Last night I dreamt that my son was 150 pounds and I couldn�t get him in a shopping cart. Why was I trying to put him in a shopping cart? I really couldn�t say. But when I tried to pick up his thirty pounds of wiggliness in the grocery store today and felt a twinge between my shoulder blades, I began to have an inkling of where this dream came from.

[Absolutely no attempt at a segue to the next topic will be made. Please remain in your seats. Thank you.]

Lately when I�ve been having trouble writing, I�ve been making lists of things, random things. Such as

My Top 10 Brushes with Greatness

1. I went to high school with Moby (Yes, that�s what we called him then too. I have his yearbook picture to prove it.)

2. Alex Kelly, the preppy rapist, smashed my Snoopy lunchbox when I was in first grade. He threw it down a ravine behind the school. He also went to high school with me.

3. While I was attending a different high school (my family moved a lot), Dorothy Mengering, a.k.a David Letterman�s mom was our church secretary.

4. I am only 3 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon (My uncle�s cousin is Lori Singer who was in Footloose with Kevin Bacon).

5. When we were both in college, I worked for a summer doing summer stock with The Daily Show�s Mo Rocca. (I have pictures of him in tights and a tunic from a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.)

6. I once sat behind comedian Louie Anderson on a plane when I got bumped to first class.

7. I once sat next to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the now defunct Uncle Tai�s restaurant in Manhattan. Of course, since I was about 7 at the time, I had no idea who they were. My mom, however, still talks about this day.

8. Pianist Emmanuel Ax taught me to play poker backstage at an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concert when I was 16 (my youth orchestra was playing on the same concert as Ax).

9. When I was 10, my family was eating in a bierstube in a small Alpine town in Austria and we saw Gene Wilder telling jokes at the bar.

10. Barbara Bush (the former First Lady, not the underage drinker) once lived in my senior year college dorm room.

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