Okay, okay! Not sure if I can come up with 20 things you may not know about me (especially if you’ve read this journal regularly the over the past year) but I’ll give it a shot and try not to repeat anything. Take your pick in laying the blame for this: Dawn, Tony or RAC.
1. I skipped the first two weeks of all of my classes my senior year in High School. I lied my way back into all but one, my Health class, a half-year requirement. Took in the final semester and had to take my final on a different day thanks to a schedule conflict. The test was misplaced and not graded and the day before graduation, at rehearsal, I was told I wasn’t graduating. They found it later that day and everything worked out but I was as scared as I’d ever been for those few hours.
2. I was on the Winter Track team that year. Hurdles and the 400m relay. Nearly blacked out during my first relay competition. Went from 1st to 5th in my first hurdles event after tripping over the last hurdle. The assistant coach was also my Meterology teacher (half-year elective, anyone?) and gave 5 points towards the final grade for every individual medal won. I won two medals. I got a 75 in the class. (Side note: He was also a Jets fan, his stated reason for letting me back into his Oceanography class after missing two weeks, per #1.)
3. I smoked weed for the first time that year, in the courtyard where most people openly smoked cigarettes. This was Lakeland High School, the school I was uprooted from Mt. Vernon for at the end of the 11th grade because it had better test scores and was in “a better environment.” Translation: white neighborhood.
4. I turned down a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts (film) in 1987 to concentrate on being a full-time Jehovah’s Witness.
5. My first roommate after I left home (and the JW’s) in 1988 had a girlfriend that was on Pan Am’s Flight 108 that crashed in Lockerbie that year. We had a Christmas party planned for that weekend and she was to come down for it and stay for the week.
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