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i was born on a hot july morning in the borough of manhattan, and named after:
1. marina, a character in pericles.
2. mimi, my great grandmother.
i was raised in the suburbs of new york city, on the edge of the old baldwin farm. when i was little, bulls would come up into our yard, and my dad would chase them away with a stick. i grew up loving cats, my little pony, the smurfs, judy bloom, barbie, nancy drew, running around in the woods, and making machines and hideouts with my brother out of cardboard boxes. i had the chicken pox during the three weeks they taught multiplication tables in third grade. my math skills never recovered. i broke my elbow that same year during a particularly perilous game of dodge ball.
my favorite holiday is halloween, because it appeals to my pagan and nostalgic tendencies all at once. i love the smell of fresh cut grass, and warm cat fur. i hate the sensation of falling, and i’m scared of heights. i see numbers, particularly decades, in colors. i have no interest in going to law school, but I think it would be fun to take the lsat. when i was four years old i told my mother i wanted to be a rock star. i took tap and ballet lessons when i was little, and got big parts in school musicals, but mostly i was just a kid. i went to an extremely progressive girls’ high school, where i had some amazing teachers. my favorite subject was biology, though i refused to dissect anything. i was on the soccer team and did lots of plays and musicals.
after high school, i slogged through four years at princeton, where i discovered that:
1. i am not an academic.
2. i will always choose sleep or procrastination over class work.
3. i want to be an actress, i want to be a star.
4. smart people can be really fucking stupid, or just really boring.
i graduated from princeton with honors, and moved to nyc to hit the big time. i fronted a rock band and toured the ny area and ireland. i had my head shaved in public and on camera for way too little money. i performed off-broadway in the donkey show, off-off-broadway in a whole lot of other stuff, and all over north america in the national tour of RENT, where i understudied five roles and performed four. i may possibly have been the whitest mimi ever.
i have been a vegetarian since i was 13. i believe the way our society raises animals for food (and other things) is immoral. i am a self-identified queer feminist anti-racist. i am extremely interested in the construction of race and the intersection of racism and misogyny in the patriarchy. i think george w. bush and his associates are the living face of evil in this world. either that, or they are, collectively, the manifestation of a genetic defect that will doom the entire human race. i hope they all go straight to the hell they believe in.
2006 was the hardest, scariest, most infuriating, most humbling year of my life, but i got through it with perseverance and the help of my wonderful family and friends. 2007 was way better. in 2008 my new rock band, THE REFORMATIONISTS, is making our performance debut.
...more to come...
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