Yeah, that’s me, ice-fishing. I like ice-fishing, except when I accidentally catch a fish. (I’m in it for the fashion.) Anyway, I thought that while I’m updating this site, I would include some other facts about myself that people seem to find interesting. So here goes, roughly in date order since I’m an historian:

1. ‣When I was growing up, I sometimes spent Saturdays with my family on anti-abortion picket lines. My parents were Right-to-Life activists, and my mother was a Feminist for Life. As I recall, sometimes my father ran for public office on the Right-to-Life party line, and he regularly lobbied Albany. (I grew up on Long Island.)
   

2. ‣My mother once referred to me as “the normal one.” My sister is now a conservative Roman Catholic nun and a physician, my older brother is an artist, a computer animation specialist, and sometimes a musician (best song chorus ever: “Duh! Duh!”), and my younger brother, a serious New Yawker who does finish carpentry construction, can’t understand why I like to live in the midwest. I got some useful experience with racism growing up, since my younger brother is multi-racial and appears black. (The rest of the family, including me, are white.) As teenagers, the two of us were sometimes mistaken for an interracial couple. When I would respond, “Hey, he’s my brother,” people thought I was making a political statement. I realized only later, I was.
   

3. ‣After I dropped out of college (Georgetown University) at the age of 19, I worked for five years as a mortgage broker. No, I don’t miss it.
   

4. ‣I went to graduate school in Indiana because my therapist said, “You’re cured. Now get out of New York!” I was admitted to the program in which I earned my degree because they lost my application and were too embarrassed to admit it. (They found it a couple years later.)
   

5. ‣As an assistant professor, I won a butter dish in a writing contest for Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. (I also sort of won an Associate Editorship there.)
   

6. ‣I appear naked on the front cover of my second book. (The article I wrote about that won me the butter dish.) So yes, I do nudity, but only if it’s critical to the plot.
   

7. ‣A few years back, I got a media-interest call from Penthouse Magazine and right after that another one from Christian Life Radio. You know you’re onto something interesting when you have a week like that. Both agreed with my take on leaving kids’ healthy genitals alone.
   

8. ‣I’ve been married 17 times, but always to the same guy. (Not a coincidence.) I often wear red to our weddings, as I did to our first.
   

9. ‣I gave birth without painkillers out of historical curiosity. Answer: ow. But kind of cool. I would definitely do it the same way again.
   

10. ‣I quit a tenured job to be able to energetically pursue what I really love (writing, speaking, advocacy work, cooking, and my kid). Academics call me “brave” when they hear that I did this rather self-centered thing; I think this is proof that academics are weird.
    

11. ‣I’m now working for my fourth Big Ten University (half-time, by choice). Unfortunately I love my current job so much, I’m unlikely to rack up employment at all eleven Big Ten Schools before I die.
    

12. ‣As a hobby, I provide interior decorating advice to fellow academics for their university offices. Since academics can’t afford my talents, I trade this service for my clients’ professional advice and services...or (I admit), for sex, but only in the case of the Senior Associate Dean for Education at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. (And wow, does his office look good!)
    
    

If you’re curious to know who funds a nut like this, click here.

My Mystique (go figure)