Meme May Ma Moe Moo
Posted on | June 26, 2007 | 1 Comment
About eight years ago, Kris Vire tagged me with a meme. I will comply as best I can.
Bloggers must post these rules and provide eight random facts about themselves. In the post, the tagged blogger tags eight other bloggers and must notify them that they have been tagged.
Item #1:
An eerie amount of my life developments have been influenced by my older sister – I wouldn’t have gone into theatre if I hadn’t been dragged to her shows as a kid, I wouldn’t have lasted through my first auditions in high school if she hadn’t told some people to look out for me, I wouldn’t have gone to Ohio Wesleyan if her best friend hadn’t gone there, and I definitely wouldn’t have had the warm welcome in town were it not for leeching off her post-DePaul Theatre School career. Through kind-of-weird happenstance, the first two apartments I lived in were ones in which she had previously lived, one of them four or five years previous.
Item #2:
I played almost every sport there was as a kid – soccer, baseball, basketball, cross-country, and track, often running right from one practice to another. In a representative incident, I ultimately quit soccer – a sport I loved – because Tim Dever wiled away idle moments punching me in the stomach, and never suffered any consequences from me, my parents, or the coach.
Item #3:
In a somewhat related incident, I am a red belt in Tae Kwon Do, earned when I was about 13. My mom keeps telling me I should go back and “finish it,” like getting your black belt is getting an MBA. Still, I refused to throw out my accumulated belts during my last move.
Item #4:
My first “professional” gig was at the Croswell Opera House in Adrian, Michigan. I played the Leather Apron and had a cameo as the Painter in a production of 1776 when I was 16. It was directed by a radio DJ who had an illustrious community theatre background in the NW Ohio/SE Michigan area. He was pretty much Toledo royalty.
Item #5:
My second professional gig was in an outdoor drama – folks from the Midwest will know what I’m talking about – called “Tecumseh!” – based off the life of the Shawnee cheif/martyr. It was actually an amazing experience, but totally bizarre to recall. We lived in these boxy cabins on a site outside Chillicothe, Ohio (called- I shit you not, “The Compound.” In many ways it was like being a Branch Davidian). I played a really pissed off Native American. I wore a loincloth, learned to ride a narcoleptic horse, participated in 50+ person staged combat complete with firearms and pyro. It was pretty damned cool.
Item #6:
I went to Catholic school for K-8 and high school. My high school was run by an order of priests called the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales. I thought nothing of it at the time, but in retrospect, the name Oblates strikes me as something from that might be appropriate in an 80s film about a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Regardless, I was fairly seriously considering a run at the priesthood for a while. I was even in a group designed to be a feeder for the seminary, when I got kicked out because I never actually attended mass.
Item #7:
I was enrolled to be an Education minor at OWU for about a two weeks. What ultimately dissuaded me was my first mandatory-but-volunteer tutoring session with this kid from the local grade school. The kid – no more than 11 – starts telling me about how pissed he is at his parole officer. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t fathom what this kid’s life could be like, constantly in trouble and a “known offender” before he had pubic hair – I was such a nervous nellie as a kid I felt guilty for seeing a Barbie naked. I dropped out of the course a week later. I still feel really bad about that.
Item #8:
I lobbied hard for my family to get internet access (c. 1995) so that I could contribute to an online sci-fi/fantasy shared world writing project called DargonZine. From about age 11 to the time I really discovered girls, I read almost exclusively high fantasy novels, and at 14 I wrote my first and only complete short story. Those heady days of near-anonymity and my relatively large vocabulary allowed me to skirt around my age (although it probably wouldn’t have been a problem) and get some real criticism and feedback from a group of writers all over the country who were at least 10 years older than me. I have no idea how I had the stones to do something like that, and I never finished, or even started, another piece after that. The next complete piece of fiction I recall writing wouldn’t be until my playwriting courses in college, and to this day writing anything is something of a bitch. Thanks to the internet you can still read it today, if you’re interested – but it’s really hacky. I mean, I was 14.
I’m supposed to name eight people – and I’m not sure I even know eight people. Here goes: Tony, Steve, and (as a clusterbomb) Neil, Idil, David, Thom, Jamie, and Humphrey over at the Dreadfuls (though you guys can post on your own sites, if you has/likes).
Buy me a beer?Comments
One Response to “Meme May Ma Moe Moo”
Leave a Reply
July 4th, 2007 @ 11:15 am
Oh, balls.