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Five Things You Don’t Know About Me
Usually people want Ten Things, but let’s make it easy for everyone:
1. In 1999 on Kauai for a conference called Storytelling in the New Millennium, I interviewed Todd Rundgren, Thomas Dolby, Graham Nash (a super nice guy), and Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic for video press releases.
2. I once composed, performed, and recorded keyboard music for a guided imagery program for Kaiser Permanente. Got paid $200.
3. I was at that Day on the Green concert with Led Zeppelin where John Bonham beat up Bill Graham’s security guard. They delayed the start by more than two hours, saying over and over, “They’re still trying to fix Jimmy Page’s guitar” until Bill Graham gave into extortion.
4. A friend who worked for George Lucas gave me a tour of Skywalker Ranch while George was out of town; got to see his private theater and cherry wood elevator. The huge sound stage was designed for the walls and ceiling to move in and out to accommodate sound recordings.
5. My first marriage lasted about 14 weeks; I moved to Minnetonka, MN, for eternal love and marriage, and after the annulment left for a friend’s couch back in California on April Fool’s Day. Sometimes the universe makes an obvious point.
Your turn.
Published in Humor
Exactly!
If I were to speculate on their provenance, I should think it’s probably Baaaa-ch.
I believe the instructions were to list things we don’t know.
1. I hit three home runs and two doubles in a Little League softball game when I was 12. It made the local newspaper. That was the peak of my athletic career.
2. I wrote (as in, wrote, by hand, old-school) and mailed one letter per day in 2018, just to see if I could do it. It was fun and rewarding, but mostly it was stressful.
3. My mom and I have been collecting coins and paper money together for 40 years. We have a huge, varied, interesting collection. When we tell people about it, their first question is always, how much is it worth?? We don’t know and we don’t care. That’s not why we do it.
4. My favorite cereal is Post Oh’s. I eat an entire box at a time, dry. It’s not pretty.
You are like Forest Gump. Sounds like a pretty fascinating life! How did you end up sleeping in heads of state’s beds? And who were they? Did you tidy up or leave a mint before you left?
You must be talking about Carl Philip Eman-ewe-el Baaaa-ch. Could have been singing french composer Ram-eau’s music, too.
Moo-zart…
My wife and I swear by Soda Stream. After they were bought out by Pepsi, they stopped filling the large canisters with CO2 in favor of smaller canisters at a higher price. We discovered through Internet sharing that we could simply fill our large canisters with dry ice pellets. For 30 Bucks we bought a ten-pound bag of dry ice and filled something like seven or eight canisters. That is enough to make soda water for several years.
I have unofficially adopted Oleg since I am going to do a cross stitch project of him with daffodils. It’s like having a grandchild – I get the fun part of seeing pictures but his Mom has to take care of him.
https://nnry.com/pages/engineer.php
Nevada Northern Railway – take a quick class, then get on board to drive a steam locomotive. Expensive, but something I would love to do.
Actually, it’s my mother who was the Forrest Gump character in the family. She was incredible. She’s the one who noticed Jackie Kennedy on the horse and called out to Dad, who was filming the yacht racing, in Hausa (because there were lots of people and she didn’t want to start a stampede), something to the effect of: “Look, there is the wife of the chieftain who used to live in the big house that is white!”
She was always running into people: Colonel Sanders (the original one), Duke Ellington, Harry Secombe, and more. She went to grade school with Kenneth Tynan, and spent her childhood summer holidays at the same guesthouse as Bertrand Russell and his family. And on and on.
LOL. Dad was in the British Colonial Service, and we were in Nigeria and the Cameroons for the first decade of my life. He was quite influential by the time I was born, and it was a life, in the evenings, of high-society, receptions, cocktail parties and the like. (Yes, they met the Queen and Prince Philip. And Princess Alexandra. And the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. But I didn’t sleep in any of their beds.) But when I was very young, they’d take me with them, and the house staff would keep an eye on me when I was an infant, and I’d play with their kids when I was a bit older, and when it came time for bed, and if all the guest rooms were occupied, they’d just tip me into the Governor’s bed or the Premier’s bed. Until it was time to go home.
Ouch.
Argh.
Hay-den.
For three years in a row, I averaged writing over seven hundred poems per year. That was around 2005-ish.
Here’s the poem I gave to my wife and guests at our wedding (no typos, please):
Are you a Southron?
Born in Nebraska, raised in Kansas through age 11, then California, except for that short hiatus in Minnesota. Mom born in Alabama an dad in Tennessee.
The best people come from Tennessee stock.
The only way I could make that “aspire” work was as two-syllables as a Southron might say it: “aspiah.”
You spelled Alabama wrong. 😁
I don’t think so.
It comes from being sinister.
Glad to hear you’re branching out into emotional support sheep.
These puns are making me miss polemic acrimony.
You’re a lefty?
Randy is.
And Arahant never lets me forget it. Not that I’d want to. Sets me apart from run-of-the-mill northpaws.
That would be my dad’s side of the family. Born in Opelicka, Alabama, but raised in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Decades TV is running an all Beverly Hillbillies marathon this weekend, my favorite TV show. I’ve taped about 20 hours of it so far. My dad never liked it much because he complained that their Tennessee accents were too phony. I didn’t care.
I have swam in, and drove on, the Arctic Ocean.
I’m 61 and still waterski every morning at sunrise in the summer and most of the fall (weather permitting, not with rain, thunder, or high winds).
I took up paramotor flying for something to do during the Covid lockdown.
I still have my first car, which I bought in 1976, and drive it on a regular basis.
Now, ya see, that’s not coming from Tennessee. That’s being born in a civilized place and moving north.
Never thought to ask before, but are you related to William Seward?