Some People Call Me Wizpower

My parents routinely complain that I tell too many stories. While my father will humor me, my mother tends to avoid the phone. My brother, Michael, two years younger, openly admits that he hasn’t listened to me in years. I will agree that I do verge on the verbose – but a lot happens to me. Or, I do a lot that makes thing happen to me. Or, I was blessed with equal parts extroversion and affinity for substances, and thus tend to execute the sort of shenanigans typically reserved for movies.

But to blame these shenanigans on substances is not fair. Plenty happens during the daytime hours to warrant the claim that embarrassment knows no boundaries. By three years old I’d been kicked out of preschool (there was an incident with peanut butter, clarification to come), and by seven I had found a magic ring (aka bought for twenty five cents at one of those grocery store machines), had named myself Wizpower, and earnestly believed that like Peter Pan, the desire to stay young would enable me to simultaneously fly out of my window. Thankfully, my windows had screens on them, but that didn’t keep me from announcing to my first grade class one Friday that I would fly for show-and-tell and would everyone please arrange the desks in a cluster from which I could jump. When I, surprise surprise, didn’t actually take-off, and instead fell into the middle of the circle my classmates had formed, I sat down calmly and declared with the utmost sincerity, “I wore the wrong ring.”

Granted, at the time I was part of that experimental group (Connecticut, 1989-1990) already taking Ritalin, but I don’t think we can really blame drugs for that one.

Anyway.

You could say most of my life is funny, in retrospect. Sure, it’s been a fairly comfortable whirlwind of Connecticut lawns and Massachusetts boarding school and New York City after Vermont college, but I’ve never been one to “mesh” with other kids quite like my brother. He's a little politician, wooing family friends and grandparents and small children. All of these groups generally make me awkward, and when I'm awkward, I tend to tell stories, and these stories tend to be inappropriate for whatever context I currently inhabit. Maybe the lesbian thing sets me apart. Maybe the fact that I have no rhythm, or can’t parallel park, or pee the bed sometimes. No one knows for sure.