Debra Dickerson Schools "Professor" Imus

Professor Imus, as his esteemed guest Professor Debra Dickerson referred to him, was given a gift by one of the WABC salesmen this morning: a Chia Obama, which, when watered, grows green grass hair around a caricatured face of President Barack Obama.

"It's dangerous territory for me to be discussing anything to do with African-American hair," Imus told Dickerson, who then shared the story of her own recently grown afro.

"My 83 year-old Mom, a Mississippi sharecropper with no education, she looked at me the first time she saw me with the afro and said, 'you look like a black q-tip,'" said Dickerson, who recently co-edited the collection Best African-American Essays: 2009.

Speaking of books, Dickerson had recently sent Imus the galleys for a forthcoming book called Burying Don Imus, which she was asked to blurb, about Imus's Rutgers "incident" of nearly two years ago.

"I'm a very, very, minor, minor not quite celebrity, but even at my level the first thing you do is go to the index to see if you're mentioned," said Dickerson, who discovered that the author, whose name is Michael Awkward (no joke), had "dogged" her for a piece she wrote in TIME Magazine in the aftermath of Imus's comments.

"You said mean things about me," Imus told his guest. "And I was probably developing cancer, even at that time!"

Amazed by Imus's use of his illness to elicit sympathy, Dickerson demanded to see proof of the cancer diagnosis. "I think this is a scam," she asserted.

A longtime listener of Imus in the Morning, Awkward provided a perspective for the show that Dickerson had been unaware of.

"My piece in TIME was a primal scream; it wasn't putting you in context," she told Imus. "But I stand by that piece, because it hurt. But you have acknowledged that, and that's why I keep doing your show."

Imus disagreed with Awkward's thesis that the girls on the Rutgers basketball team were immune from being satirized, which Dickerson suspected would happen.

"But I thought you would take comfort in his analysis of why they were immune," she said. "Given how seriously and personally you've taken responsibility for this situation."

Dickerson wondered if Imus would just rather this all go away. "I'm here for the party!" he mused.

Asked her impression of the Obamas on their first overseas trip as President and First Lady, Dickerson confessed she's not paying much attention to the substance.

"I keep having to remind myself that this is amazing!" she said. "This black couple at the G20 meeting-what I'm stuck on is that it doesn't seem weird. Those two just...fit the bill."

-Julie Kanfer