WEDNESDAY

Katie, my friend in the 11th grade, was beautiful: blue eyes, blond hair, bone structure like Michelle Pfeiffer’s. My mom used to squawk in her Long Island accent, “That Katie, you could flush her down a toilet, and she’d still look gorgeous.” Anyway, Katie had a motto she would say in a sexy growl: “Bitches rule.” Turns out Katie was ahead of her time. Bitches are all the rage now. Radio is still beating to death last year’s “Bitch” by that Meredith Brooks. And Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the controversial Prozac Nation, has penned the equally scandalous Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, celebrating the likes of Delilah, Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, and Amy Fisher in a “bitchography” that examines chicks who use their sexuality to orchestrate, manipulate, and elevate. (Stop me if I sound like that INXS song.) Wurtzel assures that with Mother Teresa gone, “Goodie Two-Shoes as a real live girl has thoroughly fallen from grace.” Anyway, some girls have all the chutzpah. My friend Katie would toss her not-very-biodegradable Big Gulp tumblers and Benson & Hedges butts out the car window. She was a bitch. And she ruled. Author Elizabeth Wurtzel understands. Ask her if she’s fighting for her own identity, and one doozy of a book jacket, when she reads at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, at Olsson’s Books & Records, 1200 F St. NW. Free. (202) 347-3686. (Gina Vivinetto)