Some things you don’t know — hopefully — about me

Kelly at TaxGirl, a blog that manages to make the world of taxes an interesting one, tagged me earlier today for a meme. I have to admit, I had no idea what a meme was until Kelly tagged me. Now I know, sort of.

Anyway, my meme task? To share seven things about me you may not know.

Hopefully, there are a lot more than seven things my readers don’t know about me, but here are seven that aren’t too embarrassing:

1. My first-ever freelance writing gig was writing bar reviews for a Chicago newspaper called Barfly. You can bet I gained a lot of respect from potential interview subjects when I said I was calling from Barfly.

2. Things are better on the writing front now. In fact, I’ve even branched out into comic-book writing. My first comic mini-series – a four-issue action/comedy story called GEARZ – will be published in early 2008 by Bluewater Comics.

3. I’ve not interviewed too many famous people, but I did have the honor of interviewing June Foray. You know her voice if you ever watched The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. She voiced nearly every female on the show and, even though he wasn’t female, also provided the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel, better known as Rocky the Squirrel. That’s only one of the many, many cartoon voices Foray has provided. And, yes, I did ask her to do some of her voices during the interview, even if it was for a print publication.

4. Thanks to my freelance writing career, I work from home. My beautiful wife also works from home, handling the costuming duties for area theaters. That means we’re lucky enough to always be around for our 8-year-old son. I’m not sure if our 8-year-old son thinks this is as good as we do.

5. Our son’s name is Ben. Our dog’s name is Benji. We named Ben first. Benji came with his name when we picked him up from the humane society. He didn’t answer to any of the other two-syllable names we’ve tried to give him. (By the way, Ben is a wonderful guy. Benji? He can be wonderful. He can also be … well, you know.)

6. My son and I love watching classic black-and-white horror movies on the Svengoolie show broadcast Saturday nights at 9 p.m. on Chicago’s channel 26. Last week’s movie was House of Dracula. It featured not only Dracula, but the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster, too. Talk about bang for your buck! My wife? She likes to snooze in front of the TV when the old movies come on.

7. Finally, I volunteer once a week to teach English-as-second-language courses at our local library. My student is working incredibly hard to master English. Maybe that’s why I get so annoyed when people complain about having to “press 1 for English.” C’mon, shut up and press “1” already. It only takes a second.