Variations on a Meme

There are a number of blogs that I read every day. Or, more accurately, there are a number of blogs that I have bookmarked to flip quickly though every day looking for fresh material. My friends and family have been woefully lax in updating their pages of late, which has left me to rely more heavily on the few extraneous bloggers I’ve taken to reading for my daily dose of … daily doses. Within a week of each other, two of those bloggers wrote similar posts.

The meme floating around last week was vaguely similar to those recurring “know your friends” e-surveys that surface at least once a year: self-serving for the author and yet somehow intriguing to the reader. And, because the only other material I seem to have lately involves publicly lambasting my visiting mother – a delicate task that will require time for precise crafting – I’ll just go with the flow and stick to the easy stuff for now.

Here are my lists of 5 things:

5 Places I’ve lived:
Wayne, Michigan
Tullahoma…
Manchester…
Murfreesboro…
… and Nashville, Tennessee.

5 Places I’ve visited:
New York, New York: I saw Phantom of the Opera, Steel Magnolias, Lend Me a Tenor (Philip Bosco) and Rumors (Ron Liebman, Jessica Walter, Christine Baranski, Joyce Van Patten) when they were still relatively new plays in the Broadway vicinity and went to the Hard Rock Café at the height of the T-shirt craze.
Miami and surrounding areas, Florida: One trip to buy fiberglass car parts, one miserable trip to Panama City Beach, and a visit to St. Petersburg to see the brilliant performance of Nashville’s own Brian Webb Russell in the two-man show Stones in His Pockets at American Stage.
Scottsdale, Arizona: a national convention of the Golden Key National Honor Society, for which I was my college’s Vice President of Public Relations, at the 5-Diamond Princess Resort.
Seattle, Washington: Went for whales and rain, but got salmon and drizzle.
San Diego, California: Went to visit the folks, stayed to do the shows.

5 Places I want to visit:
London, England. (God meant me to be born there, I think, but forgot to send my folks.)
Rome, Italy
Florence, Italy
Athens, Greece
Barcelona, Spain

5 Jobs I’ve had:
My first job was as a Phone Girl/Delivery Driver for Domino’s Pizza. I kept that job for years, working my way into management even while I was also a radio personality/News Director on WDFZ, but finally abandoned it when I took a second on-air position at WHAL.
After college, I was Divisional Assistant for the 17 Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia stores in the Raven Division of Heilig-Meyers’ Furniture. In charge of store audits, reports, publications, and Customer Relations, I hated the job so much that I quit after exactly one year and temporarily returned to both Domino’s and WDFZ until I landed drive-time radio shifts on WFTZ, with duties as the Programming and PR Director, which I finally had to sacrifice for health insurance at Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre, where I was the Resident Stage Manager (much to the chagrin of my acting career) for several years until they stopped providing said insurance. (Oops, that's six.)

5 Movies I Could Watch Over and Over:
Crimes & Misdemeanors
Moonstruck
L.A. Story
About a Boy
The Mirror Has Two Faces

5 Television Shows I Watch:
The West Wing: in current run, on Bravo, and on DVD. Sorkin seasons preferred.
Project Runway: God help me, I'm hooked on bizarre costuming challenges. What? Okay, YOU call it fashion.
Medium: As my mother likes to say: it's well done, which is rare.
Boston Legal: thank goodness, it's BACK! Though its absence, sadly, did lead me to...
Grey's Anatomy: There's not a thing I should like about this show, but I don't turn it off.

5 Bad Habits:
Obsessive intolerance of people who fail to be considerate, neat, responsible, or quiet.
Saving every program, postcard, ticket stub, or score card I’ve ever held – and buying the T-shirt, keychain, or shot glass to go with it.
Saving the miscellaneous papers my programs, postcards, ticket stubs, and score cards found themselves lost in – including every bill, receipt, and cancelled check from the last 15 years.
In fact, I think the only piece of paper I've ever missed is the dance card I keep shredding for relationships with men who are still carrying theirs.
Wait, I think I wrote a fifth bad habit on piece of paper that's... here somewhere....

What were you doing 10 years ago?
Refining my major emphasis to force my college graduation to coincide with the end of a lease I shared with my one-time fiancée – who was not only unfaithful but also so very couth as to buy the engagement ring on my credit.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
Rehearsing the award-winning The Odd Couple (female version) in San Diego.

There are, I’m sure you can imagine, many more list categories. I’ll save those for a later date, if necessary, and in the meantime tag those of you who need a theme – or meme – for your own pages this week.

Don’t make me do this again….