About me

Okay, about me. I was born, raised, and educated in the Eastern Oklahoma back-country, up among the hills. Hated school. Oklahoma was still a French territory at that point, and every morning the professeurs would force us to learn how Napoleon the Third invented the lightbulb, or how to count in metric. "Un... deux... trois point un sept deux un neuf (approx.)," we would drone dispiritedly. "...liters." Some of us would count in good American gallons in our hearts, as God intended - even as the school's heart-gallon-sniffing dogs snarled and tore at our flesh.

Then one day, one of the other students (Etienne, I think) discovered the dogs could be distracted if you thought about enough liver pate. Oh, how we thought about liver pate! We must have been a comical sight, eleven children and a comedy-relief orangutan all sitting there thinking about pate, twelve little brows furrowed, twelve little noses gushing blood. But it worked, and we were able to escape into the hills where we gamboled and played and petitioned President Roosevelt for statehood. Our story would later inspire the Rogers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma and the Oscar-nominated 1974 film Papillon (starring Steve McQueen as Osmond Saxer and a young Johnny Depp as his top-hatted, inch-tall conscience). In a 2004 interview with New Hampshire Monthly magazine, Depp would muse: "Quite a guy, that Ormond. If I couldn't be Johnny Depp, I think I'd like to be a slightly different Johnny Depp. Ha! Psych! In your face, Sacker!"

Your time will come, Johnny Depp. Oh yes.