"Memoire" a post by request, because I listen

In my cam room this evening was a hysterically funny round table discussion based on who the participants would be in the following scenario...

You approach, or start a conversation, with someone on a plane, but for the entire trip, you pretend to be someone completely different from yourself.

Initially I said I'd be Sarah Palin, I mean i can't get more opposite to her. In case you're curious, I'm a proud Liberal, bisexual, pro-choice, vegetarian, animal welfare and gun control advocate who uses real words and understands there are no Death Panels.

But then I started mentioning the most random events I could think of in my life, and a dear freind/follower kept asking "why isn't this in your blog?" Here it is Dear, a random collection of Kir's life events that with more exposition might be a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life."

When I was 5-years-old I started having brutal, paralyzingly painful ear infections. They lasted from kindegarten through first or maybe second grade. I lost 80% of the hearing in one ear and 90% in the other. My mother realized how bad it was when my school had a small orchestra come play for us and a local photographer snapped a picture of me laying on my belly on the floor of the gymnasium or auditorium, in the front row, with my hands cupping my ears in order to hear the music, which was being played only feet from where I was laying. Not only was this the first concrete proof she had of my deafness, this was the first of a surprising number of times I've been photographed for local papers.

Oh when I was a baby I was in diapers commercials, Pampers and LUVS, at least one was broadcast nationally, I could get a SAG card if I wanted. My Social Security shows income for 1976 and 1977. All the money I made was apparently borrowed by my grandmother and never paid back.

Due to the chronic ear infections and hearing loss, I learned to face read ("lip reading" is not an accurate description). My mother and grandmother spent hours teaching me a long and involved tongue twister that required me to pay attention to their faces to "hear" the words. Over 30 years later I still have some ability in that department.

I was supposed to have surgery. I was terrified. My mother is a witch. Wiccan to be precise. Gardnerian tradition to be nitpicky. Her coven had a healing ritual. When I went for my preopperative bloodwork, my infections were gone and my hearing was not only restored, it was perfect. In 2007 it was tested when I developed vertigo, it was better than 95% of the population. Although I worry that the headset I wear telemarketing is damaging my hearing.

Skip forward a bit, my parents divorce, my mother immediately (2 days after finalization) marries the spawn of Satan, they have a son (third sibling, of which I am first). The oh so familiar pattern of spousal abuse and child molestation started long before my brother was born. I believe he is the result of rape. When he was a baby and I was ten or eleven years old, I threatened to kill my step-father, to his face, during the xmas holidays. I told him he should kill me because if he made one move toward my siblings (who were cowering together on a couch just to the side of us) or my mother, I would kill him. I said all this while backed into a corner with no way to escape or defend myself. He actually told me to calm down. But at least he stopped throwing my mother around that night.

Around that time, while everyone was asleep, I went downstairs to the kitchen and got the antique Italian steel full tang chef's knife my mother inherited from her grandfather out of the drawer. I got 2/3 of the way up the stairs, knife clenched so tightly I can still feel the slight roughness of the wooden handle in my palm, the startling coldness of the steel tang under my fingers, when the stair creaked and I stopped. I thought about my mother sleeping beside him, about my tiny brother and broken sister, about my cop father seeing his preteen daughter go to jail for murder, and I pivoted on that step, crept back downstairs and returned that perfect knife to its place of honor in the drawer.

I should have kept going.

This is around the time I started beating my legs until my thighs were just continuous bruises (no Daisy Dukes for me!) and sticking myself with pins and needles and burning myself with wires wrapped around batteries. That's all boring.

In high school I started suffering chronic pain and insomnia. Also my life long hallucinations became more common. But I recognize when something I see isn't there, so don't worry about it too much.
Lost my virginity at 14 on Valentine's Day to an 18-year-old who spread the story that I was a "dead fuck." Like I had any idea what the fuck I was doing?

Gave my first handjob to a guy in a blind hallway my freshman year in High School after school. But he wouldn't date me publically. This became a pattern in my life. I'm good enough to fuck, but not date.

I was a published author and photographer in High School. I worked for a local free paper and had to be driven to assignments by my parents. I also helped run my father's photo lab and studio and learned how to work both the "one hour" equipment and digital (first generation) colour enlarger better than anyone. I would also hand touch up antique photos.

I fucked up a lot of High School relationships. Some of them were so important, they have shaped who I am today. Due to one boyfriend, I am a body art enthusiast, even though he never got to see me tattooed or with crazy hair. I never should have hurt him like I did. I'm so sorry B.

I went off to college with my last High School boyfriend and fucked that up so epically that four years later incoming Freshman would meet me and say "oh you're THAT Kir..." If you are going to do something, do it well. I'm so sorry T.

