Peter

1. Because though I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading “The English Patient”, I was bowled over by her portrayal of Hana.

2. Gosh, is she beautiful!

Dickson makes a great co-conspirator when you’re planing things like 30th birthday celebrations for people secretly. I respect a guy who can keep a secret better than I can!

Because crgreene will take a day off to have breakfast while flipping through Us Weekly, see a movie, get a spa treatment, and get dinner. That’s what I call a trooper.

Also for introducing me to EOnline Fashion Police, making me consistently great mix CDs, and being about the only person in Chicago I trust to give me a hand in the kitchen when dinner party preparations are lagging.

More accurately, one of my favourite memories….

Let’s dig into the wayback machine for this one: October 2001. She and I and her sister undertook a long distance, overnight train trip to Rochester to attend a friend’s wedding. And another trip on the way back to Chicago, of course. By the time we rolled into Rochester early in the morning, our faces were flattened by the windows and crgreene had had a night sharing a set of coach seats with a snoring woman from (I believe) Cleveland instead of spreading herself across the pair of them.

Nonetheless, crgreene was that face mask treatment at the bride’s hotel room, but by gosh, did crgreene look stunning in the mauve bridesmaid dress during the next day’s ceremony!

The photo, incidentally, is me and NOT crgreene enjoying the mask.

This is the first installment in a long line of postings about Why I Like Peter.

Why I like Peter #1: I credit him (correctly or otherwise) with introducing me to many essentials of life, including but not limited to: the joys of quince, Go Fug Yourself, Kasabian, Coffee Crisps, how to entertain with elegance in an apartment of modest size, Sapori Trattoria, the full appreciation of tapas … I’ll add as they come to me.

I met Peter through my first professional job, at the UIC Library. We were both Academic Resident Librarians and our offices were next door to each other. Eventually we dubbed it the “party wing” because we were clearly enjoying ourselves more than the folks in the offices on the other side of the building, despite the fact that our offices had almost no heat. In fact, if Peter called me, he could hear me pushing my chair back to get the phone. You might ask, “why use the phone in that situation?” and I would answer, “Shouting through a wall is neither very professional nor very clearly enunciated.”

Well, they used to ask each other – but not me – if I was gay. Guess we cleared that one up pretty effectively!

Just because I like to be tongue-tied and idiotic, babbling small talk at someone whose work I admire and enjoy greatly.

And so I can ask her if she really wants that Nobel Prize one day.

Oh, say what you will about her television persona: she has done a lot of things well and right to make it where she is.

And yes, ANTM is my (not so) secret guilty pleasure.