 Nancy Schultz was born to a woman who was very, very afraid of animals. When my mother was about five years old, a big dog jumped on her and knocked her down. After that experience, she avoided contact with animals of any kind. My four siblings and I lobbied my parents continuously to give us permission to have a pet. My mother's answer was always the same, affirm no with no room for negotiation. My dad was actually fond of animals, but he understood the importance of a united parental front, so he supported her no pets policy. In time, we wore my mother down. She relented and agreed to let us have a goldfish. This turned into a succession of goldfish as none of them lived very long because no one in the household knew how to properly care for a goldfish. Sprinkled in among the goldfish was the occasional tiny turtle. The turtles, unfortunately, met the same fate as the goldfish because no one in the household understood how to properly care for a tiny turtle. Eventually, there was a very big occasion on the horizon, at least in my mind. I was going to be turning 12 years old on April 12th. I don't know if it was this combination of date and age, the specialness of it that actually won my mother over, but she agreed to let me have a parakeet for my birthday. I knew that I wanted a male parakeet, and I was having difficulty deciding should I call him Andrew or Anthony. And so, in a flash of inspiration, I decided to call him Andrew Anthony. My father took me to the pet shop where we encountered a large man who was a proprietor eating a sandwich. With his sandwich in one hand, he entered a very large cage sending birds and feathers flying in all directions. With the hand that was not holding the sandwich, he plucked a bird from the side of the cage, brought it out to show it to me, and I knew from my bird book that this was a young bird because its head was completely covered with these beautiful violet horizontal stripes, bars. And I knew it was a male because he had a gorgeous blue seer above his beak. We brought Andy home and introduced him to his new cage, which we had equipped with everything we thought he would need. Birdseed, water, perches, gravel, a swing, but something was wrong. Andy was on the bottom of the cage, silent, not moving, looking very listless. We thought he might be sick, so we kept him warm and we kept him away from drafts and we waited. This went on for days. One afternoon I was sitting next to the cage reading. All of a sudden Andy shot up from the floor of the cage and started chirping like crazy. It was a warm afternoon, the living room windows were open, and I realized that Andy could hear the robins, the blue jays, the sparrows, and the grackles in our backyard. These were the first birds he had heard since we had taken him from the pet shop. We realized then that Andy wasn't physically sick. He was hungering for his own kind. So in order to help Andy feel less lonely, I got him a mirror. It dangled from the top of the cage. It had a bell on the bottom and it had a plastic frame. Andy at night would lift up one foot and he would gently tuck his front claw into the plastic frame of the mirror, pulling the mirror next to him. Then he would fluff up his feathers, close his eyes, and nestle next to his cold heart companion. He seemed to think the mirror was in fact a closed window in that he would peer around and try to find the parakeet on the other side. When Andy wasn't nestled next to his mirror, he was regurgitating food onto it. My bird book said that male parakeets would as part of a courtship ritual regurgitate food into the mouth of the female, and this was done as a sign of affection. So Andy must have liked his girlfriend a lot in that his mirror was always covered with regurgitated food, blocking the view of the girlfriend. And I was always cleaning his mirror. Andy was a quick study and a good talker. Within a relatively short time of our having him, he learned to say a bunch of phrases, including, hello Joe, give me a kiss, Andy baby, good night sugar, and Merry Christmas. He would get excited and then he would scramble the phrases, taking bits and pieces out of sequence and stringing them together, and it would almost always end with, Merry Christmas, Miss Miss, Miss, Miss, Miss, he would go on like a broken record. When my mother didn't know she wasn't home, we would take him out of the cage to play with him. And one of our favorite things to do was to pull a shoelace along the carpet. Andy would run after it, and when he caught up to it, he would attempt to break open the piece at the end thinking it was a seed, he would try to do that with his beak. His favorite toy was a small plastic penguin that would bob when you hit it. So he would charge the penguin, hit its beak with his beak, knocking it back, and then it would bounce up, and he just loved this toy. He would bob and weave with his barring partner forever, and it was then that I thought Andy was at his most charming. One day I noticed that Andy had a problem. His poops were not dropping individually from his body to the floor of the cage. They were sticking to one another. And there was this ever-growing chain of poop that was coming out of his body. My father recognized that he had a solution at hand in two foot-long metal knitting needles. You would think when these sharp, foreign objects came through the bars of the cage toward Andy that he would be skittish at best. But in fact, something weird happened. Andy didn't move. He seemed to know that my dad was trying to help him. So Andy was steady. My dad's hands were steady, and the charitable mission was accomplished. There was no shish kebab. Four years after we got Andy, there was a seismic wave