Shakespearobics and Kindertanz and-and-and . . . tumbling jazzerbatics.

And here she is riffing on the Lutheran school that rejected her daughter:

Do you know why Hannah stopped naming animals, and why she didn’t try the diamond? Because she was bored. She was bored with you all. Look at you, Luther Hall, this sad little campus behind, let’s face it, a Target and an El Pollo Loco. Your wall of ivy? Just a bit tattered. Your coat of arms? Doesn’t stand for ANYTHING. I believe you people made that little coat of arms up!
. . .
Try as you might, friends - you may close that white gate down, you may put a guard in the guardhouse, but you will never be Baptists with their lovable kitschy color! Or Catholics, with their mesmerizing drama-queen flair! Or our Evangelicals who actually run the country. . . What do YOU do. . . Lutherans! What do you have to say for yourselves?

So funny.