REVEALED! Part 1

(First, if you didn't read yesterday's post yet, you may want to go there first, lest I ruin the huge, huge, pleasure you indubitably receive from reading my every word in exactly the order in which it was written. Ahem.)

Without further ado, the answers to yesterday's quiz! (UPDATED TO ADD: Um...some of them. Sorry, but I started this five hours ago and now it is getting late and I have to work tomorrow and I don't want to rush the rest of the stories and yes, yes, I admit I am a bit pleased that means that the final NaBloPoMo post is also taken care of, but that's not the real reason I'm doing this, you gotta believe me...)

1) True. My future roommates and I were looking at apartments in Chicago. Another friend was living in a women-only artist residential center at the time and called us to say that the center was having a fundraiser and Robert Downey, Jr. would be there as the celebrity auctioneer and would we like to come by? Hell to the yes, we said (or something that was hip slang at the time). So we all perched in one of the large windows of the courtyard, self-conscious because we were a) far less fancy than the attendees of the fundraiser under the best of circumstances, and b) having planned on perusing affordable apartments that day, this was hardly the best of circumstances. I'm pretty sure I had on lipstick, but that's all I can guarantee. T-shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors were the rest of my outfit. Precisely what you want to be wearing when meeting a cute celebrity manchild with a penchant for illegal activities. Anyway, he came in with his handler or whoever and just...sat on this big ol' couch, waiting for the fundraiser to begin. We all nonchalantly stared at him for a few minutes, before I finally said, "Well, this is stupid, we're here to meet him, let's meet him!" and walked over to basically acknowledge "Hi, we're staring at you, could you just meet us and get it over with?" He was, as I mentioned, terribly sweet and funny and did very little to discourage undying junior-high-girl-quality devotion, what with the big brown eyes and throaty laugh and all. And, after a few minutes of what I have no doubt was the most sparkling conversation in which he'd ever partaken, we stood up to go, and--allegedly--when I stood up, his eyes...traveled. My friend A-E, who was sitting on a chair across from us, said, "They kind of defy gravity, don't they?" (It's worth noting that I was 21 at the time. They did. Then.) Aaaannd...the rest is a blur. I'd be more mortified, but he relapsed and got sent back to jail a few weeks later, so I'm guessing that getting busted for checking out the boobs on some chick ranked rather low on his list of embarrassing transgressions, right below being in The Shaggy Dog.

2) True. When we lived in Chicago, we ran a small theatre company, and the annual fundraiser always included at least one puppet number. So a few years ago when MOTH's agent asked him, "You don't happen to know a female puppeteer who sings, do you?" MOTH was all, "Lemme make a call." And next thing I knew, I had an audition for Sesame Street, which happened to fall on my 30th birthday. Sadly, I kinda bombed the audition, because it came up just as we were leaving for Burning Man, and a week in the dusty desert had thrashed my voice, plus I didn't get the audition materials until the day we came back, which was 24 hours before the audition. So I didn't do well, and was really, really upset about the whole chance-of-a-lifetime-blown thing, until I stopped by my friend's apartment on the way back from the audition. I should probably mention that while we were out partying in the desert, Hurricane Katrina was happening. So my friend was watching the coverage of the Katrina refugees and I was suddenly quite humbled, realizing that I really had nothing to complain about.

3) False. I started knitting right before my 30th birthday (and the fateful audition). My mom taught me. I was back visiting her and she wanted to know what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her I was wanting to learn how to knit. So she dredged up what she could remember, we bought a book and supplies, and for the next year or so we showed each other our unfinished projects. I have made some progress since then (read: have actually finished approximately five items in four years), but haven't picked up needles since the night before Tankbaby was born. Somewhere in this house there is the first half-inch of a hat for him.

4) True. I went with my first gay friends (hee--new from Fisher-Price: My First Gay), Matt and Dave, while we were visiting Matt's hometown. Matt was delighting in taking us wee sheltered Midwesterners into The Velvet Finger. I was stunned and overwhelmed, but managed to hold it together better than our friend Andrea, who was even more sheltered than me (she once had to ask me if what she'd done with a guy "counted as sex") began to quietly sing "Jesus Loves Me."


More tomorrow! Probably with more parentheticals!