It's the end of the world as we know it- and the meme finally got here:)

[captainsblog]

Fraid so. You read about it in the USAToday. Or maybe The Times. ABC, NBC, and for all I know, M-O-U-S-E have paid homage. So I guess it's my turn, huh.

First, though, an even better one which somebody else wrote.

Apparently, long ago, on a sceptered isle far far away....

Okay, enough stalling.

1) I was born in a Catholic hospital, spent the first 17 years of my life with a shul as the closest house of worship, but was raised and remain Methodist (United-ly so since the age of 8). Is it any wonder I'm so confused?

2) While I'll get to my former hometown's most notorious ex-resident a little later, the "town" (actually an unincorporated subsection of a much larger town) was perhaps best known for producing radio broadcasters. The longtime news director of New York's WMCA was unofficially known as the "Mayor of East Meadow," and one of my oldest friends, remaining to this day, went into broadcasting right after high school and still does radio news for WFAN from one "town" over from where we grew up.

3) Right. Him. I spent thirteen years in the East Meadow public schools, many times in the same classroom, with one of New York State's most prolific serial killers ever to be caught. When the news broke, sometime in the early 90s, long-ago friends from back then started calling me in Rochester with the news. He would probably have been voted "the least likely to succeed at chopping up more than a dozen women" if our yearbook had had such an award. Instead, the school newspaper awarded him "a shade for the lamp in his darkroom." Yes, I'm part of the society that is to blame.

4) Toward the end of third grade, they gave us some standardized tests, which I blew the doors off. The district offered me a spot in its Elementary Acceleration Program, which would have knocked off fourth through sixth grades in two years and sent me out into society a year sooner. Since I'd barely made the December 1 cutoff for kindergarten and was already one of the youngest kids in my class, my parents decided to pass on the chance to make me younger still than all my peers. (The district ended this program a few years later, but not before one of the EAP kids from the year behind me got accelerated into my junior high grade and became, and remains, one of my closest friends.)

5) When I wasn't taking tests in elementary and junior high, I was out having near-fatal pratfalls. I lost one vital organ and most of the use of a second between 1969 and 1973. Fortunately, I had a spare of each.

6) That Methodist Church of mine confirmed kids in ninth grade back then. Halfway through our confirmation class year, our only minister had a heart attack, and while he survived it and lived many years thereafter, he was essentially off-duty for the rest of the year. Several dozen congregation members, including at least three under the age of 16, took the training to become Certified Lay Speakers, doing everything in church except sacraments, weddings and funerals. I was one of those kids. Fortunately for the faith, my license expired sometime during college and nobody ever dared ask me to get it renewed.

7) Back in fifth grade, I took up the clarinet. I could read music and keep time well enough, but never had the embrochure or eye-hand coordination to manage much more than a quarter note at a time, so by junior high I was delicately shown the way to the bass clarinet section, where I remained, unceremoniously, through my second year of college. For high school marching band, I was given the little guy back, since nobody gave a shit what we sounded like out there. We hated the football team, the cheerleaders, and especially the beyotches on the far more prestigious kickline- and the feelings were mutual. I wrote a version of the school fight song called "Downward East Meadow" which is what we were actually singing before kickoff.

8) My junior-year English teacher nominated me for a National Council of Teachers of English writing award. You needed to submit a sample of your writing on any topic and write an in-class essay  to qualify for the scholarship. It being 1976 and all, I did my freestyle competition by parodying The Canterbury Tales as a pilgrimage to Philadelphia for the bicentennial. The final couplet of the piece ended in the word "screwed." Needless to say, the essay really didn't offer me a prayer of redeeming myself with the judges.

9) I applied to five colleges- two on Long Island, two upstate, and one in Connecticut. All of them accepted me except Yale. Considering how lax their academic standards have proven to be in the years since then, I have no regrets whatsoever about that.

10) Jodie Foster would have been, briefly, a classmate of mine had I gotten into that school. Even better than that, though, was that I spent at least a year in Ithaca on the same campus as the original Charlie from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Not that I knew it at the time.

11) On the other hand, I did get to meet Diane Ackerman- she was my creative writing instructor in my freshman year.  I completely lost touch with her until Eleanor independently started reading her books a few years ago. 

12) Despite blowing off dozens of classes and high percentages of reading lists, I somehow managed to come out of Cornell with a decent, if altogether average, average. I made the Deans List exactly once in eight tries, and can count on one hand the number of grades that were outside the range of A-minus to B-minus. That's not counting the sequence of four straight A-plus grades I got for Symphonic Band participation, and those were achieved, not for any kind of musical prowess, but because the director gave you extra credit if you helped load and unload the truck when we played our twice-a-semester concerts in the lobby of the Straight.

