I’ve been tagged by Brody to confess eight things few people know about me.  Here goes, only because he knows where I live and has threatened to make that information public if I don’t cooperate.

1. I have a sister named Lindy who’s five years older than me, lives in Texas, is beautiful and only 4’ 11”.  And she tortures me by singing her horrid rendition of Somewhere Over The Rainbow.  Ouch.

2. I started making music by playing the alto sax in the middle school band.  I was twelve and I was last chair – the worst in the class.

3. My nickname as a kid was “Bozo.” As in the clown.  My mother thought I was funny.  I didn’t realize how degrading this nickname was outside family circles until she called me this in front of some friends in high school.  Therapy probably would have been a good idea at that point but I started writing songs instead.

4. I can rope stuff.  With a lasso.  Seriously.

5. I once bought a car by stealing baseball and football cards from grocery stores, forging the names of famous people on them and reselling them to card dealers.  I’m not proud.  But I did it.  All for a Fiat Spider Convertible.

6. I worked at Chick-fil-A in high school because I had a crush on a girl there named Jennifer.  She quit not long after my first day and I stayed on, having developed an addiction to the food.  I still have the pricing of every menu item in 1990 memorized.

7. I played soccer, halfback mostly, for ten years.  The shin guards de-emphasized my gigantic knees.

8. When I was a kid I didn’t want to be a musician.  I wanted to be a cartoonist.  I developed a comic book in the third grade about a hairball of an alien who moved to earth and went to public school.