16 or so semi-interesting things about ME

Perhaps you too have been a victim of the current Facebook vogue for this exercise: you list some random stuff about yourself (25, supposedly, but I lost interest partway through), then you tag 25 others (!!) who perpetuate the process.

It was fun, actually. And since I wasted an hour of time yesterevening typing all this up, it seems only right to foist it upon unsuspecting readers at this site, too. Enjoy!

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1. Not until I was nearly out of my teens did I realize that not all people hear voices.

2. You can divide people into two large groups by asking whether they loved Alice in Wonderland in childhood or thought it was freakishly grotesque. Guess which half I fell into.

3. Likewise with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Some readers think Joyce’s writing perfectly reflects the flow of internal human thought; others reject this and think Woolf is the better reflection. Clearly not everybody sounds the same way to themselves. Me, I’m with Virginia.

4. In the late 20th century, my father turned up in New Orleans after a complete absence of 35 years. I haven’t "had time" to reestablish connections (nor has he).

5. At a very early age, I decided it was better to be spanked than to be ignored. Is that true of all kids?

6. Whenever I watch Mad Men, I find myself envying Betty Draper. Not her daily psychopathology, just her agoraphobia. Why can’t I stay at home all day and clean and cook?

7. This has been discussed on my blog already, but: biofeedback machines don’t respond to me. They sit there as though I’m brain dead. It has been suggested more than once that I may only be a visitor to this time-space continuum.

8. Since I was too young to be able to articulate it, I have had a terrible fear of death and of annihilation; this is my primary motivation for getting anything done on this miserable planet.

9. Years ago my Cousin Tabitha and I got so sick on rum and coke that to this day it nauseates me to smell either.

10. Believe it or not, I was alarmingly skinny until I turned 28.

11. A mania: I believe that if I don’t think about my loved ones before leaving home every day, something terrible may happen to them.

12. Recent development: after 14 years in L.A. with no problem, here in pacific Oregon I’ve acquired a fear of driving on the freeway.

13. Watch out, I can see your aura. Really. But unlike psychics, I have no idea what the colors signify.

14. Fun you can have with your aura: if you mentally imagine pulling it into your body, you’ll become all but unnoticeable to other people, for some reason.

15. Technically I’m hermaphroditic, in that I carry vestigial oviducts in my body. Before you cart me off to the circus, however, one man out of every six has this condition, according to my doctor.

16. My first clue that I was a tad light in the loafers came at the age of four or five, while watching Bonanza. Pernell Roberts showed up all dressed in black – in leather pants, yet, who dressed those boys, anyway? -- and I started feeling all shimmery.

NameGame Redux

What’s in a name, you ax? More than ever nowadays, in our litigious society.

To wit: I belong to a Portland service organization called the Drammy Awards. The fourteen of us who serve on the Drammy Committee see countless productions all year round with an eye to designating various aspects of these productions as “outstanding” in their respective categories. We are volunteers. We’re not paid to do this work; we do it because we love the theater and want to provide our community with a way to pay homage to the extraordinary work that happens here every year. Every year it’s a struggle to scrape together enough money to cover the costs of the Awards ceremony, and it is unquestionably totally worth the effort.

SO. Imagine our surprise last fall when we were contacted by attorneys representing the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Inc., “in connection with the protection of it's [sic] intellectual property” -- better known to most of us as the Grammys.

After some paragraphs explaining what happens to people who mess with NARAS, they get to the point:

In view of the foregoing, the Committee’s use of the nearly identical mark DRAMMY for award services may constitute trademark infringement, unfair competition and false endorsement under federal, state and common law. This is especially true because the DRAMMY mark appears to have been contrived to resemble the GRAMMY mark.

I don’t actually know what “the DRAMMY mark” means.

The letter goes on to say that in order to settle this “unfair competition” without litigation, the Drammy Committee needs to answer a few questions and to do it within 10 days or else (the customary threats followed). The attorneys demanded that we supply them with:

1) Any particular meaning of the word "DRAMMY";

2) Why the Committee adopted "DRAMMY" for it's [sic] awards;

3) The audience for the DRAMMY Awards;

4) When the DRAMMY Awards were created; and

5) Whether the DRAMMY Awards are televised.

Once we stopped laughing, we had to ask ourselves how committed we were to the term “Drammy.” What if this was our chance to change it? How about throwing the question open to the theater community and asking them to rename the Awards?

Disappointingly, we never got that far. We responded politely but not cravenly to the Recording Academy’s interrogatories, and then……never heard from them again. Evidently the Academy’s goons realized they would need to look further than Portland to justify their salaries.

We’re not the only ones to suffer from overlawyering, of course. Portland City Commissioner and now mayoral candidate Sam Adams recently heard from Samuel Adams Beer, the Boston Beer Company, which demanded that the real live Sam Adams remove his name from his own campaign site’s URL, citing trademark infringement. Cited as precedential was that the company had been calling itself “Sam Adams” since 1984. Never mind that the Councilman had been called the same name since birth.

Maybe I’d do well to stake a claim for my own Internet domain, before it’s too late. A quick Google search reveals several Mead Hunters besides myself — one in his infancy, and two different dead ones. There’s also a respected philosopher named Hunter Mead, and a noted Australian bird watcher named Derek Mead-Hunter. There’s even an elaborate computer game, World of Warcraft, with a character named Mead Hunter who restocks his arsenal at a mysterious fortress called “The Armory”.

And in the teeny, tiny theater universe alone, there is Mame Hunt, Laural Meade and Laurel Hunter. In the past I’ve gotten letters, emails and phone calls intended for each of these ladies. I once fielded an angry call from a guy who was certain I was scamming him; he said he “knew for a fact” that Mead Hunter was a woman.

So names give us plenty of room for confusions and contusions. Just ask all the Monroes and Madisons growing up right now. I used to think that gender ambiguity was a hassle; now I think it's actually.....convenient....

Though perhaps the Grammy's laywers would disagree.