Over the holiday I got blog tagged by Colette in this ever-expanding game of 5 things, so I'm going to follow through and post five things that most people probably do not know about me:
1. I was one of four lead singers of a 15 piece funk band, the Hiram L. Weinstein Memorial Funk Project with the Subsonic Analog Horns and the Ivory Tower of Power Rythm Section. We played a lot of Parliament, Fishbone, James Brown, and other booty-shaking classics. Dig around enough and you'll find an embarrassing pic of me getting up for the down stroke.
2. I was in the Peace Corps for two years in the Horn of Africa (Decamhare, Eritrea, to be precise) and I've taken a goat from bleating to lunch with just a table knife. FYI: He was tasty.
3. My wife, Cheryl, is a professional food writer and recipe developer, and she's been trained as a chef and worked in a Viennese pastry shop. So my expanding waistline is purely her fault -- I eat only to support her career, really.
4. In high school I was a quite competitive in debate, particularly policy debate or cross-ex, which involves reading lots of cards (little pieces of evidence culled from publications) as quickly as possible. I went to a bunch of debate camps and competed in dozens of tournaments all over the United States. Of course, I've grown past all that now and I'm no longer an argumentative contrarian. Supposedly.
5. I've been in more than a dozen musicals and plays over the years, including Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and the Dentist in the Little Shop of Horrors. However, watching the video of myself dancing around and overacting in those shows now makes my gums itch.
I don't want to break the chain (bad luck, you know) so I've tagged 5 other bloggers. Let's see who takes the bait... Sanjana Hattotuwa, Diane Levin, Jeff Seul, Josh Weiss, and Beth Noveck.