Vingt-cinq!

[fancycwabs]

1. I'm painfully, painfully shy. I compensate somewhat by initiating conversations with new folks via a wisecrack, which doesn't always go over well.
2. It is nearly impossible to get me to laugh. I vaguely recall someone in middle school making fun of my laugh, which pretty much shut it off permanently.
   
3. That said, I'm almost constantly amused by something.
   
4. I make what is generally regarded as the world's greatest fried chicken--I learned the techniques from my grandmother, who also taught me the secret to pear pie.
   
5. I hate the way I look on video. My gestures and movements strike me as twitchy and stiff.
   
6. Similarly, I hate the way I sound on a recording. What sounds in my head like a resonant full voice comes across as hollow.
   
7. I took six years of piano lessons as a child, played the trumpet for another six in high school, and have sung all my life, yet for all practical purposes, I can't read music--or more precisely, I can't read music that's more than a single line on the treble clef. I KNOW what all the other notes are, and years of listening have made me capable of hitting most melodies and harmonies correctly, but I am almost always doing it by ear or memory.
   
8. When I lived in New Orleans, I put on so much weight so quickly my liver had trouble keeping up, and I was told not to donate blood for a year. I'm sure the drinking didn't help, either.
   
9. I went to Wigstock in 1994, one of the two years that they were there shooting the documentary. For a straight, naïve, 23-year-old guy from Mobile, Alabama, increasingly graphic songs about buttsecks by drag queens was a bit unnerving.
   
10. I'm mentioned, or hinted at, in Eugene Walter's autobiography--something about doing things to keep Mom happy must have struck a nerve with him.
    
11. I have a rule when traveling that I can't eat anywhere that I can eat at home. It's much too easy to go into a Starbucks and miss out. That said, I DID stick my head into a McDonald's in Paris to verify that a Royal Cheese was on the menu. From that day forward I wondered what they're putting on their Royals in France that they couldn't legally use the word "fromage."
    
12. Once during a production of a play called Face Value, which was a semi-adaptation of Shaw's Pygmalion set in a television newsroom, I had the misfortune of sharing the stage with a giant (for a bug) cockroach. I didn't notice the critter until very late on, after he'd already completely distracted the audience and run halfway up my pants leg. From the laughter, I thought I was HILARIOUS--and it ends up the cockroach was getting all the laughs and I was just so-so. The cockroach also got applause upon his onstage death--sorry PETA. The reviewer, fortunately, had left after the first act to get the review in the morning paper, so he missed the fun with insects.
    
13. Since I'm on the subject, during my freshman orientation at Georgia Tech I was the first person to hit the coffee decanter on the first day of the first orientation session, and got a surprise in my coffee. I didn't notice the cockroach until I felt the crunch in my mouth. I didn't drink coffee at Georgia Tech again for nearly a year afterward. Again, sorry PETA.
    
14. Somewhere there exists a photograph of me wearing naught but a skirt made of ties.
    
15. At the cast party after the final performance of a given play at Georgia Tech, the tech crew would hand out "Paper Plate Awards" for the show--given to commemorate the customary oddball antics that surround the great playground that comes from the combination of college antics and theatre antics (and there are plenty). Among the awards was the "William Shatner acting award," given for the most bizarre line reading. I am a two-time recipient of said award; to date the only recognition of my acting ability or lack thereof.
    
16. Like everyone else, I wrote somewhere near a zillion awful poems in college. Unlike everyone else, mine had an actual meter. No, you can't read them. Not even if I could find them.
    
17. I once delivered a sermon in the church I grew up in, for youth Sunday. I was maybe seventeen, and scared to death, and the congregation laughed their asses off (apparently comic timing is a thing in sermons). About a year later, as the actual pastor was leaving to take a job in Birmingham, he reused my opening joke in his farewell speech, which pleased me. Public speaking without a written speech still frightens me, so I usually write the whole thing out longhand in preparation--otherwise my wolf mind might take over and make me spew obscenities.
    
18. I have invented a method for slicing potatoes based on a variant of a second-iteration Koch curve. With it, I will win the Nobel Prize in food science.
    
19. I have never worn a hat that didn't make me look like a complete dork, possibly because my head is friggin' huge.
    
20. I majored in Mechanical Engineering, and got a certificate (the equivalent of a minor, I'm told) in Western Literary Traditions. Beyond Statics and Mechanics of Materials, I've used Western Literary Traditions more than Mechanical Engineering—they just don't ask you to do heat transfer equations at trivia night that often.
    
21. When I was living in Mobile, my then-boss decided whether I would relocate to New Orleans or Memphis based on a coin flip. New Orleans won, but a year or so later I ended up in Memphis anyway. While I was living in New Orleans (1995) a light hurricane missed the city, and my coworkers, who'd never experienced a hurricane before, were full of macho bravura about riding out the storm. That sort of attitude probably cost lives ten years later.
    
22. There is nothing quite as much fun to me as visiting a new place for the first time, but the second time—when you're not just trying to find your way around and can notice some of the details isn't bad, either. The metaphor holds for friendships, romance, etc.
    
23. I've had parts in some variation of The Taming of The Shrew four times, if you count Kiss Me, Kate. I don't know what it is that makes Shakespeare's tale of spousal abuse so very popular in the South.
    
24. I have more unread books lying around than should be legal.
    
25. I rarely give out compliments, but when I do you can rest assured that it's because I've been impressed.

Comments

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

I wish people, myself included, could be this informative about themselves in their posts more often. I'm too shy to be honest.

Last summer a huge cockroach crawled onto the back of a flat that was lying on the stage and someone stepped on it, pressing it into the flat. No one removed it and now that cockroach has participated posthumously in four productions.