In which Mrs. Meridian "makes a funny"

This requires a bit of set-up, so bear with me.

If you've had a hankering for more and glossier unsolicited mail in your mail box, take the LSAT and score fairly decently on it. All manner of solicitations from all manner of law schools will begin to arrive not too long after you return home from taking said test. We've received the standard please-consider-us letter accompanied by promotional brochures and promises of money, some please-PLEASE!-consider-us letters (these being sent by a school which will welcome its very first class this fall, a school not even ranked by U.S. News and World Report, and by a school which is on probation because of its low passage rate for first-time bar takers), even a promotional DVD.

We Meridians have had some good discussions about all this mail, ranging from "Did [name of school] even LOOK at my scores??" (Translation: "I don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being admitted there") to "They've GOT to be kidding!" (see the school on probation, above). Often we've discussed our sense of the school based on the words and images chosen--we had a field day with the DVD, as you might imagine. But this morning we had a different sort of discussion regarding image.

Yesterday's mail yielded a please-PLEASE!-consider us letter, complete with a decent offer of money, and a pretty standard glossy brochure. Over coffee this morning, I looked at the brochure more closely. The standard look-at-happy-law-students-in-our-library pic shows a young woman seated at a reading table, dressed casually in a sleeveless top . . . and her bra strap is showing. True, it's not hanging off her shoulder, but it's clearly visible. When Mrs. Meridian joined me, I asked her if that didn't seem odd and a wee bit tacky to her (it did) and, since we can only assume that someone looked at and approved the brochure and, thus, the picture in question, what sort of message the school seeks to convey by sending this out. That they're decidedly unstuffy?

Then Mrs. Meridian said: "If they'd been thinking, they should have made that the first picture you see and have the caption 'Want to see more?'"