A Wider Net

Thanks to Sue Pelletier tagging me, I am obligated to share 8 things you may not know about me. When did this meme all start? It’s the blogging equivalent of a chain email but without the promise of ultimate riches or karma. It’s supposed to be a random list, and that rubs my marketing & communications sensibility the wrong way.

Anyhow, here goes:

1. I own a (musical) keyboard, an electric guitar, and a tin whistle. I am as fast-fingered as I am musically untalented, making for a consistently awful listening experience.
2. I seem to be two notches above half-bad at the video game Rock Band. Who needs real instruments, anyway? (My gamertag is “Fool Throttle”)
3. My first record album, that wasn’t a hand-me-down, was “Boston”, my first 8-track was Kiss: “Alive!”, my first cassette was “Blizzard of Ozz” and my first CD was the BSO playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on Telarc. I have no idea what my first MP3 was. I’m now a neo-classical progressive metal junkie. Go figure.
4. I was once asked, by one of the biggest event impresarios in the world, to make a laser effect that was so huge that it made the Japanese audience think of Hiroshima. Years later, I was asked to create the illusion of the Firebird hovering over the walls of Jerusalem. Sometimes people take a twisted view of entertainment.
5. I have written several plays, one-acts, and a musical libretto. Half were performed. I miss doing that.
6. I have a t-shirt and a tennis ball autographed by Ivan Lendl, whom I admired when I used to play a ton of tennis. I have, in fact, more autographed Lendl merchandise than I do friends who know who he is.
7. My favorite book is “The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks. It was written and published almost simultaneously with the original theatrical release of Star Wars, and is almost the same story (except with elves and wizards). I am convinced Terry Brooks and George Lucas are the same person. If I ever get to meet George Lucas again, I intend to ask him.
8. I was once part of a team that had to build a house, or at least all the pieces of a house, while riding on the back of a huge flatbed truck in a parade, using only colonial-era hand tools. I was 9. I made shingles out of cedar using a drawknife. I still remember the smell and the odd taste of lemonade in a pewter cup dispensed from an oak barrel.

I tag: Andrew Vande Moere, Rob Larsen, Scott Kiekbusch, Ilya Vedrashko, Steve Paine, Margaret Desjardins, and Bill DeRouchey. Close enough.