Taking Care of the Tags, Part II

The newly-married (sorry ladies) Frank Simarco tagged me with the Seven Little Things About Myself tag recently.

1. I have owned two Ted Nugent albums in my life-- his first, self-titled album Ted Nugent ( the one with "Stranglehold" and "Just What The Doctor Ordered") and Free-For-All. Hey, we all have our dark secrets. It was the seventies and I was in high school. And besides, he lost me at Cat Scratch Fever. That album sucked.

2. After a summer spent starving due to bad financial circumstances (1982), I swore never to let anybody go hungry. To this day, when I get panhandled, I offer to buy a meal, and have never, ever turned down a request to buy food, and never will. And I never give money. Hey, I can barely afford to buy my own cheap wine.


3. I once paid a guy five bucks to help me and a group of my friends roll a huge boulder behind an SUV parked on Addison Avenue in Chicago. As you might predict, the hour was late and there was tippling involved.

It seemed really funny at the time.

4. I'm not a big sweet-eater, but I would trade one of my kidneys for chocolate-covered cherries. Fortunately, my son is aware of this and usually gets them for me for my birthday and Christmas every year, and still have both of my kidneys.

5. I nearly voted for a Republican once. In the 1990 election, Republican Illinois governor candidate Jim Edgar bucked his own party, which was in the process of trying to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice candidates, and declared himself emphatically pro-choice. The Democratic candidate, Neil Hartigan, for whatever reason, waffled on the issue. Edgar was always a moderate within his party, and it didn't hurt that he'd gone to my college.

I never got a chance to make the decision; a construction job I was working at that day went overtime and I didn't get to the polling place in time to vote. It's one of the few times since 1984 that I didn't vote.

Edgar won that election, even without my vote. And I've never even been tempted to vote for a Republican since then.

6. One of my favorite movies is True Believer, which starred James Woods, Robert Downey, Jr. and Kurtwood Smith. Everything about it-- the story, the performances, the cinematography-- just grab me. I've never met anyone who even put it in their top ten. I've watched it easily twenty times.

7. I lived for the Monkees' television show when I was a kid. I wanted to be Mike Nesmith, hat and all.

Unfortunately, my dreams of rock and roll stardom are fading away as I slide into middle age. Unless, of course, Monica lets me do guest vocals on Heart and Soul on her upcoming R and B remake of Huey Lewis and the News' classic Sports album. I might have a chance then.