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things you couldn't care less to know about me...

that I have a favorite punctuation mark... 3 guesses what it is...

that I narrowly escaped death once again (without even knowing how close it got) when I was on the last subway train out of DC to cross the 14th Street Bridge before Air Florida Flight 90 hit it and crashed into the Potomac... and one of the only 4 survivors was the older sister of a friend of mine from high school...

that I had a dear friend who during the Vietnam War lived on a commune in Canada with an actor who starred in a movie that had scenes filmed in a famously unique hotel not far from where I live... and also that he had escaped, with his wife, from Scientology's Sea Org, in the dead of night, to avoid what kind of persecution I don't know... they wouldn't talk about it but I have seen documentaries... and that his wife, also a dear friend, was a teenager babysitting in a house on the farm next to the home where the murders Truman Capote wrote about happened on the night the murders were happening... 

that somewhere in a shoebox in this house is a photo of 9 year old me with Roberta Flack, though I didn't know who she was at the time... my mom was a yard sale fanatic and I was dragged mercilessly from driveway to driveway on Saturday mornings and she happened to be having a yard sale at a house she owned a few neighborhoods over from before she was famous I guess... all proceeds went to whatever black power organization was trending at the time... including the $5 for the picture... now I'm wondering why my mother had a camera with her that day... a phone that one could carry around and photogenically record every aspect of one's life and who they were doing what with had not yet been invented... except for use on Star Trek...

that I may have been at the concert a fellow writer on this site cites in one of his works... and I have the ticket stub to prove it...

that I was once asked by Penn & Teller to pick a card at a show at Center Stage in Baltimore circa '87... and I have a signed program and ticket stub to prove it... but not the card... they made that disappear... 

that I had the extreme good fortune to have been at what I'm thinking now might have been an outlaw Stevie Ray Vaughan concert at the Ontario Theater in DC... I don't have a ticket stub because a friend who was working security got me in... I do remember it being a no-rules situation unlike the no-dancing-in-the-aisles show at DAR... I know because I was there... and I have the ticket stub to prove it...

that I am cleaning my closet should be nostalgically obvious by now...

that my mother really was "a coal-miner's daughter"...

that I went to high school with 3 famous people... ok 1 very famous person who you might have your morning coffee with everyday... 1 quasi-famous person who you might know if you are one of the upper-crusty East Coasters who wants to redecorate your house in the Hamptons... and 1 who was famous for as long as it takes to read an article about her in People magazine when they did a story on runaway brides to go with the movie (and she has a relative who has a statue installed of himself in the park across the street from the White House that I could see from a building I worked in circa early 80s)... I wouldn't know or care about any of this (and have all their autographs in various yearbooks of the era) except that my mother was thrilled at such close proximity to greatness and made sure I was aware of how well my former classmates were doing... I find it strange that the HS I attended had more than its 15 minute helping of fame... oh and there was the time that one of its own set fire to this school on New Year's Eve thereby disrupting the rest of our school year and also that of 2 other neighboring rival schools who had to make room for us in their lives... but instead of just throwing us all in for a melee, school days were cut in half for everyone... what happened to the firestarter you ask... nothing, him being a prominent member of the football team and a longstanding member of the boys-will-be-boys club... 

Lest you be thinking that I'm from some fancy place, I most definitely am not... I am nobody from nowhere... and then I left all that behind to become even less than nobody and even further away from nowhere (except that the everybody else's are encroaching)...