that hit my childhood home. My parents decided that we had all gotten old enough that we could completely care for a dog on our own. And so my mother granted permission and caved to the pressure. She gave my sister permission to have a dog. My sister chose a Welsh corgi puppy that she named Kelly. When Kelly arrived in our home, all the attention that had been showered on Andy for those years was slowly but surely diverted to Kelly. We no longer hovered next to Andy's cage, teaching him new phrases. We no longer took him out of the cage for play dates, and you could understand this because after all, a puppy is a much more engaging and versatile pet than a parakeet. So the time came when Andy was in solitary confinement again. The first time we had robbed him of his own kind. The second time the people who had robbed him from his own kind deprived him of attention. Andy ended up on the bottom of the cage again. But this time he didn't perk up when he heard the sound of wild birds. This time he was dying. And when Andy died, I cried. I didn't cry because I understood what it would be like to be completely and suddenly robbed of your own kind. And I didn't cry because I understood that a small metal cage in suburban New Jersey was no substitute for flying free in the wild. I didn't get it until I was a junior in high school when I was studying Spanish with an accomplished professor from Cuba. Dr. Maria Luisa Guerrero had worked for the Cuban Resistance before being forced out of the country in exile in 1961. She told us that she had witnessed what happened to political prisoners and she couldn't stand to see a bird in a cage. It was then that I understood. Thank you. Stuart Hancock. Born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and growing up there for the first part of my life, to two musician parents, I had a much more interesting time of it than I realized until I got much older, was able to appreciate the kind of environment I grew up in. For example, my father, both my parents were pianists, and my father wanted to hear how he sounded. So he wanted to find some kind of recording device and building a tape recorder so that he could hear how he sounded, obviously from that perspective. And they were both very interesting parents and they were pretty eclectic. And my eclectic father went out one day in 1959 when I was two and had no knowledge of any of these things. And I don't know if my mother had any knowledge of this at the time and came home with a car, which became the family car. So most of you have probably heard the name, but I'm pretty sure none of you have ever seen this particular vehicle or this body type. This was a 1934 type, 46 Bugatti sedan. And it was one of these big coach things with big running boards and pot headlights and blue leather upholstery and it was just... And of course, as a kid, you have no appreciators too, and as I was growing up a little bit, I had no appreciation. This was unusual. And when he bought the car in 1959, it was actually a 25-year-old car. Now you can look around Vermont and you can find 25-year-old cars. So it just doesn't seem all that unusual to hear about a 25-year-old vehicle, but this was something else. And as I said, it wasn't like the antique car, it was the family car, and it was parked in front of our house on West A.A. Street, Manhattan. And so, you know, we... I mean, the story is essentially about some of the things that happened in and around the car and some of the adventures we had. But in, you know, come 1969, my father got tired of having to disassemble the car, effectively and tiredly and put it back together repeatedly because, guess what, you didn't find parts off the shelf at Advance Auto. He bought a lathe to manufacture parts for the thing. And I mean, it was just... It was insane and he had a much bigger, more involved life and he couldn't put all of his energy into his car. And if he had to fix it, it was in a garage, he rented in New Jersey and, you know, I'd go out there sometimes, he'd take the whole thing apart, put it back together. So, in 1969, he had bought this car for a song. He bought it for a song, and he sold it in 1969 for a song. And it was in disassembled form when he sold it. It was, yeah, he sold it for so little money. And, you know, and that was that. But, you know, not that long ago, I started to think about the car some more and wondered what had happened to it. And all I have now are, in terms of my memories of the car, are some photographs from, you know, when my sister and I were little kids. There's a photograph of the car parked in front of West 8th Street, me in one of those snowsuits that you can't move in and sitting on the roof and then a couple, when we were some trip to the country, with my sister sitting on the roof and my, you know, looking out the window and mugging out of the window in one of the pictures. And so, you know, I have those memories. And I was going back through my mind and thinking about some of the things that happened in the car when I was young. And the couple things that I remember that I want to relate to you guys tonight is things along the lines of we were driving in some, I don't know where, part of the countryside one day and we get pulled over by the cops. And it was actually one guy, and he comes up and the first thing he says is, I'm really, really sorry, you guys are fine. You did nothing wrong. I just wanted to get a better look at the car. That happened on more than one occasion. And then the more memorable version of that was driving down the New Jersey turn bike one day and getting pulled over by the state police. And the guy came up to the car and he was mad. And, you know, why was he mad? And