Five things no one knows about me ...

(By Erik)

In continuing the trend I’ve established of mentioning Bobby and/or Tamie Ross in the beginning of every single blog post …

Bobby recently “tagged” me to list Five Things No One Knows About Me. For some time I’ve avoided this activity for the simple fact that any such information would be considered privileged and, if I posted it, would be no longer privileged or indeed unknown. Yet, as I find myself woefully without Netflix movies or anything decent to watch on TV, I feel oddly compelled to comply.

1. I have absolutely no writing ability at all. All of my articles are ghost written by my wife in her spare time. In fact, I’m not even writing this now. I’m in the other room playing Super Pac-Man.

2. I have AT LEAST two fingers on every single hand.

3. I have a brief cameo in the film Mission to Mars. I portray Marvin Morales, the wise-cracking head chef at NASA who breaks into Mission Control throughout the film, grabbing the intercom system and shouting the names of today’s entrees in the NASA cafeteria up to the astronauts as they approach the Red Planet. In the touching scene where Woodrow “Woody” Blake (Tim Robbins) dances with his wife, Terri Fisher (Connie Nielsen) in zero gravity as a wistful Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) watches, pining for the wife he lost to cancer, I can be heard in the background yelling, “RIGATONI WITH SAUTEED BABY EGGPLANT, FRESH MOZZARELLA AND FRESH BASIL IN FILETTO DI POMODORO SAUCE. GOLDEN BROWN, WHITE MEAT CHICKEN SERVED WITH SHALLOTS IN TERIYAKI SAUCE. THE CHICKEN AND BROCCOLI TORTELLONI IS NOT AVAILABLE ON TODAY’S MENU. I REPEAT, NOT AVAILABLE. THAT IS ALL.”

My voiceover was cut from the final version of the film’s domestic release. The producers felt my performance was “too cerebral” and removed the romantic tension from the scene. However, the scene was left in its original form for the Italian version of the film. Though I have never visited, I am regarded in Italy as a national hero.

4. Right now I’m watching the religious TV station. It features Kirk Cameron, better known to the world as Mike Seaver of ABC’s popular sitcom Growing Pains, talking about the Ten Commandments. (Actually, a man with an Australian accent and a mustache is doing most of the talking. And no, I'm not sure if I'm spelling "Seaver" correctly.)

More recently Cameron portrayed the main character in the movie version of the popular Left Behind series of novels, a fictional account of the equally fictional belief that the Second Coming will be heralded by the Rapture and seven years of tribulation in which we will be tortured by the antichrist — an evil man with a bad Russian accent in the Left Behind version. He will also be the head of the United Nations, which believers in the Rapture think is an evil organization bent on nothing less than complete world government. They are wrong, of course. It is well known by all free-thinking people that the evil organization bent on world domination is not the United Nations. It is Disney.

Kirk Cameron’s voice is just slightly ahead of his mouth movements on the religious channel. I fear that he might be the antichrist. If he is, perhaps he has the power to silence the moustached man with the Australian accent.

5. “Tryggestad” isn’t actually a name at all. It’s merely an assemblage of random letters I put together by punching a “Speak N’ Spell” repeatedly. My actual name is X92458756-NB478. I am a clone — part of an elaborate government experiment to create an exact genetic duplicate of Leon Trotsky, the Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary, Marxist theorist and founder of the Red Army. The government deemed the experiment, code-named “Treadway,” a failure. I was released into the wild to fend for myself, and the government was forced to devise another method of winning the Cold War — pushing the Soviets to the edge of economic ruin by escalating the arms race during the Reagan era instead of having me — had I, in fact, developed into a perfect genetic double of Trotsky — announce to the Soviets, “Oops, comrades. Looks like I was turned around on this whole communism thing. Free markets rule!”