Friday Feature: For a Good Rhyme, Call....

Remember telephone booths? Tucking a dime (then a quarter) in your shoe so you could feed it into that phone slot in case of emergency?

When I was growing up, telephone booths weren’t hard to come by. There wasn’t exactly one on every corner but, like mailboxes, you could easily find several in a neighborhood

Now, of course, cell phones have replaced these 24-7 call boxes but a new, bright blue call box has popped up on a Dubuque Iowa Street corner. It's not a displaced Tardis but, rather, a booth where visitors can step inside, dial a (rotary) phone, and call up a poem.

The Dubuque Telepoem Booth features the work of Iowa poets and is open round the clock. It's one of five of these installations, which stretch across the United States (the one closest to me is in State College, PA). A directory in the booth allows visitors to browse the possibilities, then simply dial a number to hear the poem they choose.

Sounds like a good rhyme to me.