mid 1980s

            
                              HILLARYG64





Figured it was about time to give everyone the lowdown, and Janet, you
provided just the intro I needed. THANKS!

Hillary is my real name. My parents gave me a very nice name, but lousy
initials. (Ursula wouldn't have sounded great, would've made for a nicer
monogram.) Hillary was not a common name, and not easy to find in those
name your baby books either, but it seems my grandmother had a neighbor
with a daughter or granddaughter named Hillary. This little girl was an
adorable blue-eyed blonde. Oh well, one out of three is not bad! (I
don't know how on earth my parents expected to produce a kid with blond
hair and blue eyes; those genes are SO recessive on both sides of the
family it's ridiculous!)

Born at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital on January 15, 1964, my arrival in New
York preceded the Beatles' by about three weeks. [Legend has it that my
father was in Philadelphia on business when my mother went into labor,
and defied the authorities on the New Jersey Turnpike, which was closed
because of the snow, by driving north anyway in his 1955 Lincoln (not a
hot-rod, tho) to get back to Brooklyn.] I'd like to believe that my
parents had Ed Sullivan on the boob tube on Sunday, February 9, and were
making sure that even at my tender age I was witnessing this bit of
cultural history.

I was *SUCH* a good baby that I found myself saddled with a little
sister, Suzanne, 22 months later. It's just the two of us; unless you
count the furry kid who was always my father's favorite (Queenie, a
bee-yoo-tee-full German shepard who brightened our lives for almost 14
years between 1971 and 1985).

My mother, father, sister, and I were all born in Brooklyn. I spent my
formative years in Queens. Even at an early age they knew what a trivia
prodigy I would be: I skipped kindergarten and went right into first
grade.  My mother used to tell me it was because I was bigger (i.e.,
taller) than the other kids in the class. As it was, I was usually one
of the last five or six girls when we had to line up according to
height. I never experienced a sudden growth spurt; I was always one of
the taller girls.

I didn't know it at the time, but John Gotti's son went to my junior
high school. (He wasn't in any of my classes; not even in the yearbook
photo!). John Gotti himself attended, briefly, the high school in New
York I went to sophmore year (not at the same time as me of course).
THEN, horror of horrors, we moved to New Jersey! Talk about culture
shock! I graduated from a high school in northwestern New Jersey whose
total population was equal to just one grade in my New York high school!
A school that had a golf team, but not a volleyball team--can you
believe that?! I'd been the scorekeeper for the volleyball team back in
New York, but I got to practice with the team, so the coach saw how much
I'd improved. With all the girls graduating, I might've had a shot at
actually being a player! But NO! We had to move to New Jersey! (I'm not
bitter . . . not much!)

After graduation from high school I went to American University in
Washington, DC, as a Russian Studies major. That lasted three semesters.
I spent a semester abroad in Tel Aviv and came home with a broken
ankle--I broke it en route to a picnic! Either Peter and Mary or Paul
and Mary signed my cast after a concert in Jerusalem before I came back
to the US; I didn't save the cast, nor did I take a picture of the
signatures before the cast was removed!

After a semester off, during which time I worked at a day-care center
and took typing and accounting classes at County College of Morris (how
far is that from you, Anth?), I changed my major to Communicative
Disorders and Sciences [a.k.a. Speech Pathology and Audiology] and
transfered to SUNY-Buffalo, which bestowed upon me a B.A., cum laude, in
1985. Funny, now that we were no longer residents of New York State,
both my sister and I ended up as alumnae of SUNY (she went to
Binghamton), paying out-of-state tuition; guess it was a way of getting
back at our parents for moving to New Jersey! [I'm sorry to be dumping
on New Jersey, but it WAS a hard move for me; I know I would've felt
different if I'd been born and raised there, or if I'd moved there at a
much earlier age.]

I spent the year after graduation living at home, which was now Scotch
Plains, New Jersey, in the central part of the state, in Union County. I
took classes in the Sign Language Interpreting program at Union County
College in Cranford. Then I applied to the graduate program in Audiology
at Gallaudet College (soon to be University) in Washington, DC.

And that's what brought me back to Washington, DC. I never got a
Master's degree. I switched from Audiology to Linguistics; I realized
that what interested me about being at Gallaudet was the language and
the culture, NOT the medical or scientific aspect of deafness.

I've always been interested in languages. My interest in sign language
was spurred by the appearance of members of the National Theatre of the
Deaf on Sesame Street waaaaaaaaay back when. I taught myself the manual
alphabet from the back of a Helen Keller biography. But I never met
anyone who used sign language until college.

My best subjects in school were always language-related. I studied
Spanish in junior high and high school, French in high school and
college, Russian in college, and Hebrew in college and beyond. Actually,
I was a Hebrew school dropout at age 8, but I became an adult Bat
Mitzvah last year. When I was in elementary school and junior high, I'd
considered becoming a writer. An English teacher in 7th grade wanted me
to enter a writing contest, but I never got around to it. I did write
about 150 small loose-leaf pages of a "manuscript" that I eventually
threw out because I deemed it too hokey. I'd thought about majoring in
Creative Writing in college (at the University of Michigan, like my
heroine protagonist, Francie Nolan of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn") but,
of course, like my father says, you don't need to go to college to write
stories! And I haven't written much outside of classwork since.

I MUST appear on a nationally syndicated game show before I die! I've
taken the "Jeopardy!" test many times now and passed every time except
once (maybe twice). I also passed the "Millionaire" written test. I
never tried for "Weakest Link" because I didn't like the concept of
voting people off--it was too mean, and I'm not thick skinned enuf to
deal with it if I was voted off. When I was at SUNY-Buffalo, some
friends of mine were going to take up a collection to send me out to
California to be on "Name That Tune." I've been on two local community
cable shows, where the prizes have come from the 99-cent store or the
video store. Not exactly the same as being on "Jeopardy!" or
"Millionaire" or "Wheel of Fortune."

Even as a kid, I could answer the "adult" questions on "Jokers Wild" and
other game shows. The questions they had for the kids--my "peers" so to
speak--were so lame! I was smarter than a lot of the adult contestants!
(Granted, when I was a kid, I did not understand the idea behind
"Jeopardy!" and it was not one of the game shows I watched.)

I've been playing tournament-level Scrabble for almost 20 years, and
it's given me a family just like this trivia club. There are tournaments
all ove