6. I had a Hernia operation in when I was in the second grade.
7. I am featured in an encyclopedia. I do not own a copy of it, because it is priced for academia (List Price $350). Sometimes when I am feeling down about my career I can peek at it, because my entry is occasionally readable at the link below. (Please note: access to this link is sometimes randomly restricted. I do not know why.)
An Encyclopedia of Vaudeville Performers: Old And New
(8.-10. THE THIEVERY TRILOGY: As an occasionally self-policing only-child, I had a strangely tortured relationship to theft throughout my early years)
8. Grape
When I was 4 or 5 years old, I was riding home from the supermarket, when my mother noticed that I looked very nervous after we drove past a police car. I asked her if she thought the police might chase us or try to arrest us.
My mother’s natural confusion, about why in the world the police would want to arrest us, was answered when I blurted out an anguished confession, about something had occurred, when she was not watching me in the produce section at the supermarket: I ate a grape.
9. Cookies
Once, when my mother and stepfather were being shown a home by a Realtor, I helped myself to a cookie out of the cookie jar that belonged to the owner of the house. We eventually moved into the place. It was in Walpole New Hampshire. Sharon and Kevin were attempting, unsuccessfully, to run a restaurant called The Thomas Ryder House, and I was attempting, even less successfully, to fit in as a second grader.
One night in the restaurant, after we had lived there for at least 9 months, my mother told me that one of the diners was the man who lived in the house before us. I soberly approached him an apologized for the cookie indiscretion– unaware at that age that such an act had surely since passed the statute of limitations.
10. Pornography
In the 8th grade I stole a porno magazine from Ziter’s Market on Western Ave. I still maintained a serious moral aversion to stealing, as well as an enormous amount of guilt.
So, in order to restore balance, I purchased the dollar equivalent to the magazine’s cover price in comic books from the very same magazine shelf at the store. I then snuck the comic books back into Ziter’s, in my backpack. And with the same sneaky mitts that I had stolen the smut, I replaced the comic books on the shelves– so that the proprietors could resell them…
Therefore I had not stolen– but in fact, covertly purchased the magazine.