13) I acquired my first car about a week before leaving Ithaca to "go home" for the summer after freshman year. It was a 1971 Ford Pinto with a four-speed manual transmission. I'd never driven a stick in my life. On the way back from the seller's place, on a two-lane state highway in the middle of nowhere, I tried to downshift and the lever came off in my hand.  After a tow truck came, we got it jammed into second and I drove the 40 miles to my sister's house in about three hours.  Two weeks later, I totalled the car on a Long Island highway- leaving me carless in the worst place for mass transit in the entire industrialized universe. I left that August and never went back except for brief visits.

13A) Oh, and about a week after the accident, word came out that Pintos did THIS when hit from behind (I'd been fortunate enough to be front-ended):

"" (Watch on YouTube)

14) I took the LSAT on a lark toward the end of my junior year with no Kaplan or such prep, did just well enough on it not to be embarrassed (it was something in the 600s back when they were scaled the same as SATs were), and applied to three law schools. UB took me, Cornell had had quite enough of me, and Columbia waitlisted me. I'd still be waiting, most likely. I went until the last possible day to decide whether to go, and the school offered no deferral option. A year later, they seriously oversubscribed the entering class and were begging students to defer a year.

15) I made Law Review, not on the basis of stellar grades, but by being one of only two first-year students to do it solely based on a writing competition. The following year, they eliminated that as an option. I do not consider this to be the least bit coincidental.

16) You're not supposed to work the summer after your first year of law school, so I did. (Totally unofficially, doing work-study-like tasks at a sub-minimum wage rate.) You ARE supposed to work the summer after your second year, so I didn't. (At least not here- that was the summer I interned in a solicitors' firm on Gresham Street in London.) The summer after third year was the bar exam. I DID take a prep course for that one.

17) When I took my first job after law school in Rochester, I'd been there fewer than a dozen times, and that counts stops in the bus station on Andrews Street on the way to and from Buffalo. I'd never stayed overnight, had no idea where anything was, but took the plunge anyway, the happiest plunge I ever took.

18) A few months into that first job, I finally broke down (possibly literally) and bought my first new car. It was a previous year's Dodge Aries that had been sitting on the lot forever and was priced to sell. As I pulled out of the showroom driveway onto West Henrietta Road, the car stalled. Yet somehow, that car lasted us the first seven years of our marriage and as recently as the early '00s, I've seen its distinct color combination on roads around here.

19) I met Eleanor in church. Yes, it was Methodist. Not that I was looking for such a place, but I wound up picking an apartment a block away from the one we'd be married in, baptized Emily in, and still visit our officiating minister at every couple of years.

20) We moved here after almost ten years of me at the same firm, when it became clear that men can hit glass ceilings, too. We chose Buffalo because I knew the town, as well as a fair number of the lawyers here, and it was still close enough to "home." So naturally I picked a firm that didn't work out and spent the next ten-plus years commuting back to Rochester several times a week.

21) I stopped that nonsense almost three years ago, and I number those three among the happiest of my life.

22) Growing up, I'd never had pets beyond tropical fish. Eleanor had, at various times, had dogs and at least one psychotic cat named Madame Nu, but her allergist had warned her against ever EVER getting another one. (This would be the same allergist who shot her up with a thousand teeny little needles full of various toxins and antitoxins several times a year.) A year after our wedding, a friend offered us a kitten. We took her in. The allergist was gone within a year. The cat lasted almost 20.

23) I am the only male in three generations on my side of our family- all of my siblings, nieces and grand-nieces, as well as my only daughter, were little bundles of XX joy. At least I can say that until my youngest niece's ultrasounds get a little more specific.

24) I ramble on way too much in memes. And generally.

25) I hate tagging people and won't do it.



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There's another hidden meaning in that header I've been meaning to mention: Dar Williams sent an email out last week to announce that she's going to be performing at Carnegie Hall on March 11th as part of an REM tribute: "Also featuring Throwing Muses, Kimya Dawson, Ingrid Michaelson, Darius Rucker, Glen Hansard, Marshall Crenshaw, Jolie Holland, Patti Smith and many more. 100% of net proceeds to benefit musical education programs for underprivileged youth." Hmmmmm....

Comments

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

i'm going to read your 25 things in depth and will likely comment again, but in the interim i just wanted to say that the show you posted about sounds AWESOME.