100 Things About Me, Part the First

I keep running across variations of this theme on other blogs. Seems like a fun exercise. Prepare to be fascinated.

1. I’m quite short (5’3”) and I don’t mind it – in fact, I like it. I have noticed that other people seem to consider it a handicap and I don’t understand why.

2. I’m gay, and knew it unambiguously from an early age – 10 years old. I never went through a crisis of conscience about it.

3. I was raised Roman Catholic, and though I am no longer practicing in the sense of attending Mass or receiving the Sacraments regularly, I am still a cultural Catholic. I privately observe Saints’ days, light candles, and say my rosary. While some will see this as naïve, bizarre, or superstitious, I don’t particularly give a damn.

4. Ethnically I am a mix of Lebanese, Slovak, Czech (all on my father’s side), and Italian (on my mother’s side).

4. I grew up in a military family. My father had a distinguished 20-year career in the Air Force and I still feel an affinity to and affection for the USAF. Hearing “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder” inevitably makes my eyes tear up.

5. I love both my parents, and think that especially considering the oddball son they were given, they did their honest best and a very good job. I feel that I can never possibly repay them for the sacrifices they made to ensure that I got what I needed as a child.

6. I was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, which I will have you know is the county seat of Fayette County.

7. My earliest memory is pulling a Fisher-Price puppy on a string through the laundry room of an apartment building we were living in. I would have been about a year old.

8. I do not drink coffee and never have. The smell of it makes me gag.

9. I was the second person in my family to get a college degree. My father went back to school part-time in my junior year, and got his diploma a couple of days before I did.

10. My lifelong love affair with British literature started when I was five and read P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins.

11. I love working out. It makes me feel good and boosts my creativity. In a perfect world, I would be at the gym two hours a day, every day. I get frustrated because work so often interferes with my regimen.

12. I love opera, but a night at the symphony is utter hell for me. Sitting and listening to an orchestra while stuck in the middle of a row of people with nothing to look at or read makes me fidget. Add a singer to the mix, and I’m fine.

13. I’ve been to two pop concerts in my whole life: Donna Summer and Cher. (See Item #2). Cher was fun. Donna sucked. I have no desire to see another.

14. I have managed to make most of my hobbies pay in at least a small way. I’ve been paid to write, to draw, to design Web and print pieces, to embroider, to take photographs, and to direct, and to act. Haven’t been paid to knit. Yet.

15. I love to dance, and can lead most ballroom dances and follow in the two-step, the waltz, and both standard variations of swing.

16. My first movie star crush (age seven) was Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. My second (age eight) was Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu. (See Item #2.) Have not had one since then.

17. By the time I was six I knew most of the songs in Funny Girl from listening to my parents’ LP recording. (See Item #2.)

18. I learned to read, apparently by myself, when I was about a year and a half old. The first book I remember reading was The House That Popeye Built.

19. I have an inexhaustible appetite for chocolate and any form of fried potato.

20. I really, really wish I could sing, but I can’t.

21. In the past 10 years, four close relatives of mine have died from heart failure brought on by obesity.

22. I got into a fist fight once, in high school. He started it, I won.

23. My first three dates were, in order, an Air Force captain, a Marine lieutenant, and a Navy ensign. When I was in high school it was easier to find grown men than guys my own age to go out with. (That rumor you’ve heard about Marines is true.)

24. I can remember obscure points of British history but have to hunt for my glasses every morning.

25. It burns me up that one of my favorite movies, Enchanted April, is not out on DVD while Pootie Tang is easily procured from any rental or retail outlet.