100 Interesting Things About Me -- The First Ten

My mother says it runs in the family, this habit of ours of meeting people and being at events that are often thought of as important or notable.  Who knows? There are some wild tales in family legend.

So, we begin...

1. I was born in the original land of fruits and nuts, as the old joke goes--Marin County, California--from which came hot tubs, peacock feather massages, and the term Newage-- located in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, across the bay from San Francisco. I was born in San Rafael General Hospital, in the shadows of Muir Woods, but we lived in San Anselmo, then Novato.


2. I am a descendant of pilgrims John Winslow and Mary Chilton Winslow, through my maternal great-great-grandmother, Mary Francis Davis Cline. It is through her that we are also descended from Matuoka "Pocahontas," aka Rebecca Rolfe, through her son, Thomas, born to her and husband, John Rolfe. She died at age 21 in Gravesend, England after having been presented at court and acting as an ambassador to the English Court from her father, Powhatan, the Algonquin Chief. She remains one of my enduring heroes.

Husband, Chris, is the family genealogist and has traced these two branching lines back quite a way to include royalty and even Marcus Antonius of Cleopatra fame. But then he found something that was the coolest of all. We are 27th cousins, once removed. Our shared relation? The Viking chieftain, Halfdan the Old and Stingy (I'm NOT making this up, you know…), who was known for being…er…old…and stingy. So, we are now a true Southern family: cousins! Please don't tell my mom. Hahaha!

3.  When I was four, we moved to New York State from California. When I was six we moved to Merriewold Park, a private country club for theater people from New York City. My father was the superintendent. We knew dancer and choreographer, Agnes de Mille Prude and her family. I was one of her son, Jonathan's, playmates when they came upstate from the city. We also knew Mr. George Abbott, the Broadway producer. My father designed and built him an Oriental home in Merriewold. Next to the Park was the Shoo-Foo-Den, a Japanese home that had once been the Japanese exhibit at an international exposition in St. Louis in 1904. I had an adventure there which I will share with you here on Gather in due time.

4. When I was eleven, we moved to southern New Jersey, in the Pine Barrens, to a private club on the Great Egg Harbor River called Sunshine Park. It was a famous nudist resort, founded by Daniel Boone descendent, Dr. Isley D. Boone as part of the naturist movement of the nineteen-thirties. We had come down there from our Catskills home in Monticello, New York to visit my father's business partner and his family, who were staying at the Park in a rented cabin for the summer. Imagine my surprise when my parents stopped at the entrance to the Park and told my brother and me what kind of country club we were going to! The first nude person I saw was my friend, Judy, then, shockingly, her mother, who was a lady of size, who ran to greet us, with flapping in extremus. [grin] By the end of the week we all were blissfully unaware that we were running around in our birthday suits. Because it was a family/couples-only resort, there were customs which didn't permit any but the most innocent touching, even between married folk. Like the other kids there, we grew up with a respect for our bodies as our personal property, and with all-over tans. It was there that I met the late photographer, Diane Arbus. The tale awaits telling, unless you read of it in last May's The New Yorker article about me. ;-)

5.  While in South Jersey, I was a topless waitress, a hot-walker, a stripper, and I sold drugs.

Say wha….?? Oh…you want an explanation?

While still living at Sunshine Park, my first summer job was as a waitress at the dining hall in 1963. I was thirteen. I learned arm-service and all the wonderful old-fashioned skills and diner slang from my boss, the Park manager's wife. I wore a white, ruffled apron, and a smile. That autumn, we bought a split level home in Harding Lakes in Mays Landing. While I didn't keep it a secret, I didn't volunteer that I had lived at the Park, mostly because I was in high school and trying to fit in, as do all teens.

As part of my 4-H horse club, I walked race horses at the Atlantic City Race Course after they ran or breezed. The job is called being a hot-walker. I came home from the Morning Glory Club at the track one Saturday morning and told my mom with great excitement, "Mom! I'm gonna be a hot-walker!" She, peeling carrots in the sink, without looking around, replied, "Over my dead body you will!" She relented after I explained.

Stripper: a person who uses opaque ink to block out imperfections in the photo-negatives in preparation for burning printing plates for offset printing.  It is one of the unusual duties I learned when I worked for The Laureate Press, a small publishing firm and printing press in Egg Harbor City. I did it all, from bindery equipment to copy editing to typography to paste-up and mechanicals to photography. Oh, and editing. It was a great introduction to the publishing field.

