Seven Things You Don’t Know About Me

1. I was born blue, six weeks premature–I was so small they had to wait a month to do the circumcision, so maybe I wasn’t a Jew for those few weeks and that’s why I’ve been nagged by life-long melancholic nostalgia–yearning for lost Jewishness or mourning my temporary gentile identity?

2. I hesitate to admit I’m an only child, because I know people know that means I’m selfish and spoiled.

3. When I turned 14, I developed a mild form of epilepsy that lasted till I was 20. I was treated with a drug called Dilantin–my mother told me, “Julius Caesar had epilepsy too.”

4. I abused drugs, dropped out of art school, welded my sculptures in my parents’ garage, fronted a punk rock band at night and worked at The New Jersey State Employment Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for six months before going back to college.

5. My father was discharged from Mt Saini Hospital with lung cancer while I was in my last year of grad school at NYU–I came home every night to help my mother care for him until he died seven months later.

6. I love my two children beyond reason; to their dismay, delight and good fortune.

7. “I fall in love too easily*”  *Sammy Cahn.

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