he starts berating in the window and he's berating my mother. He's like, you know, you can't change lanes like that. What do you think you're doing? And this went on for, you know, probably 15 seconds, which is a very long time to have a cop speaking angrily in your window. And then he looked down a little more closely and my mother was sitting there demurely with her hands in her lap. And he looked a little more closely and realized that he's chewing on my mother and the steering wheel is actually over on the right hand side of the car. My father, the shifter over here, and he turned around without a word and went back to his car and caught him and drove off. And then the other memorable country visit, you know, off on the weekend trip that we had, that I remember, I was probably seven or eight. My sister was nine or 10 and we drove off to the country and we stopped at a farm stand. And there were, and we wandered off in different places. And this one place had, you know, some boxes of produce and it had three farmers sitting behind it with, you know, those, you know, that were way older than this car. And, you know, when they're beaten, look and kind of crinkly eyes. And one of them says to me like, ah, that's a nice car, because I am, I wouldn't know, you know, I'm seven or eight. What do I know from a nice car? And they decided to run a little bit of a game on me and sitting in front of me were these boxes of various produce and one of them was these little sort of curly green things. Now, I have to tell you that seven or eight, I really didn't know what a hot pepper, a jalapeno pepper was. I really didn't know. I had an idea, but I had never tasted one. I wasn't about to start here. But they said to me, why don't you take one of those peppers now? I knew what the big green bell peppers were because I ate those, but these things were, but I knew the way they said it. And I knew because I grew up in New York City that there was something afoot here. And so I had an easy out. I said, well, I don't have any money. And they went, oh, no, no, you can just take one. I was like, pfft. So that's the game. And so I picked up one of these little curly kind of green evil looking things. And I turned around and we were starting to head back to the car. I need to take a minute here and break in and tell you about a term that I refer to as chessboard guilt. So, and as another side, I will say that my sister who loves me dearly, I love her dearly and is one of the smartest people I ever met on the planet. I mean, she went, I believe this. She went grad school. She's just brilliant. But I was seven or eight. She was nine or 10. And chessboard guilt is when you're sitting across from the chessboard with her phone on the other side that you recognize as vastly inferior chess playing skills to you. And you know that you're about to create a gambit that is going to utterly, the opponent is going to step into your trap and you're going to blow them off the other side of the chessboard with pieces scattered everywhere and debris and blood. And it's going to be gruesome. And you have a little bit of guilt about this because you know how this is going to go. So I get into the back of the bigotty, my sister. And we're sitting there and we drive away and I'm just holding this little green evil looking pepper on top of my leg. And she looks over and she goes, what's that? And I said, that's a hot pepper. And she looks at this thing and she says, no, it's not. I said, yes it is. If you took this and you broke it in half and you rub it all over your lips, it would hurt like hell. And she goes, no, it wouldn't. I said, yes it would. One more iteration. She goes, no, it wouldn't. I said, yes it would. And I held it out. My sister takes this red pepper. She breaks it into and she goes, all over her lips. And she says, see, nothing. I say, do it again. She goes, two minutes later, we're pulled over on the side of the road. My sister's like, yeah. And there is mucus coming out of every orifice in her head and way, way, way. And my, who gets in trouble? Me. And they got plenty to do. And I told her that would be really, really nice. So, you know, I don't know, 15, they're trying water and everything, get her back together. And she'd finally do it and off we go down the road. And, you know, anyway, the code of that particular part of the story is when we got home, my mother pulled me aside at one point. She says, you know, you shouldn't really do those sorts of things to your sister because, you know, she's not quite as quick as you are. I'm sorry, mom. And we do, that was the game. But, you know, she's a sibling. What can I say? So the end of all of this was that in probably five or six years ago, I began to wonder what had happened to Vigotti. And I started doing some research and thank you, internet. And I found that it had gone to a millionaire doctor living in New Hampshire who has acknowledged and had the finest collection of Vigottis in the world. I went, wow. And I called him and I get his widow. And he had died a little younger than he should from cancer. And she, his widow, told me the entire collection of Vigottis had been shipped all the way to California to Pebble Beach for auction. And I reached out and I got a hold of the auction people. And they said, yes, it went for $400,000. And they gave me some connecting information, an email address. And I emailed the gentleman. It had been purchased, shipped overseas to Holland. I emailed the gentleman. I said, this is who I am. And I got this really awesome, wonderful email back from this guy. Jeff Bram Rubin who lives in the Netherlands and had the car and detailed even further than it was. It was already totally