7 Things About Me

As noted by my friend, and fellow writer, Sarah, everyone loves a list. So I am stealing her idea and writing down 7 things about me.

1. I can twirl my eyeballs around really, really fast. It's been described as sickening and nauseating and just plain weird by most who have seen it. I have never actually seen it, although I guess Randi could record me doing it, and play it back to me.

2. I had NO idea at all what I wanted to do with my life, or even liked to do until Mrs. Summers's class in seventh grade, where I learned that I liked writing stories. Then I really got turned around by the writers Harlan Ellison (for his first person essays) and Hunter S. Thompson (for his wild, wicked sense of humor and craziness). Then I was like, yeah, I could kind of be like a mixture of THOSE guys.

3. I am the co-guardian of my older sister, Barbara, who has Down's Syndrome.

4. I say I never owned a dog, but this is not true. During middle school we got an older female Golden Retriever mix from the shelter. I named her Tory and she smelled awful, but was very friendly and sweet. Unfortunately she was sick and we had to take her back to the shelter, and she died not much later.

5. My earliest memory is of waking up on the floor in my bedroom, in our old house in O'Shaughnessy Lane in Closter, NJ. Then I wandered into my sister's room and, this is the memory though it may not be reliable, we argued and she hit me in the stomach. Sharon is not a violent person!

6. This is pretty well known, but it's still cool. In 1996 I was a driver in Bill Clinton's motorcade when he came to Denver. My car was a copper Ford Taurus, and my Secret Service name was Straggler Two. (Straggler One was, of course, right in front of me.) I was the very last car in the motorcade. Little known fact, there are two motorcades. The first five cars or so, actually have dignitaries in them. Then there is a gap and there are all the other cars, who have press or whomever. I had no one, both days! I shook hands briefly with the POTUS and got my picture taken with him. They never sent me the picture though.

7. As a freshman in high school I was an indifferent athlete, but somehow during winter track I managed to be in part of a four man relay team that actually won the blue ribbon for first place at a track meet. I think my time was a touch over 64 seconds for my quarter mile. Not bad! To this day I have no idea how I did it, as I hadn't trained all that well, and my prior time was something like 80 seconds.