1. I was born in SoCal.
2. I try to get back to the beach (any California beach counts) once a year.
3. My first memory (I was 4 1/2) is of pulling up to our new house and sleeping out in the front yard our first night.
4. Because, as I recall, we didn't have the keys yet.
5. My second memory is of watching Donny and Marie (and his purple socks) in the basement of that split-level house.
6. On the deck of thathouse, I smashed a bee in my copy of "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street."
7. I still have that book and the bee guts are still there.
8. The next week, I felt something land on my head so I reached up to touch it and got stung.
9. That's karma, baby!
10. I sucked my thumb until kindergarten
11. I tried everything to stop it, the only thing that worked was putting tube socks on my arm at night and the fact that my mother bribed me with an enormous turquoise ring
12. It fell off my finger that first day.
13. I'm pretty sure it's still in the front lawn of that house and one day, I'd really like to take a metal detector over there and dig it up.
14. I rocked a great pair of boots and a vinyl dress coat (complete with fake fur-trimmed hood) in kindergarten.
15. I thought I was so Go-Go.
16. Even though I didn't know what that was.
17. In first grade, I had a crush on a boy named Johnny.
18. I remember this because he wrote me a note and I got caught with it.
19. That was my first brush with Public Embarrassment (also known as PE).
20. Then we moved to the Philippines, where I had a lot more "brushes" with PE.
21. For example, on my first day at school the teacher asked some girls to play with me.
22. They (knowingly) stood me on a red ant hill, told me to count to 20 and then try to tag them. Damn! those asian ants can really bite.
15. The read ants swarmed me, I screamed and the teacher ran me into the bathroom, stripped my lower half and hosed me down.
16. Welcome to the Philippines, thankyouverymuch!
17. I lived there 4 1/2 years (the rats there are as big as bushes, so that's a very long time).
18. Also, I was there when Marcos was. We didn't do fire drills, we did BOMB drills.
19. I swear to you that, in the 70s, the entire country (the parts I lived in) smelled like pee.
20. I spent 5th grade in 3 different schools, in two different countries, and two different states.
21. My 5th grade teacher in the Philippines was Mrs. Ester Fernando. She had fabulous Aquanet hair, stood 5 ft nothing, and wore orange nail polish on her one-inch nails. She was very cool.
22. I served as a Yearbook Photographer and my dad taught me how to develop film in our dark room. He was very cool.
23. My mom almost died of cancer. Long story short: she had a molar pregnancy, but my brother was born, lived one hour and then died. She did chemo (in the Philippines! in the 70s!)and was in the hospital for a long time. She's very brave and I admire her deeply.
24. Back in the states, I had the same 5th grade teacher as my Uncle Tom (10 years prior). People not so lovingly referred to her as"The Brink." Every girl in her class was required to crochet a granny squares afghan. She was very not cool and way past retirement.
25. However, I did manage to win my first writing contest. It was a slogan for Poison Control and the prize was a Roadrunner backpack. Winning slogan? Pesticide is for the bugs. That is what you call literary prowess.
How about you? Did you have any brushes with "PE"? What was your favorite outfit as a kid?