In college I both flourished and floundered, flew and failed. I really got involved in the slice and dicing of my flesh. If you ask I'll show you the scars. They are all quite visible.

I took up acting because one of the professors in my "First Year Program," who was also my early English lit prof, was the only American on the Board of Directors of the Globe Theatre and would have a small travelling Shakespearean theatre company perform at our university annually. They did a class showing acting and line reading styles and my prof chose me to act out the "palms kiss" scene from "Romeo and Juliet," with Romeo.

I got to kiss him, in front of 100 students.

HOT!

People came up to me for weeks, "are you the girl who kissed that guy?" Yup!

Enrolled in Beginning to Acting the next semester.

My degree is a double major, BA English Writing/Speech & Theater. Thank you Shakespeare.

Also I fucked an actor from that group every single year I was in college. But not Romeo. One guy I went for because he looked ah-fucking-amazing in a dress.

I also tended to sleep with, date, or otherwise fool around with, members of the all-male acapello group on campus. Took three or four virginities just from them.

Met my best friend and soul mate in a bathroom Freshman year. He was telling someone how to get blood out of their shirt while holding onto a sink for dear life. I was considering the pros and cons of puking. We still talk all the time. He's gay in case you were wondering.

I did a lot in college. At one point I was used as an initiation ritual for a fraternity in which I believed I was safe and respected. It may have been retribution for fucking one of the brothers and not accepting his number. I don't know if he was there. I don't remember much until I woke up naked, behind a sheet hung from the ceiling, on a pile of clothing, next to a fresh faced boy who's name I never knew. I remembered this all at once last year when a coworker, being inappropriately "funny" asked "so where does one get roofies anyway?" And I responded "no idea, I haven't had any since that time I woke up in a frat on a pile of clothes." If you could have seen the look on his face. And I'm okay. Honest.

There was the fivesome with a bunch of gay and almost gay guys. The threesome because, well why not? The bet I could get a guy off with head in less then ten minutes, that I lost because he was a freak so I had to fuck his roommate. Rape culture much? The time I made out with a girl while our professor was passed out with his legs over us both. He is gay. I shroomed with him. Did a lot of pot with him too. Wanted very much to fuck him. Couldn't, so I fucked the guys he had crushes on.

Posed nude for art classes senior year. For the professor from whom I was taking a class. That's not awkward at all. Told my dad what I was doing and he said, "moisturize really well so you don't itch while posing." Good advice.

Last year a classmate sent me an email with copies of the nudes he had drawn of me.

The school chaplan found out I was a witch and started inviting me to all the interfaith events. Love being a "token."

Came home to my dorm one night Senior year to find a message on my answering machine threatening my life. It was a girl who's voice I didn't recognize. One of the school security guards offered me his home or a hotel room while they investigated, but I didn't have a car to get to campus. They never found out who it was. I learned how to throw knives in the woods behind campus, just in case.

I survived college. Obviously.

I have continued to pose nude for various artists and a local college since moving to my current area, just not in years. Although I would like to be photographed I think. One artist sold a painting of me several years ago for a few hundred dollars. She had painted me with much bigger boobs.

Since graduating I've been a nude model, bartender, ASPCA shelter manager, secretary, marketing manager, vet tech and now telemarketer and cam model.

No crazy sexy stories since college. But I have hand fed two bald eagles and an albino wallaby. I learned how to handle birds on a great horned owl. I hate cockatiels. I was knocked back into an xray viewing light bank by a dog in 2007 and that may have started the chronic vertigo.

I used to keep dermestid beetles in order to clean skeletons (road kill mostly) and have the preserved skeleton of one of my pet rats in a shadow box in the dining room.

After years of dying my hair, it all broke off and for a long time I had to keep my hair buzzed to 1/4".

As an infant, around the time I was in commercials, I was bitten by a dog, on the face, and almost lost my left eye and sinuses.

My left hand was crushed when I worked at the animal shelter (1998) during a tornado. I still don't have full mobility or strength.

I met 2 of the original animators for Walt Disney Studios when I was in Junior High School and had no idea what to ask. I think I asked something about drawing Bambi's mother's death and tried not to cry from nerves.

In 2009 I met Tom Savini, Jason Mewes and Corey Haim at Monster Mania. I should have taken Jay up on his compliment that he like my tattooes and "pretty mouth" and asked what he would like me to do with it.

Lost my well paying job with full benefits to cutbacks, and home to a flood in the same week in 2005. That's how I ended up where I am. In the house we still might not be able to keep. Doing what I'm doing to survive and hopefully making new stories for my memoire.

Maybe I'll get to meet Isaac Marion in real life and make some inappropriate suggestions...