19) Before I became a writer, I was a teacher, an actress, a chef, a sales person, a baker, and a school librarian. Phew!
20) Sitting by the
ocean is one of my favorite places to be.
21)
My favorite baseball teams are the Mets and Red Sox. My brothers
don't know any better. Ugh! They're both Yankee fans.
22)
My favorite word is peace. It has a nice feel to it.
23) I love the smell of cow manure and skunks.
24) I have a daughter named Maggie, who towers over me.
25)
My daughter and I just moved out of the house where
she was born.
We were sad to leave it.
26) I
used to love making snow angels. Still
do.
27) I have four neon
fish named John, Paul, George and Ringo,
for my favorite rock band. And a betta named Yoko Ono.
28)
I learned two things in 6th grade that helped me in life:
Don't be a litter bug and Walk on left, facing
traffic.
Another Unofficial Bio, in prose ~
I was born a very bald baby on October 28 in Nyack,
New York. But you already know that. Until I was five, we lived in a place called
Shanks Village, in an old Army Barracks left over from
World War II. My dad, Herbie, was a mechanical engineer
and designed gears for things like elevators and nuclear
submarines. My mom, Betty, was a work-at-home-mom, who
used to work for the FBI. She had four kids, a husband
and a house to take care of, which meant she did lots
of work at home.
Some
of my favorite adventures, and my mom's biggest
headaches, took place in Shanks Village. One time I
came home with bare feet after playing outside in a
foot of snow. That actually gave my feet a headache.
Another time, on a hot summer's day, I came home
with tar coating my feet from breaking tar bubbles on
the freshly paved road. I liked living my adventures
as much as I like writing about them.
On
weekends, my dad took us on hikes through the woods,
where I began my life-long love of nature. I'll
never forget the time I saw my first lady's slipper, which I wrote about in a story called Louisa's Treasure. I'm still
waiting for a publisher to make that story into a book.
My
sister, Sue, and I had many great adventures. She was
older, so she got to boss me around. She had me pull
her around on her roller skates, which I wrote about
in a story called Suzie Skates. In summer,
we climbed into a dried out sewer, where it was cool,
and where I watched my big sister knit on those muggy
July days.
When I was three-years-old, my brother, John, was born. Shortly
after his birth, my mom got sick with tuberculosis and
had to go to the hospital for a long time. I lived with
three different families during those 18 months and
missed my mom fiercely. When she got better, we moved
to St. Cloud Ave. in West Orange, where I was friends
with Larry Lancit, who grew up to be the creator, producer
and director of Reading Rainbow. I got him into trouble quite often.
Six
months after my youngest brother, Phil, was born, my
mom had a relapse and went back into the hospital. It
was hard on our family, because my dad's sister
moved in with us, and didn't know how to be our
mom. I was so mad that Mom was sick again, I got Larry to pull up our neighbor's flowers with me.
One of my favorite things to do when I was young was
sitting on a branch of a big beech tree, which stretched
out over the field next to our house, where horses grazed.
I called it My Special Place and wrote about it in one
of my stories.
I never dreamed of being a writer like many of the writers
that I know. Being outdoors, playing with friends was
what I liked best. I wanted to have the adventures others
read about in books.
By
the time I got to high school, I developed a group of
friends that weren't very popular with my mom.
Some of them were greasers; others were from the college
prep crowd. Dotty Woznik, who sat behind me in all my
classes, got me in trouble the most. I named one
of the cows in WHEN THE COWS GOT LOOSE for Dotty. That girl could play a mean boogie
on the piano.
In my senior year, our football team was undefeated.
I was a baton twirler who performed at halftime shows,
while Dotty was a cheerleader. She convinced me to throw
an unofficial bash (one my parents didn't know
about) at my parent's summer cottage on Culver
Lake, NJ. Of course, they found out and I was grounded
for the rest of football season.
After
high school, I studied to be a teacher at Seton Hall
University in South Orange, NJ. After graduation, I taught math
& reading in a resource room, but needed to taste more of life, so I backpacked through Europe with my cousin, Mary, for two months. I then tried my hand at
acting, professional cooking, sales, baking cakes,
and running a school library, before I settled into
writing.
Somewhere
in the middle of all that, I got married and had a baby. My daughter, Maggie, who is 22 years old and still the joy of my life (now that we're past the teen years), inspired me to write children's books. Her dad and I have since split up (which inspired my poetry chapbook, DIVORCE PAPERS), but we are friends now and often celebrate the holidays
together.
While Maggie was in high school, we started working
on a book project together that we finished in her last
year of college. A memoir about the struggles we had
in her last two years in high school that we look forward to becoming a published book someday soon.
Thanks for stopping by my bio page to read these bits and pieces of my life. Be sure to stop back soon.
