11. So far, I feel that the high point of my 15-year career performing as Evan O’ Television, happened on a night when I was hosting a rock show with Beat Circus and the Dresden Dolls at the Middle East in Cambridge, and I was aggressively booed and heckled by the audience. By sheer coincidence the particular routine that I was performing when I was heckled, involved the TV character becoming paranoid and believing that the audience hated him.
As he wiped the sweat from his brow and worried aloud “Oh my god! They hate us,” my videotaped alter- ego, quite impossibly, appeared to be responding directly to the boos, and thus outwitting the live participants that were trying to shout us down.
You can take it from me or, if you choose, you can read this blog posting by a pair of my actual hecklers from that night…
Read the original March 2, 2003 post
12. I have never paid much attention to houseplants. I guess, in general, I have taken plants for granted, as the domain of the people that I lived with– and not given them any further thought. A few years ago I was on Cape Cod at Sharon and Kevin’s house (my mother and stepfather) and I noticed this one cactus plant, and it dawned on me that it had been in every house we had ever lived in.
My mother told me that the plant was, in fact, older than me, and that she had kept it since before I was born. For some reason this fact disturbs me greatly, and since then I have been filled with strong feelings of jealousy and resentment toward that cactus.
13. If I have one vanity about my appearance, in a cliche-actor kind of way, it is regarding the redness of my hair. In grade school I was occasionally mocked as a curly-headed carrot-top, and there was even one incident, when 3 older grade-school girls grabbed me, and jammed so many burrs in my hair that my mother had to cut them out. But it never really bothered me much, primarily because my hair was always being complimented by attractive adult women. So, I pretty much adopted the attitude that I had it goin’ on.
But in my late 20′s the redness of my locks began to fade until they took on, at best, a dark auburn hue. These days most people who meet me would say that I have brown hair, and yet I still feel this defiant anachronistic pride in my redheadedness.
I do confess that every few years, in a desperate burst of follicle nostalgia, I have been known to attempt to Henna my way back to my former redhead glory.
14. I once made out with someone while we were both lounging in a hammock. It was a suffocating slapstick nightmare that I never want to try again.
15. My father Michael, was very active in Vipassana Meditation throughout the majority of my childhood. One time, we traveled to the airport to pick up one of the great, spiritual, meditation teachers and bring him to a weeklong retreat.
One of my pastimes on long trips with my dad was to read aloud. At this time, all of my favorite books were either novelizations of movies or from the Bantam books Choose Your Own Adventure series. There was no chance that my father, a steady champion of intellect, would have tolerated, for even a single car ride, my recitation from a movie novelization. So Choose Your Own Adventure books won the day, and proved to be an enjoyably interactive form of entertainment for such a long drive.
I continued reading the books aloud and Dhiravamsa, the Thai Bhuddist spiritual leader, joined my father in choosing from the variety of alternatives posed at the end of each section of the book. We had a great time!
I cannot remember what “adventure” it was, or what any of their choices were, but to this day I regret not paying closer attention to the spiritual and life-guiding decisions that were imagined during the ride home.