Back in the fall of 2006, Connie Reece plowed me out of her memory and Googled me off the web and we reconstituted a friendship started nearly 25 years ago. We had a digital reunion. I'd been writing a blog for Big River Advertising in Richmond, VA, and Connie was starting up a blog for AnthonyBarnum PR in Austin, TX. It didn’t take long for two old Southern storytellers to start Blogabillies with the hopes of making a few people laugh as we celebrate our Southern heritage and humor.
Last week Connie told me that I have been tagged for the Five Things meme. She's the one who tagged me, so I guess she should know. She swears it's a good thing, and I'm pretty sure I trust her. So here goes.
Five things about me that nobody probably cares to know:
1. I was unable to read until I was almost in the 5th grade. One day my mother dropped me off at the public library and I dug around until I figured it out, learning to read and then write by thumbing through well-worn copies of Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver. Eventually I became a story junkie and I continue to need my daily fix. I currently own about 9,000 books. I still get Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver.
2. The Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery was one of my first brushes with the unfolding history of that turbulent era in my home state of Alabama. Inside of a year in 1965, I ran across Dr. Martin Luther King and George Wallace, face to face. Several years later, after having met Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant several times, I figured I'd met every Alabamian who mattered and some more than once.
3. Michael Jordan has beaten me more than once playing H.O.R.S.E. It's sad that I list that athletic failure as a highlight in my life; but I don't have a lot of big-time accomplishments, so there it is.
4. I jumped from the second floor of my hotel in Santa Monica during the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994. Thank God I wasn't staying on the 11th floor. I would have jumped from there as well, no doubt, since I was in an unthinking hurry to exit the undulating building. I landed in a palm tree, slid roughly to the trembling turf ,and dropped next to a half-naked Fabio look-a-like who’d also jumped. That memory is worse than the quake.
5. This is sick. I am addicted to Pop Tarts. I mean, seriously hooked. It's not that I just enjoy one now and then either. I have a frosted-brown-sugar-and-cinnamon monkey on my back. I mainline them raw, no milque-toaster for me. I have eaten at least three Pop Tarts a day for 25 years. Do the math – that's 27,375 Pop Tarts that I can honestly recall chomping. Kellogg's owes me a lifetime achievement award.
Now, since I read about one-tenth of the number of blogs Connie does, I've had trouble identifying five bloggers to tag. So if any of the bloggers below are second-time taggees, or the kind who despise this sort of meme, I'll offer my apologies in advance. Otherwise, take your meme-medicine and 'fess up.
1. Starbucker, author of Ramblings of a Glass Half Full. I especially like the fact that he writes music extolling caffeine, and he still considers Pluto as a bona fide planet.
2. Ryan Anderson, who writes the New PR blog and doesn't let the glamour of PR go to his head.
3. Chris Brogan, proprietor of the Grasshopper Factory, an almost daily poster of self-portraits. (Happy Birthday, Harold!)
4. Curt Hopkins over at Foam Finger Media also works behind the scenes to protect bloggers who face government repression.
5. Jon Sobol, whose Talking Shop is part of the 76 Design group, advocates for every company to have a Chief Storytelling Officer. Chief Storyteller; that's a job I want!
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