Wednesday, June 15, 2005

True Confessions

Well, I really would love suggestions/ideas/challenges from those who know me and those who do not about what I should do now that my hideous but cosy job at IBM as a technical writer is a thing of the past. No pity! Just possibilities.

So in order to hopefully draw more people here, I'm going to post some things people don't know about me, following Deb's challenge. Don't know if it will be all that interesting, but here goes, in no special order:

1. I worked as an associate editor of pulp fiction magazines--first True Detective, then Stag Magazine. The latter was a sort of low-class Penthouse or Hustler. Our readership sent us letters from prison written in red crayon.... I also wrote confessions for romance magazines.

2. When I was 21, I met John Lennon, talked with him, he gave me a coconut. Also met Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, his then-wife Maureen, Phil Spector and others that same weekend. I still have the coconut.

3. When I was 28, I almost died of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

4. In the Seventies, John (later, my husband) and I worked on a Public Access TV show in NYC. It was a talk show. The talk show host interviewed his guests while he was tripping out on acid.

5. I won first prize for fifth-grade girls in the city of Yonkers for my science project. I think it was 1960. My mother told me not to talk about it because my brother hadn't won for his. The project tested variables in method for baking muffins as to illustrate the scientific method.

6. As a teen, I worked in doctors' offices. It was our job to open the mail. We stole the sample diet pills, spent the summer speeding...

7. I was in high school when M.L. King was killed. I took up a collection to send to the striking sanitation workers he was supportiing when they shot him.

8. Which reminds me. I was class Idealist and class Dove in my high school yearbook, categories invented for me.

9. There was nearly 300 points difference in my verbal and math SAT scores. Guess which was higher.

10. In kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, I was considered very cute, selected to appear in cute newspaper pictures of first graders doing cute things, and so forth. In second grade, they cut off my long red braids, I got braces and glasses. End of story.

11. I have been fired um, numerous times (including from Sears for not wearing a slip under either of the two skirts I owned), laid off numerous times. Dear Reb, I always cry.

12. Except for crying, everything from this list relates to my life before I was thirty.

1 comment:

Robert said...

I can't resist chiming in:

1. My first marriage was to a woman who needed a green card to stay in the USA. I did it more or less on a whim: she was a friend but we were “just friends.” I guess she did it on a whim too, as not too long after, she decided she didn’t want to live in the USA after all and moved back to Sweden. It was a double-wedding; my roommate married her sister in the same ceremony, and their marriage was for real!

2. I am a physics geek. My favorite book when I was a child was Our Friend the Atom, now infamous as an example of propaganda produced for children in the 1950s by Disney in cooperation with the government and military. I must have read that book 100 times.

3. My first job was as a summer clerk in the supply office of the Postal Inspection Service. I remember sitting at my desk reading William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. I also remember the time I shipped a typewriter to an inspector who’d requested a gun, and a gun to an inspector who’d requested at typewriter.

4. I once had sex with an endangered species.

5. My second job was making espresso at Caffe Trieste, one of the original coffeehouses in North Beach in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg once told me I made a good caffe latte. The other celebrity I served was Goldie Hawn, but I was not working the day Marlon Brando came in with his entourage. Damn! I once came very, very close to accidentally making hot chocolate for a customer using brown powdered cement instead of cocoa.

OK, I admit, #4 was not true.