The Five

My friend Kelly, over at Property of Kelly recently tagged me, a blog game in which the taggees are required to list five random things about themselves. I've sat on it a few days and this is what I've finally come up with:

• When I was in kindergarten in Nampa, Idaho back in 1976, my mother, sister and I shared a big corner house with the poltergeist of little girl, who the neighbor kids insisted had been murdered in our basement. She moved things around, repeatedly knocked the same painting off the wall, played with the toys in our closet and once even scared my mom and her best friend by screaming outside each of the doors during a blizzard. The police were summoned but were unable to find footprints in the snow or any sign that someone had been in our yard at all.
  
• The first girl I ever kissed was Marie Osmond.
• After an expensive dinner of tapas I threw up all over myself while attending a performance of a Pulitzer Prize winning play, Seven Guitars, at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. I only made it through one guitar and spent the rest of the first act both puking in the bathroom and huddling in my wet clothes outside on the curb in frigid January weather a block off of Lake Michigan. The next morning one of my co-workers asked how the play went and said she'd heard that someone had "decimated the men's bathroom." There are three million people in the city of Chicago and word of my misadventure had spread far and wide.
  
• I literally slept through a portion of a phone interview for a job I hadn't even applied for. Two weeks later the company offered me the position and I've been there ever since.
• I once tried to murder a woman on a cross-country train trip from Boston to southeast Idaho. She'd kept me up all night across New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio but as we entered Indiana I couldn't take it any more. During the course of her rambling she mentioned she'd been a nun, a Mormon, had joined up with Jim Jones and would've sipped the kool-aid had she not escaped a month earlier, was allergic to many things, including most fruits and berries, nuts, colognes and perfumes as well as soaps, detergents and other cleaning products. When I finally had a chance I slipped away to the bathroom to freshen up, dousing myself in Obsession and returned to my seat figuring she'd either be forced to move or die. I sat down next to her and when she got a whiff of me and asked what it was, I suffered one of the most crushing defeats of my life when I learned I was wearing the one cologne that wouldn't kill her. Go figure.