Borrowing from the popular tabloid feature, and more so from its parody made popular by my favorite political comedian Bill Maher, I offer you, my curious fan, or reader, or idle surfer who stumbled on my page while goofing off at work: 25 Things You Don’t Know About Me.
Likely, I could fill this page with 25,000 things you don’t know about me. Starting with who I am and why I have this website. I’ll let you browse through the menu if you’re curious about that. But here is my revealing, and let’s hope, shocking list.
25. I wrote under the ingenious pen name Peter Andrews from age 7 to 12, creating such multifarious works as the illustrated children’s book The Secret of Friendship, the mystery novel The Murders of Moosewood Mansion, and the stage musical Hey, Lucy McKay!
Mmm…I love JIf.
24. In times of stress, I eat Jif peanut butter out of the jar.
23. I worked as an assistant zookeeper, which largely entailed shoveling shit, hauling bales of alfalfa, and chain-smoking.
22. I later worked as a biochemistry lab technician, which coincidentally largely entailed a good amount of chain-smoking.
21. I play four musical instruments, poorly: the piano, the cello, the guitar, and the recorder.
Yeah, that’s me, 2nd from the left, in shades, tailgating at a Grateful Dead show.
20. I used to sell love beads outside of Grateful Dead shows.
19. I’ve never owned a car other than a Volkswagen.
18. I’m half Hungarian, but I don’t like paprikash, or water polo. I do like Hungarian water polo players.
Go Team Hungary! Photo courtesy of thehoopla.com.au
17. I saw my first gay pride parade at age five, by accident, when it erupted around my family while vacationing in Provincetown, Cape Cod. These things leave impressions.
16. I have honorary degrees from nowhere.
15. My date to the high school prom was the daughter of a Perkins Prize winning author.
14. Besides that brush with celebrity, I also lived next door to the house where Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita, and to entice sub-letters, I advertised it was the house where Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita.
Why do I keep getting Beanie Babies?!
13. Some of my character names I can barely pronounce myself (Aerander, the Seventh Pleiade, Calyiches). I also loathe having to say anesthetic.
12. While in practice as a social worker, it somehow caught on for clients to give me gifts of Beanie Babies, though I was secretly mildly annoyed and embarrassed.
11. While stuck in traffic, en route from the wedding reception to the hotel, both my husband and I pissed in the limousine’s ice bucket.
Me and Chloë, who doesn’t pay enough attention to me.
10. My past Halloween costumes include a Spanish toreador, a pirate, and the Unabomber.
9. I get angry at my cat when she doesn’t pay attention to me.
8. As a teenager, I had an inexplicable crush on Urkel from Family Matters.
7. If you ask to take me out to Cold Stone Creamery, I’ll go with you, even if I don’t like you.
6. When I worked at an animal hospital in high school, I used to sneak my friends in after hours to look at the dead pets in the ice locker.
Wasn’t he cute?
5. I cry sometimes when I listen to the soundtrack from The Phantom of the Opera.
4. Instead of playing cops and robbers, I used to convince my childhood friends to pretend we were waiters at a high end restaurant.
3. I like Madonna in the abstract more than I like her in reality.
2. I’m not entirely sure what #3 means.
1. I’m still waiting for the day when I can Google myself and appear to be more famous than Andrew Peters, the former NHL player, and Andrew Peters, the disgraced Boston mayor, or even Andrew Peters, the concert organist from St. Louis.
