9 Not-So-Important Things You Might Not Know About Me
One of those tell-us-something-weird-about-yourself games is getting passed around Facebook and I took the bait. I can’t say that any of these facts about me are really all that weird, but maybe they’re a little bit entertaining? And, anyway, it’s the first bitter cold day here in the Gateway to the West, despite the sunshine, and I could use the distraction. Here’s my list:
1. I can still moon walk.
2. I can also do that mime business pretty well–you know, acting like I’m trapped in a box, climbing up an invisible ladder, blah, blah, blah.
3. I know how to weld.
4. I was an extra in the movie “Biloxi Blues” when I was 15. The scene of me (walking with my younger sister) is at the end of the movie and you can only see our backs and only for a second. My husband was also an extra (it was filmed in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, his hometown), but we wouldn’t meet each other for another five years.
5. To my knowledge, I have no famous relatives, but my Grandpa Mitchell worked in lumber in Arkansas when he was young and he worked alongside a fella who went by the name John Cash. That’d be Johnny Cash to you. THE Johnny Cash.
6. I have been married for more years than I have not. And to the same guy, oddly enough.
7. If you ever see my fingers twitching, that’s because I’m silently typing. I developed the very weird habit of basically transcribing conversations around me after I had typing class in high school. As a result of all this practice, I can type (with an actual keyboard) 100+ words per minute.
8. My first car was a 1973 (?) Volkswagen Beetle that my dad bought for $300. It was painted…wait for it…Playboy Pink.
9. I once had a cat named Yellow Kitty who knew how to answer the phone (this was in the pre-cordless phone, pre-cell phone days). When it rang, he would knock the receiver off the hook and meow. He had excellent verbal skills and–I swear–also called me “mama.”
And that’s my list. Other things I might have included are: 1) I have never had a broken bone. 2) I have had some spectacular falls that should’ve resulted in a broken bone. 3) I grew up on a farm where I was the part of the 8th generation to live there. 4) Turns out, we were the last generation, too. Neither myself nor any of my siblings or cousins remain part of the farm. 5) In the mid-seventies, my dad once sat beside a man on a flight to Memphis who he said was really nice and chatty and asked him a lot of questions about himself and his life. The man then told my dad he was running for office in Arkansas and introduced himself. His name was Bill Clinton. Arkansas was then and is now a very, very small world.