The Style Invitational;
Takes a Breather (434)


Week CI: No contests until mid-January. Instead, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the All-Time Stars of The Style Invitational in 100-Word Autobiographies That Contain One (and Only One) Falsehood. The revised title for next week's column is by Chris Doyle of Burke.

* Fame and celebrity are no strangers to me. When I was 7 one of the Kingston Trio held a door open for my family. Then, in high school, I sold Ernie Banks a Coke. In college I was introduced to Milton Friedman, but I didn't have time to chat. Graduate school in Los Angeles brought me even closer to the paparazzi. I took a class taught by John Lithgow's wife and once warned Cathy Lee Crosby that her dog was trying to jump out her car window. So when I ended up on an airliner sitting next to one of the Bangles, I wasn't fazed.

(Russell Beland, Springfield)

* It's probably genetic. I have relatives who would sneak into each other's houses and rearrange the furniture. Other family members once spent all afternoon cutting drip and splash shapes out of white paper and arranging them on top of the piano my grandmother had sternly warned them to cover while they were painting the room. Larry Storch is a cousin of mine. My sister and I have made eight movies to date featuring inflatable alligators in principal roles. A young nephew included deodorant sticks in his birthday party goody bags. We're sure he got the gene. I wrote this myself.

(Sarah W. Gaymon, Gambrills)

* Mr. Kammer is the son of immigrants whose marriage was arranged to end a war between rival clans in the backwaters of Eastern Europe. He earned a computer science degree, becoming a certified techno-geek, although he prefers beer and pretzels to Coke and Twinkies. The proud alleged father of two (no uncontested paternity test results exist) has twice scaled Mount Everest (using Adobe Photoshop) and is trying to organize a dangerous motorcycle gang in his community. Unfortunately, the leading contenders for the gang's name, "The Geezers" and "The Midlife Crises," have left the local populace relatively unconcerned and distinctly unmenaced.

(John Kammer, Herndon)

* I was born on Oct. 13, 1960, and made my first mistake shortly after. There followed a long series of flubs, gaffes and miscues ranging in awkwardness from mildly embarrassing to extremely disconcerting. These events formed a running theme of my life, culminating in the character The Man Who Did Everything Wrong, featured in a book yet to be written.

(Paul Kondis, Alexandria)