restored. He's just a beautiful thing. And back with his email was so wonderful and considerate and even loving. He's like, wow, that's so awesome. You had this history with the car and your father. And he sent like nine email attachments. And one of them had the provenance of the car with my father's name in it from 59 to 69. And it's a couple of the other people. And there was like a couple of magazine articles. And then there were three attachments, three photographs that came along with it. And one of them was of the car with me sitting on it, my snow suit on top of West A8 Street. And the other two were of us in the country with my sister looking from the top of the car and me looking at the window. And those photographs have followed this car all the way around the world for 50 years and come all the way back to me. And the last thing he said, please come over. Please visit. Please stay with us. Please come sit in the car. I'd love to take you out in the car that you used to own. Thank you very much. It is two brothers. You would have noticed the resemblance immediately. And not just to each other, but to me as well. Blue eyes and bald. Now, I started losing my hair when I was in high school. And in the grand scheme of things, losing your hair, not a big deal. But in high school, pretty traumatic. I mean, there were afflictions I would have volunteered for instead. Sign me up for gonorrhea, syphilis. I'm all in. Now, in reality, I would have needed to have those afflictions injected into me because apparently you need to have sex with someone other than yourself to acquire those diseases. Nonetheless, I got baldness hereditary, I think. Which got me to thinking about how much of our DNA is actually passed down from people like our uncles or aunts for that matter. And this topic really got my attention when I was watching a DVD. Yes, I watched DVDs. I put one in right after listening to a CD because I couldn't find my MP3 player. And this DVD I was watching was about my Aunt Pat. And it was a retirement party for her. And my Aunt Pat was my dad's only sister. Small and stature, but big in personality and presence. She wasn't bald like her brother, she had black hair. They used to call it the black Irish back in the day. People of Irish descent with black hair and dark eyes. And that was my Aunt Pat. Fiery personality, a loud screeching voice. An argumentative streak, about a mile wide. But always put together. Just so fashionable, right? The pantsuits, the jackets, the shoes, the accessories, the scarves and the hats. Oh my god, she had a hat collection. But the one thing that really typified my Aunt Pat the most, she was literally the eternal flame of praise if you were on her good side. And trust me, you really wanted to be on her good side because if you were, you were literally gifted a lifetime of compliments. You hang out with her for five minutes and it was better than standing in front of a dressing room mirror that makes you look thin. I mean, it was an injection, an infusion of self-worth. So we bought this DVD and it's a retirement party from my Aunt Pat. She's retiring from the Quincy Public School System after 43 years of elementary school teaching. Which is definitely a worthy of a party, right? It's an amazing accomplishment. So a lot of people got together and were talking about my wonderful Aunt Pat. And the stories were amazing. It quickly became apparent that my Aunt Pat had found absolutely the thing that she was destined to do in this world. She was meant to be an elementary school teacher. So about 10 people got up and spoke. And now mind you, we're in Boston so a lot of heavy Boston accidents going on. It's about 1997. And the first guy who got up and spoke was actually the principal from my Aunt Pat's very first job. And so he says, in all my years here in Boston, I've never seen anything quite like it. Now he didn't sound anything like that but a lame-ass JFK impersonation is the only Boston accent I have. If I'm being honest, I'm actually impersonating Seth Meyers impersonating JFK and that, but he shared an incredible story. He said the very first week of school he stopped by my Aunt Pat's class which actually would have been the very first week she ever taught her entire life. And he said he was struck by one thing. He walked into the class and he said she treated each and every student as if they were the center of the universe. And he said she used words like amazing and spectacular and incredible to describe every little thing they did. Multiplication tables, spelling, eating their lunch, hanging up their jacket, pushing in their chairs. She was relentless in her praise. He said that she built up the kid's self-esteem in a way that he had never experienced before. So more people got up and spoke and the thread that connected these stories was amazing. It was so inspiring to hear. My Aunt Pat was literally a legend in the Quincy Public School System and I had no idea. Her students became lifelong friends. Administrators wouldn't make a move without first talking to Aunt Pat first and it didn't matter what school she worked in. She became the conscience, the compass of that school. Now her fellow teachers were a little jealous of her energy because it was boundless but they were also inspired by her because for 43 years she walked into the school each and every day as if she had something to prove. Now one of the last people who got up and spoke was her current principal. And he said, you know, teachers like Pat, we can't take for granted but we do. We don't recognize them enough. We certainly don't thank them enough and we definitely don't celebrate them enough. Now everything I heard on that DVD rang so true to me but