Tagged: Five Or So Things You Don't Know About Me

I have been tagged by typewriter so I must divulge five facts about myself which are not commonly known. 

Had I been tagged earlier I could have included two items which, however, have already been the subjects of previous posts: The fact that I am an atheist and the fact that I never learned to drive a car.  Had I known this time was coming I would have held those two in reserve. Sigh.

Okay, here we go:

I am a vegetarian.  It is odd that this is something that not many people know about me.  I don't hide the fact, even if I don't advertise it.  Even people I have told that I'm a vegetarian often end up not knowing it about me!  It is probably because I'm so fat (265 lbs. this morning).  The cognitive dissonance prevents them from retaining the fact that I'm a vegetarian.  Only people who've invited me over for dinner or who've had to otherwise accommodate my dietary needs  tend to know that I am a vegetarian.

I cannot claim that my vegetarianism stems from any well-worked-out ethical principle.  It is, more or less, hysterically based.  I believe it stems from a combination of an innate squeamishness combined with the trauma I experienced learning, in great detail, in the fifth grade in Hebrew Day School, about the slaughtering procedures which must be followed in order to insure that meat will be kosher.  There were no graphic displays but I had a vivid imagination.

I am the oldest of five siblings.  Even people who have known me a long time are often surprised to learn that I have four brothers and sisters.  I rarely talk about them; I rarely talk to them.  We grew up together in a confused and troubled household; I find it best to keep my distance from them now.  The youngest is an Ultra-Orthodox Jew - as far as I can tell that pretty much defines his life.  The next youngest is a Modern Orthodox Jew who for a long time ran her own business on Long Island but is now struggling to keep on top of things.  After her comes my brother who is brain-damaged and schizophrenic (or bipolar - diagnoses vary); this is an awful combination.  He lives life at the poverty line, dependent on county mental health programs.  After him comes my sister, who is a PhD in Educational Psychology and, I gather, an increasingly recognized expert in the field of gifted education.

I taught myself to read.  My mother said that, beginning sometime late in my third year, I sat in the kitchen with a book in my lap, pointed to a word, and asked "What's that?".  Endlessly.  Sometime in my fourth year I was reading pretty fluently but my parents, it would seem, either didn't quite realize this or didn't think it necessary to alert the school when I entered kindergarten.  I found kindergarten boring.  One day, early on, the teacher was conducting a "pre-reading" excercise, holding up one of the many posters that hung on the walls, asking the class to guess what the words might say based on the scene depicted.  The whole thing seemed pretty pointless to me so I raised my hand and, when the teacher called on me, read the poster and then got up, walked closer, and read the copyright notice and the printer's address in the bottom corner.  I don't know what I expected the response to be but I set off a small furor. Before I knew it I was sent around the school, to each class, grades 1 through 6, to read passages from their textbooks for them.  I don't know what moron thought that that would motivate anybody.  It made me very popular on the playground, as you might imagine.  I spent more time horizontally than vertically at recess since every time I got up there was somebody else who was ready to push me down again.  It was at that point that I was withdrawn from the public school system and sent to Hebrew day school.

For years I tried to be a writer. 

a) In high school I wrote poetry and submitted my best work to the New American Review, a literary magazine issued quarterly in paperback form by the New American Library.  I received a (handwritten) note back that read "Sorry, the vote went against these extremely attractive poems -- Richard Howard"  I was very upset -- not to mention kind of nuts at the time.  I tore all copies of my poetry up.  I've tried, intermittently in the years since, to reconstruct some of those poems but I'm not satisfied that I've gotten even one of them quite right.

b) In college I co-edited a literary magazine named Omphalos.  The pages were issued loose, in a large envelope.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I also contributed comedy pieces to the campus radio stations: a public service announcement for "The Emergency Bagpipe Service";  a piece about a hapless travel agency which arranged trips to the Middle East, including tours of the west side of Mecca, shooting the rapids in the Dead Sea, and excursions to the Marx Brothers Kibbutz.

c) After I bombed out of graduate school I tried to write material for my friend Julie Halston (warning: some sound plays immediately when this page loads) and her then-comedy-partner Kenny.  Julie was too nice to say anything about the bit I came up with but a mutual friend took me aside and said "This isn't a comedy routine.  It's an IQ test!"   After several more experiences like that I stopped trying to write comedy.

I live downstairs from Pumbaa.  Tom Alan Robbins is my immediate upstairs neighbor.  He has played Pumbaa in  Julie Taymor's stage version of The Lion King since the very beginning , 9+ years-- with occassional breaks to do Shakespeare In The Park or Law and Order. He recently had to have surgery on his shoulder because he'd spent so many years wearing the apparatus that is the Pumbaa puppet; it has now been redesigned to ease the load.