Tag - you're it!

Tagging season is in full swing and I've been tagged by two fine artists this week.  Alice Thompson and Susan Beauchemin both honored me with this distinction.

This is a fun way to get to know your blogger friends in art! The rules of this great game are:

1. Put a link in your posting to the person who tagged you.

2. List 7 unusual things about yourself.

3. Tag 7 other bloggers at the end of your post and comment on their blogs to let them know.

These are my seven;

1.  I can recite Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest” word for word.  Once upon a time I went for light treatments for a skin problem I was having, which required me to stand naked in a tall cylinder filled with tubes of UV lamps for 30 minutes at a time. There is not much to do in there but contemplate life. To pass the time I would recite the play out loud. I nearly got up to Act II before the timer went off.    I can only imagine what the nurses in the office thought listening to me arguing with myself in a pronounced British accent thusly:

Jack. How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

Algernon. Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

Jack. I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

Algernon. When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins. [Rising.]

Jack. [Rising.] Well, that is no reason why you should eat them all in that greedy way. [Takes muffins from Algernon.]

Algernon. [Offering tea-cake.] I wish you would have tea-cake instead. I don’t like tea-cake.

Jack. But I hate tea-cake.

Algernon. Why on earth then do you allow tea-cake to be served up for your guests? What ideas you have of hospitality!

2.  I love to eat spicy food that mere mortals dare not.  Wilbur Scoville consults me for heat ratings on peppers.  It must be the endorphin rush from the heat, like a runner's high.  That said, I find those silly XXX hot sauces like Endorphin Rush to be nasty bitter extracts.  I like taste with my heat, which leads into tidbit number 3.

3.   I am an avid cook.  I do the lion’s share of the cooking in our house, my wife does the baking.  Baking is science, cooking is art.  Don’t get me wrong, my wife, Susan, is a great cook, too.  Baking requires precise measurements for things to do what they are supposed to do and that’s not my way.  My maternal grandfather was a professional pastry chef and explained precise measures to me as a boy as he poured baking powder or salt into the palm of his hand.  Years of practice taught him to know what a teaspoon of whatever looked like.  Where measuring is concerned, I am a palm of the hand guy myself.  

4.  I’m gay -- Well, maybe not actually gay.  I often listen to show tunes or vintage disco while painting.  Lately it’s been “High School Musical.”  How many straight men over the age of fifty do that?  My mother,  an aspiring actress, would wake me for school every day with her best Debbie Reynolds rendition of “Good Morning, good morning, we talked the whole night through. Good morning, good morning to you...” from "Singing in the Rain.” Of course I couldn’t really be gay, aside from the obvious choice of the gender of my partner; I dress like a biker (or a beatnik) and have the body of Balzac.  One of my models likes to rub my tummy for good luck while whispering under her breath, “Buddha Belly.”  This brings me to number 5.

5.  I slept with David Hasselhoff.  Well, maybe not actually slept with him, it was more of a sleepover.  When I was a small boy, my parents were very good friends with his parents, Joe and Dolores Hasselhoff.   (My mother pronounced their name Hazelhoff, as in witch hazel, back then.) When my parents would visit Joe and Dolores, they would pack my sisters and me in the car with our PJ’s.  Eventually we and the Hasselhoff kids would fall asleep watching TV waiting for our parents to finish playing Canasta or whatever parents did in the fifties.  I haven't seen him in fifty years.  It’s a pity we lost touch, I know he rides a Harley and I’d love to go on a ride with him sometime.

6.  My mother was an ailurophobe, I am an ailurophile.  I didn’t grow up with cats but now I couldn’t imagine my life without them.  But then anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that.  J’embrasse mon chat sur la bouche.

7.  I suffer from terrible stage fright.  Painfully shy as a small boy, my mother thought the stage might help bring me out of my shell and enlisted me in a summer stock production of “Rumpelstiltskin,” where I played a peasant.  I did get to wear a cool costume, but seeing all those people looking at me freaked me out. I was an acolyte at my church for four years, which petrified me, but I kept on despite myself because I loved the robes.  The theatre is in my blood and in high school I became involved in set design and construction.  I did a bunch of scene painting for Peabody Opera Theatre back in the 80’s.  To this day I love to wear costumes. On any given day I either look like Maynard Krebs or a Hell's Angel.  But if it’s Oktoberfest, the lederhosen comes out.  Renaissance Festival?  No problem. Christmas?  Ho, Ho, Ho.  Indeed I have so many fencing shirts, capes and waistcoats hanging in my closet, the cleaning people are beginning to wonder about me (see number 4).  

My 7 victims, er tags are:

Diane Hoeptner

Todd Bonita

Jeff Mahorney

John K Harrell

Sherry DeGhelder

Kay Crain

Joanne Giesbrecht

I don't know if I mentioned this, but we are designing and building a new house/studio which is really eating into my painting time.  Hopefully tomorrow will see me at the easel.