it wasn't just because we were talking about my dear Aunt Pat that I love so much. Everything I heard rang so true to me because I had actually been a student once in her class. You see, when I was a kid, my parents were smart and if you think of vacation during the school year which meant they had to pawn off the seven of us on unsuspecting people. So they would literally get on the phone and call neighbors, friends and relatives and they would unload the seven of us on anyone that said yes or anyone that happened to pick up the phone. It didn't matter. And so one year I actually spent a week with my Aunt Pat and I was 10 years old. My Aunt Pat loved clothes, right? Really well put together. I remember this. The first day she came to pick me up, she went to Jordan Martian, Boston and she bought me a different outfit for each and every day we were gonna be together. And then on Monday of the first week we were together I was downstairs in her kitchen eating Captain Crunch which was unbelievable because if you got to stay with Aunt Pat you could pick a breakfast cereal that you wanted and Captain Crunch was not on the menu in my house. So I was basking my Captain Crunch Glory downstairs and I went upstairs and on my bed was an outfit. She had picked out an outfit for me and put it on my bed. Now no one had ever done that for me in my entire life. It was unbelievable. I didn't quite know what to make of it but she did that for me every day. And we got into the car and we drove to her school in Quincy Mass and I spent all day in her classroom. And so I got to experience firsthand what it was like to be a student in my Aunt Pat's class. Just one of 25 kids who felt like the son. So my Aunt Pat never married and she never had kids of her own but that doesn't mean she didn't have children. Trust me, she had a few thousand of them in Quincy Mass in Massachusetts because she did what every good mother does. She set the bar high. She was very clear with her expectations. She would praise when appropriate, scold when necessary. More important than any of that, she just loved without boundaries, without agenda. So towards the end of this DVD, some of her fellow teachers got up and they read some excerpts from the school yearbook. That year they had dedicated a few pages to my Aunt Pat because it was her final year. And there was one note in there from a past student that was really memorable. This student said that no other teacher in this student's life had as much of an impact on them as my Aunt Pat. And it was because of my Aunt Pat's teaching style. And this student described that teaching style as creative, energetic, and passionate. Now this past fall, I did something I've always wanted to do. It's like an ambition of mine. I taught a college course down in Burlington. And at the end of our semester, after the final exam, I asked my students for some feedback. How'd we do? What could I do better? What went well? And one student, an exchange student from New Zealand, said, you know, I really liked your class. I said, thanks. She said, in fact, your teaching style made it my favorite class. And she described my teaching style as creative, energetic, and passionate. Now my Aunt Pat died about eight years ago. And so I never had a chance to tell her about my teaching. But I do know for a fact that she was with me in that classroom because research says that nearly 25% of our DNA is passed down from blood relatives like our aunts and our uncles. And every day I walk into that college class like I had something to prove. And I know if my Aunt Pat was with us today, she would have described my teaching as special, incredible, spectacular. Because those are the words she used to describe all of her kids, the center of the universe. Thank you. Kevin Gallagher. I stood with my penis in my hand at the urinal, trying to pee while there is a group of guys behind me swearing and smoking cigarettes. This makes it kind of challenging to pee, doesn't it? This was my second week of my freshman year of high school. And I was doing everything I could to avoid being picked on or being beaten up by upperclassmen. So imagine the challenge of having your fly open and you're back to a room full of upperclassmen. Well, I never imagined or have predicted that halfway through my stream of consciousness, that Sister Anansiata would come flying out of one of the stalls in the boys' room, throw herself against the door leading out into the hallway and give detention slips to all the boys in the bathroom that day. Including me, who was only trying to pee. And I realized high school is going to be very, very different than elementary school. Now see, in elementary school, I liked the rule-laden strict rigid environment that Catholic elementary school education provides. It's a little like I was predictable and my home life was not very predictable. So I did like the school life being predictable, but it was sort of like a continuous lifetime episode of Groundhog Day. I never had to worry about what I was wearing because it was either black pants or blue pants, white shirt, uniform, plaid tie, clip-on. Then it was black socks, black lace-up leather shoes. Announcements were 8.05 in the morning, lunch was at 11.45, recess until 12.30, and school dismissal at 2.50. Same every day. And I really like appreciated that. The playground at my school was right next to the school. So kids would arrive in the morning about 7.30 to play a little bit before we went inside. Boys would either play kickball or chase each other or marbles. I don't think anyone plays marbles anymore. Punkies and Cleary's and Steelie's and Cat's Eyes and Bumblebee's. I can't even believe I remember that many of them. The