dailyeatings

My elementary school Gifted teacher, Mrs. Bennett, once centered an entire day’s lesson plans around playing with the almanac. This was in 3rd grade or thereabouts, long before any of us had any real experience working with reference books, statistical charts and the like. To most of us, the Almanac was some book Benjamin Franklin published a long time ago, whatever that was all about. Mrs. Bennett passed out copies to every one of us and instructed us to turn to a certain page. I cracked open what appeared to be the Thickest Book in the World and flipped to the assigned section, “Famous Birthdays.” We were told to find famous people who shared the same birthday as us and to write them down and present them to the class. In an interesting twist, the birthdays were arranged in alphabetical order by last name, so finding your birthday involved diligently searching down columns of minute text for the right numerical combination as well as deciding if the person listed was famous enough to present, a task which took most of us the better part of an hour (tricky, tricky, Mrs. Bennett!).

As I flipped through page after page of names and dates, I kept coming across people whose names had far too many consonants (unpronounceable to me, and therefore unimportant), or people who had died over a hundred years ago (too old for me to acknowledge as ever having existed). My paper remained blank while others scribbled down one interesting celebrity after another, such as the voice of Scooby-Doo, the second man on the moon and the inventor of the electric guitar, while I stared at a list of European artists whom I had never heard of and didn’t care about. I flew through the artists section, the inventors section, the politicians section and the military section without a single dang name that I recognized. Time was running out. I became really agitated and nervous; disappointed, even, that my birthday was so insignificant compared to Jenny’s or Alan’s, whose days were probably national holidays in cool places like Fiji and Nigeria whereas mine was a black day on the calendar where all the Cool People had carefully avoided being born, where everybody stayed indoors all day for fear of doing something historically significant.

At the announcement of “Five more minutes, guys”, I was officially Panicked; I needed a name, any name, lest my birthday, and consequently, myself, be found uncool by my peers. Looking through the last page, Television Celebrities, I found a name which I recognized from my odd habit of memorizing names from TV show credits. I smiled broadly, quickly scribbed it down and closed my book, satisfied that I had found that One Name which not only legitimize my birthday, but also knock everybody else’s socks off.

Our presentations went by alphabetical order. Alan presented a massive list of historical figures that seemed to interest Mrs. Bennett very much, even though he himself had never heard of 90% of them. Curtis had a couple of rock stars with songs I vaguely remembered, some others had such notable celebrities as the Scary Guy in “Thriller”, one of Old Guys who did the evening news, and a former US president. I grew increasingly confident that my celebrity would be way more rad than theirs, especially since mine was currently famous, and thus tons cooler. When called to present, I walked to the front of the class, and told Mrs. Bennett that I had tried, but only could find one name.

On my birthday, June 17th, Mark Linn-Baker was born.

Blank stares all around.

Mrs. Bennett was at a loss. “Could you tell us a little about him and why he’s famous, David?”

He’s the American guy from Perfect Strangers!

More blank stares.

“Um… ok, good job, David, you can have a seat.”