Eight Things about Me Tag

GAUTAMI TRIPATHY, THE ILLUSTRIOUS POET/WRITER/TEACHER FROM DELHI, INDIA, HAS TAGGED ME.

I'm supposed to list eight things about myself...one of them, actually (this doesn't count!), is that I've been tagged several times before and possibly will be repeating myself.

I apologize in advance if I do. I'll try not to...

1. I've been to more than 20 countries in my life that I can recall at the moment (they're outlined in red in the map below thanks to this cool site I found):

They are:

The U.S., Brazil, Argentina, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Spain and Romania.

2. My uncle, Len Cariou, is a Winnipeg-born actor and singer who won a Tony Award in 1979 for his Broadway role in Sweeney Todd opposite Angela Lansbury, who played the lead role in the TV series Murder She Wrote.

He also earned Tony nominations for roles opposite Lauren Bacall (Applause) and Liz Taylor (A Little Night Music). He also had a relationship with Glenn Close, who got her big start with Robin Williams in The World According to Garp in 1982.

I spent the day with the two of them in New York City just before the release of that movie.

He's had other roles in movies like About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson, The Four Seasons with Alan Alda and A Little Night Music with Liz Taylor. His TV roles include The West Wing, Law & Order, Star Trek and Murder, She Wrote, among others.

3. I covered the game Oct. 15, 1989, in which Wayne Gretzky broke Gordie Howe's all-time National Hockey League scoring record.

I picked him as the first star of the game so my name, I believe, is on the official scoresheet, although I can't get a copy of it.

4. In my younger, dumber years, I passed out twice that I recall from consumption of alcohol or drugs: once in India in a field in Bangalore in the middle of the night and once on the middle of the highway in Leaf Rapids in northern Manitoba. Duh.

5. My thinning hair on my head is still brown, but when I grow a beard, it's grey. I've had the hair on my head my entire life and couldn't grow a beard until I was in my late teens. What sense does that make?

Me in 1992, full head of hair, no beard

Me in 2003 or so, receding brown hairline and grey beard

6. I've learned more about women in the past 6-7 years since my divorce than I did in the entire 18 or whatever years of my marriage and all during my teens and early 20s before that. Go figure.

7. I've visited every Canadian province except Prince Edward Island off our East Coast. My favourite is Newfoundland, where I hauled in cod bare-handed with an oldtimer fisherman named Paddy O'Dea and cooked and ate it on board his dory.

8. The most important role model in my life is and always will be my mom, followed in no particular order by her mom, my dad, a now ex-priest named Max and, in more of a lifelong friend/Jiminy Cricket sort of way, my buddy Homo Escapeons.