girls would just jump rope or stand in small groups next to the building talking about girls or boys. The only two topics they seem to ever talk about. Our fearless leader, a sturdy Irish woman, Sister St. Michael. She would come out onto the playground at 7.50 with a bullhorn in one hand and a bell in the other. And she would survey the perimeter. Now one of the nice things that Sister St. Michael did is that she wore every day a four gauge steel corset that made her breasts look like double missile silos in her habit. And she would walk around the playground until exactly 7.55 when she would start ringing the bell. And we would fearfully stop having any fun and we would line up by class and by gender. And there you stood waiting for the parade of nuns to come out of the school and each join up with their classrooms. And we would walk into the building as one unit. Kindergarteners first, eighth graders last. Engraved in stone over the front door of the school that we could read every morning as we walked in where the words, suffer little children to come unto me. And even as a boy I knew, wow, they even advertise their ties, this place as a building filled with suffering and our parents still send us here. Which was really quite amazing. Once inside you go to your classroom and you sit in alphabetical order and that is your chair for the entire year unless someone transfers in or out and then you might move one seat. At 10 a.m. and at 2 p.m. where the bathroom breaks you didn't pee any other time during the day and you would line up in front of the little girls room and the little boys room. There was always a very pleasant face nun standing just inside the boys room to ensure that there was no rough housing going on in there but we never really as kids knew if nuns peed because they were always with us and there were no other bathrooms in the school except the little boys room and the little girls room and we just could not have picture nuns in those tiny little spaces. High school however was really different. In the first couple of weeks I knew already that there was some sort of weird competition going on between the nuns and the teenagers. And the nuns that you have kind of in elementary school like Sister Justin or Sister Mary Margaret or Sister Thomas, you know they were like nice. The nuns in high school are like ninja warriors like trained you know with the Assad. Like they are fierce. But one of the things that you have besides the rules and the uniforms in high school you also had insurgents which you don't really have in elementary school. You have those kids that don't really care what happens to them ever. Like they're just gonna like walk in the land mine and they knew how to play the system and sometimes they even beat the system. So I knew at that point that I was gonna be learning a lot more than geometry or American history. I was actually, it was sort of like maybe an alternative educational plan, an AEP. I was on an AEP I guess when I was in high school. Well so let's start looking at some of the competitors. There was Sister Joseph Henry, a short nun plump. She had very large cheeks, so we called her chipper for chipmunk. And she didn't look a day over 97, 97, 98. Youthful in her own way. And she had this tendency of falling asleep during class at her desk. Now our classes were 15 minutes in length and instead of a bell in between classes we had a xylophone. So the PA system would come on and the secretary would go doon doon doon. And that was the sign of change of class. And so when chipper would fall asleep we would wait about a minute to make sure it took. And then someone in the class like Michael Flynn or somebody would take a mini xylophone out of his knapsack, doon doon doon. And we'd all stand up and put on our knapsacks and Sister would wake up and she'd say oh we're already out of class. Time went by so fast today, see you all tomorrow. And we would slip out of the classroom and go hide in the multi-purpose room. Which was on the fourth floor. Then there was Sister Mary Rosalima. She was also known as Sister Mary Chemistry because she taught chemistry. She was not a nun that was easy to get things passed. She was a pretty tough nut. Very thick glasses, dentures that weren't quite adhering so the clicking sounds that went out. So it took us a while to figure out what her weakness was. And her weakness was water. Yes, she was not afraid of sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid but water. So if there was a particular test that we didn't wanna take or an assignment we didn't wanna do we would pour a little water in the back of the classroom on the floor. Someone in the back would take out a piece of paper. Sister, it's right, the roof is leaking back here. The roof is leaking back here. The girls would start screaming. The boys would move the chair, Sister would go up and she'd say oh my God, everyone out. Quick, go down to the gym. And say we would go and we would have recess. She never really understood that we were on the second floor of a four-story building. Yeah. Then there was Sister Immaculata, I won't say much about her, but she was an algebra teacher that only gave one problem on the midterm and one problem on the final. And if you got it wrong, then you failed the course. But it was really, by senior year, we knew how to work these women. But there was Sister Lazarus. Three foot 10. She was the veto Corleone of all the sisters. She was tough and she died senior year, which was surprising to all of us because she was only about 140. And I was a pallbearer at her funeral. And as we carried the coffin into the nun's chapel, we were going up some stairs and so in the back you had to hold it up