Showing Up & Getting Noticed: An Odd Continuation of My Memoirs

This work tells of my interactions with some famous and some not so famous people, and people who are not so famous, but I think they should be. The stories include my "odd interactions" the likes of Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, and even the Pope, and the president of Mongolia. They include tales about me and one Miss America, a woman who was once part of an underground terrorist group, and another woman I helped to become very famous. They also include a story about me meeting two peasants who separately discovered two of the world's most famous archeology sites, and several off encounters of "less famous" people..

These stories cover the odd changes that led me from being the illiterate "street radical" discussed in the first volume, to be a vender at sporting events, a development officer for non-profits, to eventually going to collage at age 38, and then being a leading spokesperson for a disability population, and a national expert for the US Government. But much of these jobs and transitions are background noise, or only discussed in getting to the point of one of the stories. Too much detail would make this too standard of a memoir.

Therefore, this work uses perhaps the most ancient way of telling personal or global history, that of a "good story." In my opinion, all the tales in this new volume can be stand-alone stories that can be enjoyed, with no need to have read or even skimmed the previous publication. The criteria for including any one of these stories is that they are both, in their nature, "odd events" and "good stories." To be clear, some of these odd events had lasting impacts on me, while others had almost absolutely no impact or just a transitory one. But regardless of impacts, each of these tales does meet the main criteria for inclusion as both an odd and good story.

The common thread of this series of tales is that each of these stories in some way represents broad events that occurred in my life and were only made possible based on the many transitions that occurred over the time since the end of my last memoir. In one way or another, many of my transitions were and are quite common to people of almost any modern age; Over the years covered I was trying to have a family, getting increasingly better jobs, with far more stress; and also trying hard to maintain some sense of one's youthful self. Tales of these types of transitions seem to me to be too common of an event for most people and are mostly not discussed that much. The more common events are mentioned only as background material for a given odd tale. This can also be said concerning historical events involved, even though many of these stories involve people who were or became famous as either main or minor characters, it is not their fame that is key but only how I interacted with them in one of my tales that is mostly included.

I do not mean to overinflate myself by that statement, since in fact only a few of these events had less than a blip on world history. Truly, many of these types of experiences I have had are left out. In addition, even though they meet my criteria, I have let out extensive numbers of other great tales, simply because of space and they don't really reflect one of my major transitions. I hope you enjoy those that are included.