As we say in the hood, I'm a stoop kid.

Let's not kid ourselves. They're 2-15. Nothing against Mt. Hood, but I'm just curious to see is we can do that against somebody better. The girls were run pretty good for the last few days, so this was a day off compared to the last couple of practices.

After a show, I'll get the 16-year-old white kid whose lip is pierced, his head is shaved and his parents hate him, and the young gangster from the screwed-up 'hood, and they say that now they realize there's someone out there who thinks like they do.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.

Oh, I never look under the hood.