Parents' house is full of books in every room. Plus a dog and a cat, usually.

From age 6, I grew up in a working class irish/italian catholic town, but proposition 2 1/2 gutted the school system (in order to lower taxes) the year we moved there. Private Quaker grade school/jr high, thanks to generous and lovely Grandma. Glasses in second grade. Hair: short and really curly. Lively beginning, by third grade a complete loner bookworm. Piano lessons from age 5. African dance and conga drumming in junior high. I'd grow out my hair long and frizzy (in two pigtails, or mom would "set" it with bobby pins the night before), then get fed up and cut it short and be mistaken for a boy. Two best friends and books.

Private artsy/freak high school (thanks again grandma): computer geek then tried being a hippie for 5 months, failed. Figured out how to have long curly hair (don't fuck with it) and got contacts. Whole world treated me differently. Ran to punk and straightedge hardcore, industrial and Billy Bragg. Became vegetarian. Exploring beat music, dancing to techno and house. Choreographing dance, performing dance, and continuing piano. Went to the Netherlands in a high school dance company tour. Read Howard Zinn a bunch. First taste of contact improvisation (it's a kind of dance).
Small-private-liberal-arts-college (thanks again grandma): had fun the first year. Indie rock, hardcore, and techno/house. Dance, performance, writing. Second year: Riot Grrl. College Radio dj stint. Prochoice march on Washington in '93 (I think), saw Fugazi and Bikini Kill. Tried to take School seriously, could't understand why I was getting no sense of the way things work in the world. Volunteered to coordinate 65-person housing "cooperative" full of credit card hippies, lost even more youthful idealism about humanity and freaked out. Took a semester off, stayed in Boston. Learned guitar. Went to UMass Boston and got a taste of working class academia. Liked it, but needed the paper, so went back to Oberlin. Contact improv. Performance theory. Labor History. Went to Europe on the Antioch Women's Studies Abroad Program --you must read the saga to understand how fucked up this was-- came back and finished up. Kinda. Shaved head senior year, then discovered the joys of bleach and dye. Blond! Red! Spiky! Stubble! Continued contact improv. Stopped piano, mostly. Rediscovered the social benefits of being a loner/ valuing good friends and not wasting my time.

Where am I now?