so it was level. Someone in the front yelled, on three, dump it. And so on the count of three, we dropped the back and you felt Sister Lazarus slide down to the other end and slam her head into the coffin for all eternity. That event haunts me to this day. Because as an adult, I have gotten to know lots of nuns. I have nuns for relatives. And I don't really think nuns were trained as ninja warriors. I think there was a joint struggle between adolescents and nuns with suspiciousness and fear that they didn't really know what to make of these boys that smelled of B.O. and had long hair and were loud and hairy and your three feet 10 tall. And then us kids are thinking about these women, these penguins in black and white uniforms trying to ruin our lives that I sort of think like, maybe we all just didn't really know each other very well. Well, I am a big believer in karma. You know, what goes around comes around. And so there is a part of me that worries a little bit. Nunsi and Lazarus and Mary chemistry again, I'm not quite sure what the next round is gonna look like. Jennings really wanted to go to prom between renting a suit or a dress, the fancy dinner beforehand or all the awkward dancing. It just wasn't my scene. I much rather have stayed home and watched Boy Meets World. It just seemed like a safer bet. But that all changed when my friend asked me, he was a flamboyant, fabulously dressed friend, Justin, asked me to go to prom with him and I said, sure, I'll have to go because I couldn't say no to him. So I told my mom she was beyond excited. I think she literally jumped off the ground because up to that point, both of her kids, my brother and I had never gone to anything formal. It just wasn't really our style. Cause three years earlier, my brother did go to prom, but instead of wearing a suit, he wore his torn corduroys that were torn up the back that he sewed up and he wore a ripped t-shirt. And when his date arrived, she stopped at the end of our long dirt driveway and she honked her horn and my brother ran out of the house and jumped into the car and they drove away. And my mom was left holding up her camera, taking a picture of the car driving away. So she thought it might be different with me this time. So she even offered to go to the local JC Penney's and pick me out a few outfits. She came home with bags, I think four bags that she had and I tried on all the outfits and we even did a fashion show just so she could see them all. And I ended up going with a button-down shirt, baby blue, with darts going in every direction to show off my figure. And black dress pants. And this whole outfit was kind of a nod to Ellen DeGeneres because at the time, the 90s, she was big and I really loved what she was doing. And so that day, I let my mom take a picture of me for prom and I left and I got in my geo tracker and I drove over to Justin's house. And when I drove into the driveway, this man was running at me, dressed in a full suit of black necktie and dress shoes and he was running at me with a plastic container with a bunch of flowers in it. And I was like, who is this man? And I thought about driving out but I decided not to. And it was actually Justin running towards me, I'd never seen him like this before. And before I could even get out of the car, he tells me, I have a corsage for you, this is for you. And I was like, what the hell is a corsage? So he asked me, the window is down at this point, and he asked me to put my arm through the window. So he puts the corsage on my wrist and I'm thinking this is a very odd thing. I didn't understand these gendered rituals that were happening in front of me. And at the same time, he said, do you have a boot in the air for me? I was like, what, a boot? Are you talking about a boot? Are you talking about an ear? What are you talking about? And he said, you know what, forget it, just forget it, let's just go to prom. So his parents took a few pictures of us, and we got in the car and we headed over to the local Chinese moon buffet, because that was our fancy spot to go to. When we pulled up, there were three limos idling in the parking area. So all of our friends had gotten there. See, everyone at prom was the biggest night of their life and we drove up in our tracker and everyone else had limos. But I didn't want to fall to having a limo as well. I didn't want to spend the money. After we went to the buffet, went straight to the high school. When we got to my high school, the prom was in the cafeteria. And we walked through a balloon arch and we walked through the balloon arch and into the darkly lit cafeteria with the Backstreet Boys blasting on the sound system. There are chaperones all around the perimeter of the space. I think there actually might have been more chaperones than students there. Everyone with their cameras taking pictures of all the kids and there was so much sequence. There was sequence everywhere. I didn't even recognize all the people that were there. I danced the night away to all the fast songs and on the slow songs I ate Ritz crackers. I just wanted to make sure that they were delicious for everyone else. But there was one song that I wanted to dance to. It was Stairway to Heaven. It was kind of a rite of passage in my high school to dance to that song. I meant the end of prom and I thought this is one thing I need to do. So I did end up dancing to Stairway to Heaven. I found a random guy to dance with and when we were dancing the whole time I could think is that he had his hands on my hips and I just wanted to ask him if we could switch positions if that would be okay. But I didn't get the strength up to ask him at that point. And when the song of Stairway to Heaven came to an