8 Things

StinkyLulu has tagged me with the "8 things" meme that's currently sweeping the blogosphere, which goes as follows:

THE RULES
1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to tag and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Now here's the thing: One of the reasons I don't do a lot of personal talking on this blog is that I'm a) very shy, and b) not very interesting. I'm always more than happy to express my opinions about other things, but I don't talk about myself much. Still, we'll see what we can come up with.

1. One of the chief perks of being gay is not having children. I don't actually hate the little critters as much as I sometimes pretend to, but I like them better when I can give them back to their parents.

2. I hate having my picture taken.

3. For a non-professional musician/actor -- and someone with limited talent in either area -- I have performed in some prestigious halls, having sung at Carnegie Hall (with a large chorus, but hey, it still counts), acted at the Mark Taper Forum (one of LA's major professional theaters), and performed at the Comedy Store.

4. I crashed into Ann Miller, nearly knocking her over, during a theatrical intermission. I started to apologize, but she held up her hand to stop me, bellowed, "Young man, it will take a lot more than that to knock me down!," and swept back into the theater.

5. I don't eat my vegetables. French fries and mashed potatoes, baked beans every now and then, but that's about it. (Do corn chips count as a vegetable?)

6. I believe that The Wizard of Oz is the most overrated movie in history, mostly because I hate Dorothy. Here's a girl who spends the first twenty minutes whining because she doesn't have any friends and nothing ever happens and life is so dull that it's in black and white, then along comes the hurricane and whisks her off to Oz where she makes lots of friends and has exciting adventures and the world is in color, and now it's "I wanna go back to Kaaaaansas!" Having gone from Kansas to Oz myself (well, Vermont to Los Angeles, but it's essentially the same thing), I can safely say that no one with a lick of sense ever wants to go back to Kansas.

7. When listening to classical music, I prefer large forces to small -- choruses to soloists, symphonies to string quartets. I do, however, have a weakness for percussion ensembles.

8. As a child, I always believed that I would die young, and am somewhat astonished to find myself still here at 43.