1. I love Jack Russell Terriers. I mean; I love them so bad that it’s almost creepy. Walt points them out to me whenever he spots one in a car or in the market or trotting along the road because he knows how happy they make me. He’ll say, “Just try to appear normal.” My favorite feed on Instagram is, you got it, #JackRussellsofInstagram. I could spend hours looking at the posted pictures and videos.

2. I was born in a suburb of LA during the early 60s, not far from the stomping grounds of the Charles Manson gang. My father claimed that, sensing someone in the house, he’d often wake in the middle of the night. He’d get up and look around but there’d be no one there. Years later, when the Manson murders were splashed all over the news, he realized that they’d been the ones in the house practicing their “creepy crawly” stealth moves. Whether this was true or not, I can’t say. I mean, Dad could be rather paranoid.

3. Speaking of the early 60’s, this is the name my mother wanted to give me: Star. Star Stevens. Thankfully, my father put his foot down because I would have ended up in the porn industry.

4. When I was 17 or so, I sang in a traveling Vietnamese band. I’m a horrible singer but the audience would put up with me because rare was/is the Anglo girl who could speak the language. At least, that’s what I hope all those opened-mouth looks were all about.

5. When I was in first grade I totally wanted to be Cinderella. That was my first career aspiration. My dad kept pushing me to be a nurse, like Florence Nightingale, but I was all about the fancy dresses and gorgeous shoes. (Florence looked run down, at least from what I could tell from the picture-book biographies my parents insisted I read.) I also thought it would be pretty cool to be rescued by a prince. Which is probably why my daughter and her husband refuse to allow my two-year-old granddaughter to watch Disney videos with me.

6. While all my childhood friends vacationed in Cape Cod or flew to Disney world, I spent my summer holidays in North Dakota. Every other year, my parents would drive us across the country in an old station wagon to stay at my aunt and uncle’s farm. There, my brother and I would play with our cousins from sun up until long after sundown. Bliss. Nothing like the smell of cow shit to make me happy.

7. For years, I was fixated on serial killers. I must have read every book on the subject, well into the late 90’s. Being a perennial people pleaser, I couldn’t fathom the mindset of a Ted Bundy or a Charles Manson. (Hey…. I’m seeing a theme here.) Fine literature, this was not but it did teach me that not everyone thinks the way I do.

8. As a kid, my favorite movie was Fun with Dick and Jane, starring Jane Fonda. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t age appropriate. But back then; age appropriate wasn’t a thing. I mean, back then, every family seemed to have a stack of Playboy magazines on the coffee table and the latest Penthouse Forum on the back of the toilet. And the theatre in town, the one right next to the middle school, offered live sex shows.

9. If I had to choose a mentor it would be Anne Marrow Lindbergh, the wife of Charles Lindbergh. She was a deeply introverted creative who lived a life of adventure in an era that didn’t cotton to that stuff. Did you know she was Charles’s navigator? That they flew across China during the famines to gather information on problematic Yangtze River floods? I discovered her through her books, the first ones being a series of her journals. Much better reading than that serial killer stuff.

10. I studied Chemistry in college, not because I was interested in science, which I wasn’t in any way shape or form, but because I wanted to impress some guy I had a crush on. The guy happened to be the bass player in the Vietnamese band I sang with. Problem was, he was all hot on this Vietnamese chick who was studying chemistry. I figured, I couldn’t be Vietnamese but I could study chemistry so… Like that, an inappropriate major was born.