# Auto and Semi-auto Biographies.



## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

How about posting a short autobiography? Presented for your approval, my quickie autobiography:

Michael O’Connor
A Short Biography

Michael O’Connor was born at a very young age in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 18, 1953. From the very beginning, he demonstrated an unusual talent for being a baby and make large messes. Talents he has nurtured to this day. 

When he was five years old the family moved to Granger, later to be known a east West Valley. Although the stated purpose of the move was to better house the family of Father, Mother, Daughter and Son, there are persistent rumors of peasant uprisings around the O’Connor house prompted by the strange experiments thought to be taking place in the home. Also the cries of “It’s alive” seem to have been unnerving to the neighbors. All this was later explained away by the Buergermeister as Father O’Connors dabbling in the black arts of Bagpipe playing. 

Along with the bagpipery of his father, Michael also imbibed music from his mother. She was a talented Alto who got her start singing in the saloons of Schenectady, New York. She was accompanied by her mother, who had a fine touch as a Honky-tonk pianist. As can be imagined, the nightly lullabies were not of the usual sort. It was also his mother who blighted his life and blasted his prospects of gainful employment with a love of classical music and, more tragically, a passion for Wagner. 

Michael went to Granger Elementary for five uneventful years. The only musical event of note was his mother being told by the piano teacher that he had no talent. 

It was in Junior High at Valley Junior High, that Michael did two important things; he taught himself to play the piano, which was seen as a good thing and he took up the Horn, aka The French Horn. The goodness of the latter is still to be decided. Michael continued with the Horn through high school at, you guessed it, Granger High School and graduated with no distinctions in the middle, somewhere, of his class in 1971. 

Having nothing better to do, and finding that a middling low Horn player is not a marketable skill, Michael enrolled in the University of Utah as a Music Theory major, not knowing that this was perhaps the least employable major in the entire university system. 

Feeling a sudden and inexplicable urge for self improvement, he served a mission for the LDS Church in Ohio (really? Ohio?) from 1972 to 1974 after which he soon returned to the fleshpots of the University of Utah. 

In 1976 he married the love of his life and the only woman who could stand him, Miriam Clark. Their courtship had been the usual giddy round of concerts, museums, long walks in the cemetery and discussions of Egyptian mummification practices. It was Miriam who first introduced Michael to the music of the Renaissance (a word he still cannot spell) and in turn he introduced her to the modern and daring music of Johan Sebastian Bach. Their few friends often say that the words “Gomez and Morticia” come to minds when they think of Michael and Miriam O’Connor, that is, when they think of them at all. 

At the same time as his marriage, Michael became in the eyes of many a traitor and began attending Brigham Young University. Originally he was a Composition major studying with both Merrill Bradshaw and David Sargent. However, that field promised to be too lucrative so Michael turned again to Music Theory, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1981.

Being told by the BYU Employment Office that there was nothing they could really do for him, Music Theory degree and all, Michael tried several ways of making a living and supporting his family which now consisted of himself, Miriam and four children. Apparently there was a good reason that he was called “Rabbit” while attending BYU. 

After hurting his back at work in 1984, Michael returned to the University of Utah for a Teaching Certificate. Having no aptitude for anything “useful” like Science or Math, Michael fell back on Music and History. You thought I was going to say something naughty. 

From 1989 to 1995 Michael taught band and history at, ironically enough, Valley Junior High. Not being the “Star Wars” enthusiast he was to later become, he did not say to his current colleagues who previously had been his teachers “The pupil has become the Master”, which would have been a misquote anyway. 

In 1995, Miriam decided that simply talking about mummification was no longer satisfying, so the O’Connor family, now with five children, moved to the Los Angeles area so that Miriam could enroll in Mortuary Science at Cypress College. To finance this excursion Michael got work teaching band and history at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. Taft is world famous as being the High School from which Lisa Kudro graduated. 

After three years enjoying the laid back Los Angeles life style of great weather, gangs and running gunfights, the O’Connors moved back to West Valley in 1998. 

With no demand for band teachers and all the history slots being filled by Coaches, Michael was again forced to find employment in other fields, eventually landing at eBay in 2000, where he still maintains a tenuous foothold on employment. 

Other than an abortive attempt to enter Graduate School in Music Composition at the University of Utah (being 1/10th of a point below the 3.0 required) Michael has had no further education in music. 

During all the changes and upheavals of his life, Michael has remained a remarkably unproductive composer. There are to date no magna opera hidden in trunks or under floorboards for future music historians to find on his death.


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## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

Hahaha, that made me laugh quite a few times


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Excellent, Mr O'Connor! :tiphat:
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Mollie:
Born the fourth of six kids, of an Anglo-Scottish family, in York, the Queen of the North. (My Dundonian father met my mother at the bottom of her garden in Retford, after being evacuated from Dunkirk.)

After reading English at Durham Uni, I got engaged to Taggart in 3 weeks, married within 3 months, & still cantering on together 41 years later. :kiss:

I have known the love of four moggies, 2 Airedales & a Border Terrier.

I spent 30 out of my 40 working years teaching every age from 7 year olds to undergrads, in 10 Educational Establishments around England.

And right now I'm having a passionate affair with my fiddle...

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## Abraham Lincoln (Oct 3, 2015)

My life was a tragically short one. That's because I haven't died yet.


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