Seven Things

Nat over at "...and sometimes why" tagged me for this, but due to the nature of this blog I'm changing it slightly to reveal 7 weird/strange culture-related things about myself.

The rules are as follows:
# Link to the person who tagged you
# Post the rules on your blog.
# Share seven random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.
# Tag seven random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
# Leave a comment on their blogs so that they know they have been tagged.

1.) I've always enjoyed the Muppets. That's not so strange. A lot of people my age grew up with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, The Dark Crystal, and so on. No, the strange thing is that I once watched a puppet porno movie. It was not in any way affiliated with Jim Henson, but there were definitely some Muppet-type beings and they were definitely involved in some soft-core porn with real people. And I saw it in a theater. With my sister. It was supposed to be a funny experience, but it turned out to be very awkward and we kind of agreed to never mention it again. But hey, you asked for weird.

2.) I have read The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens at least three times. A lot of people have reread Dickens, but not this particular novel. That's because it's generally considered to be one of his worst. I ended up reading it so many times because I did my English thesis on it, and I would say that it is certainly not his worst novel (that would be Hard Times, as far as I'm concerned). Not only have I read the book itself several times, but I've read most of the original manuscript (on microfiche) in Chuckie D.'s handwriting. Luckily it was one of his earlier works, before his handwriting went from mere chicken scratch to complete illegibility. For the record, I only have 1.5 Dickens novels to go before I've read all of them. The ".5" is there because he never finished his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I am also one of a handful of people to have seen a performance of the unfinished opera Dickens attempted to write. That went unfinished because Chuck realized it was really, really awful and he wasn't at all cut out for opera writing.

3.) I have read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, seen the movie, and seen a play based on the novel. The first two aren't so strange, and both are quite good. The play, I believe, has not been performed all that much, and certainly not the way I saw it. It was performed at my alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and it was an "experimental" production between the drama department and the computer science department. I mostly remember some guy running in place with a big screen behind him showing what looked like one of those old school screen savers depicting a walk through a labyrinth. I also remember thinking it was terrible and that I probably should have gotten drunk before viewing it.

4.) When the original Star Wars trilogy was re-released in the theaters well over ten years ago now (yikes!), I happened to be in Germany when Jedi came out. I went to see it with some fellow Americans--they spoke very little German and I didn't speak a word (this was a decade before meeting meine Frau). Shockingly, one of my friends had never seen the movie before, and it was dubbed into German, so she was lost. Luckily, I pretty much had it memorized by that point in my life, so I was able to quietly "translate" most of the dialog for her so she knew what was happening. I also learned what a lazy/clever writer George Lucas was during this particular viewing. When Yoda dies, he tells Luke "Luke, Vader ist dein Vater." How very redundant. "Vader" and "Vater" are pronounced pretty much identically in German, so this big revelation couldn't have been all that surprising to the Germans, who must have had their suspicions about "Darth Father" from the beginning of the series.

5.) The very first concert I ever saw was Arlo Guthrie, in a field under a starry summer night sky in very rural Ossippee, NH. To this day, after many, many other shows and concerts, it's still one of my favorites. Not only did Arlo sing "Alice's Restaurant", which he very rarely performed live at that point, but he added another 8 minutes or so to the already 20-minute song. The extra "verse" of the song was about the Nixon tapes, and what a strange coincidence it was that the missing minutes from the tapes were nearly equal to the number of minutes in "Alice's Restaurant." Awesome.

6.) My best friend's great aunt is Ann B. Davis, who played Alice on The Brady Bunch. She had a lobster dinner at our house once. She was a very nice, down-to-earth woman, and I really wish I could find the picture I have of myself with her. If I ever find it, I'll stick it up here. She's the closest thing I have to an acquaintance in the biz.

7.) I have seen many famous pieces of art in person, at the MFA here in Boston, at the Met and MoMA in New York, at all of the big London museums, and all over Florence. Yet of all the famous pieces I've seen, my favorite is probably still Grant Wood's American Gothic, which I saw at a special Wood exhibit in the tiny art museum in Worcester, MA. I guess I find this strange for a couple reasons. First, though Wood is considered fairly famous by American standards (his name is on the Iowa quarter!), he's hardly in league with Picasso or Monet or a number of other artists who's work I've seen first hand. Then there's the fact that this particular painting has become so iconic that I don't think most people even think of it as art anymore. It's kind of become a caricature of itself, kind of like Munch's The Scream. Finally, I don't like to think about how my enjoyment of this picture reflects on my taste in art. I mean, it's really not that good, is it? I can't even say why I like it exactly, other than that I come from a long line of farmers, so maybe I feel some kind of vague agricultural link to the simple folk depicted here. Whatever. My deal with art is that I know what I like and I know what I don't like. For reasons I can't quite explain, I really like American Gothic.


As for tagging other people...well, rules are made to be broken, right? The other contributors to this blog are welcome to to do the 7 things on this blog or their other blogs, as is Dr. Potatohead and the folks over at Clyde Squid's other blog. That's at least 7 people. Links to those blogs are easily accessible from this blog. After this long-ass post, I'm feeling too lazy/tired to do up links and commenting.