end all the lights were turned on and we had to go home and straight prom was over. Fast forward a few months and I'm getting ready for my first gay prom. When you don't have any outfits to wear is to rummage through your father's closet. So I go through my dad's meticulously organized military style closet and start trying to find an outfit for the night. I try on everything. I try on his shirts, his pants, his belts. I even try to put the ties around my neck to see what looks good. Nothing fits except for a red satin necktie that I put around my neck. And to this day I still have that necktie. I even thought about wearing it tonight but I thought that might be too much. But it's in my car so if anyone wants to know it's not actually. So with still no outfit I had to head up to Burlington where the event was. And I just wanted to go up earlier to go to another store to find the correct outfit. So I get in the geo tracker and I drive up to Burlington to the JCPenney's before I head to the ball. And as I'm driving up, I'm driving up in silence worrying that when I go to the store someone's gonna approach me being in the men's section and they're gonna ask me why I'm there. And my plan is to tell them that I'm shopping for my dad and that we're the same size and it's his birthday coming up and my mom told me to come so that's why I'm here. And I think this is a full proof plan. So I go into JCPenney's and I go to the men's section and it's like candy in there. I want everything that's in front of me. So I go to where the dress pants are and I just take stacks of pants because I don't know what size I am. I take size 30 to size 40. Because I put all the shirts, all the button-down shirts that I can on it. And I eventually go with the white button-down shirt and black pleated before I understood fashion. Pleated pants and I got dressed in my car and put on my crocs, my blue crocs and put the red satin neck tie around my neck. And still up to this point I didn't know how to tie a tie and I thought I could just ask someone, maybe this would be a good conversation starter because I didn't really know that many people that were going to it. So then I head over to it and I'm still driving in silence just worried what's gonna happen. And I get there, 1.42 main I believe and I get out of the car and I walk up to a door and it's a door that's brightly colored with a psychedelic swirl on it and a lone blue balloon hanging out front and I'm like, this is it. This is my place. I crack the door open and it's like entering Narnia. It's steamy, you can smell the sweat in the air. There's disco lights moving around. There's a queer DJ with stacks of CDs on either side moving their body to the music in a way that I hadn't seen before. There were boys dancing with boys, girls dancing with girls, boys and girls dancing together. Whitney Houston screaming about wanting to dance with somebody. This was for me, this was it. So that night I danced. I danced nonstop. I didn't care if it was a slow song or a fast song, I just let go completely. I was home. I was home for the first time and I didn't want the night to end. And the DJ kept mentioning a prom king and a prom queen. And I didn't really know that many people there. I probably knew about five people there and out of those five people, probably three people actually knew what my name was. And so I kept dancing, not even thinking about it. And then before you know it, my name is being called and I'm being pushed by a group of people to the front of the stage. And they put the crown on top of my head. It was a gold, velcro, puffy crown, bejeweled everywhere of course. And I'm standing there waiting for the queen and the queen comes up and she's wearing this beautiful red, big prom dress. And we dance in front of everyone. And I'm king of Narnia. I can't believe what has happened to me. How did this happen to someone so small? It felt like in Vermont, in Montpelier. How did people even know who I was? I was being seen for the first time in a way that I didn't think was possible, at least at that age. And so I didn't want the night to end. So a group of friends and I were about to walk down into town to go to a pizza place to kind of celebrate the night. So as we're walking into town, I'm wearing the crown on top of my head. My chest has puffed out and I'm pretty sure I was strutting. I'm not a big strutter. So I was strutting. And as we were walking into town, it felt like we were untouchable. I felt like we had this glow around us. We didn't even worry about the outside worlds. And as we were walking, a silver Honda Civic pulled up next to us and it was a group of guys, young guys, and they rolled their windows down and a guy in the back leaned his whole body out of the car and he said, you fucking fags. And he went on to say more, but I didn't hear what he said. My friends responded by screaming back at him and getting upset at him. And I went inward. I didn't know what to do. Didn't they see the crown on my head? Didn't they know? I was king of Narnia. The psychedelic door back there told me this is, it's okay to be who I am in Burlington, in my body. And everything that they said was the opposite. So the only way I thought to be safe was to go inside. And that night, I went home. I drove home wearing the crown on top of my head. And when I got home, I took the crown off in front of the mirror and I put it in a drawer underneath a bunch of toys. And I left it there for 10 years. And that's kind of where it's at. And for some of us, we have to go back to Narnia more than once to know it's real. And that's what I've been doing. I've been going back to Narnia again and again and again. And after all, I am king of Narnia.