-When I was about a year old, my mom left me home with my dad for the whole day for the very first time.  When she came home, she found my dad strangely quiet and me with a devious grin on my fat little face.  Upon closer inspection, my mom discovered that I was covered, head to toe, in a thin layer of white powder.  She interrogated my dad, who broke pretty easily.  After refusing to eat even a morsel of what my dad tried to feed me, I had forced him to give me white powdered donuts for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Thus, even as an infant, I knew my parents’ weaknesses and used them to my advantage.  I think that your family life has a huge effect on who you become.  That’s why I’d like to take you inside the Karo family – a world of relative absurdity.

-After the powdered donut incident, my young life remained fairly calm until that fateful evening in January 1982 when my parents brought home my newborn sister from the hospital.  They carefully unwrapped her blankets, showed me her angelic face, and said, “Aaron, this is your new baby sister, Caryn.”  Upon hearing this, I immediately starting running around her crib yelling at the top of my lungs, “Caryn and Aaron!  Caryn and Aaron!  Caryn and Aaron!”  My parents looked at each other in horror.  Unwittingly, unknowingly, and inexplicably, they had somehow given their only two children rhyming first names.

-So I had to learn to survive in a family with an Aaron, a Caryn, and a cousin named Sharon.  It was harder than you might think.  Imagine being ten years old, playing around with your sister in the basement, and all you hear from upstairs is your mom yelling unintelligibly, “...aaaaaaaaryn, come upstairs!” and having no idea whether she’s calling you or your rhyming name sister.  To avoid confusion, my parents eventually starting calling us by our middle names.  That led to my friends at school noticing that I wouldn’t respond when called Aaron anymore.  Since I never told them my middle name, they started calling me Karo.  And to this day, everyone I have ever met, from girlfriends to doormen, has always called me Karo (pronounced “KAY-ro”).  Except my parents.  They still call me and my sister by our middle names.  Serves them right.

-So let’s take a closer look at my parents.  My mom, an education administrator, is the kind of mom that, no matter where you are in the world, and no matter what is wrong with you, she’s got some shit in her pocketbook that will make it better.  “Mom, I skinned my knee.”  “Don’t worry honey, I have a band-aid in my purse.”  “Mom, I have a headache.”  “Don’t worry honey, I have some Advil in my purse.”  “Mom, we have a flat tire.”  “Don’t worry honey, I have a spare tire in my purse.  I also have a tire jack.  It’s in the pocket with the zipper, next to the sugarless gum.”