My Real Ten Things List (No Lies)

Dang it, I got tagged

1. I was bilingual as a very small child. From age 1 to age 5 I lived in Germany so I learned to speak in both English and German. When I moved back to America at age 5 I IMMEDIATELY forgot all the German I had learned and I have remained uni-lingual ever since — although I do know the Spanish words for a lot of different foods.
2. With the sole exception of the Department of Motor Vehicles I have not allowed anyone to take a photograph of me in over 30 years. No photo of me exists on the internet and there has never been any photo of me on any of my books. I didn’t even have a wedding photo from my last marriage. I’m kind of like Crazy Horse who never allowed himself to be photographed or painted or drawn because he believed that was stealing the energetic essence of him. And I have never in my life taken a selfie.
3. Because there are no public photos of me no one knows that I have green eyes. Now you know.
4. Back in the early Seventies a fad swept the nation known as streaking. It involved getting naked and running through a public venue. I participated (twice).
5. I once entered a jalapeno eating contest and came in second place.
6. Thanks to what I learned in a CPR class that I took I once saved a person’s life. That person was my daughter.
7. I once spent an hour in silent meditation with the famous Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull. It profoundly changed my life.
8. I once sold two bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream Liqueur to Jennifer Biel.
9. I once met a very gifted shaman/healer who had the ability to psychically scan a person’s body to detect any health issues. He scanned my body then looked at me in amazement and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before but you are completely, thoroughly, utterly backwards!” He vehemently refused to elaborate. I’ve been puzzling over this ever since.
10. I am NOT an actor but I did audition for a play once at a local community theatre. It was not my intent to do so but I got roped into it. I was running lines with a woman who was going to audition for a play. In the process of this I learned all the lines of the part playing opposite of her. I even read the lines with a British accent as called for in the play. The woman (who several years later would become my mother-in-law) talked me into auditioning, saying that I was much better than the one other guy auditioning for that part.

So I auditioned for the part then the other guy auditioned. I was like eighty times better than the other guy. I was suddenly very nervous. The other guy did not even try to affect a British accent and he did not even know his lines. He read his lines straight from the playbook in his West Texas drawl.

But as it turned out the director gave the part to the other guy. I was suddenly very relieved yet confused. I asked the director why he gave the part to the other guy. He replied that the other guy had been volunteering his time behind the scenes for years and had finally gotten up the nerve to audition for a role. I, on the other hand, had never once volunteered to do anything EVER. The director noticed that I attended all the cast parties and that I had dated a few of the local actresses (I had a ‘thing’ for actresses back then) but I had never contributed anything. He had to give the part to the other guy.

The more I thought about it, the more relieved and thankful I was that I didn’t get the part. Although I wrote theatre reviews for a while and once built a website for a different theatre group and continued going to cast parties and hang out with thespians I never again auditioned for a part. No way. After being married to an actress for 20 years I was finally cured of my ‘thing for actresses.’ It has now been over 8 years since I’ve even attended a play. That is all in the past.

Thanks Linda Caroll for tagging me. It was challenging but fun.