I sold drugs, without shame, at the Court Pharmacy in Mays Landing, under the watchful eye of registered pharmacist, Mr. R. Treidler, who was a great boss. The drug store is now a flower shop.

6.  While I was the editor-in-chief of my college literary magazine, we printed an issue wherein a short story had the "F" word. It caused such a stir, it being 1971, in a rural part of the nation, that it even made the local papers. Citing protection under the First Amendment, I and the dean in charge of our efforts refused to recall the issue, nor did we issue an apology.  It was the first, but sadly not the last time I was subjected to irrational condemnation of literary license. I have no regrets for sticking to my guns on the issue.

7.   As a child I attended Catholic masses with friends, and Saturday morning Schul with my Jewish friends. My parents were recovering from having been Jehovah's Witnesses in California, and not active in any church. Dad was raised Lutheran, and Mom was raised by her Christian Scientist grandmother, so I came from an entirely ecumenical background. My mother, brother, and I were baptized in the Lutheran Church in the 1970's. By the time I was in college, I was looking into Eastern religions and at one time was a practicing Hindu, then a Buddhist. I tried on religions like some girls try on shoes, and I could never quite find the one that fit, though I have always had a strong spiritual streak. Finally, just a year before my husband returned home from a two year mission with the Mormon Church (Latter-Day Saints), I was baptized in the LDS Church.  We were married nearly thirty years ago, in the Oakland, California Mormon Temple, on May 22, 1976. I am no longer active in the LDS Church, though Chris remains faithful and supports my spiritual quest with much understanding and patience. We remain best of friends, lovers, and partners in laughter.

8.  Chris and I lived in southern Spain for six years. He was stationed at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Rota, which is a treaty-leased command aboard the Spanish Armada base in Andalucia. Our first home, in Fuentabravia, was in a triplex built from a 250+ years old stone villa on a dozen acres of land with fruit trees and farm animals. Our son, Erik, was born at the base hospital in Rota in 1983. Just down the road was El Puerto de Santa Maria, from which Christopher Columbus sailed on his second voyage to the New World, with conscript crew members taken from the Puerto jail, which is still standing. Our second home was an apartment on the Playa Castillo (Castle Beach) in downtown Rota. We had a balcony on the Bay of Cadiz, and an elevator straight down to the beach. I had a maid, and our rent was ridiculously small. For fun we often explored castles and Roman ruins. I miss Spain and her people every single day.

9. I have been online since 1989, when we returned from Spain and my father-in-law gave us a modem and a CompuServe membership. I worked there as a system operator (SysOp) for eleven years. I first worked on Modem Games Forum, then ran the first ever commercial head to head online gaming system, called the Modem to Modem Lobby (MTM Lobby). Finally, I helped install and put together World Community Forum, which was essentially four forums with machine translation software in four languages: German, French, Spanish, and English, all of which I read or speak. I was Executive Sysop there for the life of the forum, which was closed down after AOL bought CompuServe.

10. I am a baroness. No…not black leather and pointy boobs, silly! In the Medieval historical group the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. While we were stationed on Skaggs Island, near Sonoma, California, we founded a group in Napa and Sonoma called Vinhold. (Vineyards, get it?)  At any rate, since Anno Societatus VIII, we have been Baron Ahmed ibn Tr'bai and Baroness Aliste von Falkenhof. While currently not active in the local group in Pensacola, mostly because of my health, we have learned a great deal about the Middle Ages. Chris specializes in heraldry and I specialize in period food. On at least five occasions I have cooked, as "feastocrat," sumptuous banquets with as many as seven full removes. Each remove is a complete menu, from appetizers to main course. The feast runs three to four hours and includes a "court" with the "royalty" present, much merriment, dancing and music, and finally a surprise dessert called a subtlety. I once baked a tall, British style pie filled with dry rice, opened a hole at the bottom, drained out the rice, and inserted one of the live miniature rabbits we used for our magician shows. When the prince took off the lid of the pie, out jumped the rabbit. The princess, a little in her cups, exclaimed, "Did you bake that pie with that poor little bunny inside?" I had taken as my inspiration the nursery rhyme which depicted a medieval subtlety: "Sing a song of six-pence, a pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing. Wasn't that a dainty dish to bring before the king?" I'm sure they achieved their feat by the same manner of baking a blind pie.

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Whew…that's enough for this week. Next week the small stuff. (In theory…words just flow outta me like water some days).