Millie Perkins – Malcolm's Round Table

I first learned about the short life of Anne Frank in school, probably about the time the 1952 English publication of “The Diary of a Young Girl” was released. Still, the movie engraved the story in my consciousness along with a brief schoolboy crush on Millie Perkins who portrayed Frank in the 1959 film.

Many things tore at my heart in Frank’s story: hiding from the Nazis, the betrayal of her family to the police, and her 1945 death from typhus so late in the war that had the Allies liberated Bergen-Belsen a little sooner than April 1945, she would have survived her imprisonment.

Millie Perkins had a long career–up to 2006–but whenever I saw her in a film or TV series episode, I thought of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and my crush on the young actress.

In many ways, this crush led me to read a lot about Frank and to applaud the diary and its publication while mourning her death which happened (between February and March 1945) when I was less than a year old. I saw the Anne Frank House in 1967 when I spent a month in the Netherlands volunteering on a school ship restoration project.

According to Anne Frank House website, “The Anne Frank House was established on 3 May 1957 in cooperation with Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father. We are an independent non-profit organisation that runs a museum in the house where Anne Frank went into hiding and we try to increase awareness of Anne’s life story all over the world.”

Just seeing that building flooded me with a lifetime of emotions about Anne, the story that has followed me for a lifetime.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy novels and stories, including “Sarabande.”

Every 25-30 seconds, I see a new article about a celebrity (that I usually haven’t heard of) called something like 25 things you don’t know about ___________ (whoever)

I don’t know why I click on those stories because most of the things on the list are boring and/or fall into the TMI (to much information) category. No doubt, some massive computer somewhere records my click, gives the site a higher rating, and insures that I’ll probably be bothered by a lot more of these kinds of stories the next time I show up on the Yahoo home page.

You never click on those do you? If not, how did you show up on this post? Okay, since you’re here (and the NSA already knows you’re here), you might as well read the list.

Barbra Streisand and I share a fear. We both get stage fright every time we walk in front of a large audience. I solved that by not doing it (walking in front of a large audience) while she solved it by singing.
The first actress I had a crush on was Millie Perkins. Since you probably don’t know who that is, this proves I’m a lot older than you. She never wrote back so nothing came of it.
I was raised by alligators in a Florida swamp. Sure, I had regular parents and they were nice people, but they weren’t as exciting as the gators. I learned more from gators than I did from my school teachers. I’ve kept this secret all the years because, well, who the hell knows why, maybe because I didn’t figure anyone would believe it. I’m not even sure I believe it, even though I remember Papa Gator telling me that tourists love gators.
Although my first language was (and still is) English, my grade school and junior high school English teachers didn’t think so because I made lousy grades. I knew how to speak and write my native tongue, but couldn’t force myself to study grammar, learn parts of speech and do other silly things. (Hell is an afternoon spent diagramming sentences on the chalkboard.)
Tempura – If I’d spent ten years learning how to cook, I’d be better off than a failed piano player

I took piano lessons (against my will) for some ten years and now I can proudly say that I can play chopsticks with fewer errors than people who think chopsticks are only used for eating tempura and other cool foods. I happen to like tempura, but most people don’t. As an experiment, ask some random guy on the street what he thinks of tempura and he’ll probably tell you it’s a kind of paint.
One reason I didn’t go “the Barbra Streisand route” to conquer my stage fright was simply that I can’t sing. I learned this on the job when I delivered signing telegrams to people’s houses and didn’t get any tips. I did better with regular telegrams and candygrams. Yes, I know, I sound like some guy who grew up on the frontier when I mentioned delivering telegrams. No, I didn’t ride a horse.
I kept this ancient radio until we moved last year. I found a guy who actually knew what it was and had been looking for one to restore.

I was a ham radio operator when I was in high school and once had my receiver on Radio Moscow because our high school band was playing some Russian music. A visitor to our house thought I should tell the Feds that I was picking up “the commies” on my radio. Goodness knows what he told his folks when he got home. I still know Morie Code but there’s not a lot of call for it.
I believe in magic. As a writer, this has caused problems with some magazines and publishers who wanted me to place my work in the fantasy or paranormal genres while I was complaining, “but this stuff actually happened.” I lost all those arguments. My parents (not the alligators) weren’t comfortable with my my magic books, telling me that later in life, people would just assume I was crazy. They were right about that.
I’m a Leo. Okay, I guess you probably already figured that out.
Madonna and I used to sit in one of those Rocking Chairs on the front porch of a Cracker Barrel restaurant and talk about the Kabbalah until too many people started taking selfies with us in the background. Frankly, I think they cropped me out of them, the bastards.
Contrary to popular belief, I was not born on a tabletop in Tennessee and did not kill my first bear when I was only three.
Mercifully, this list is coming to an end with the news that I tend to put hexes on people who don’t read my books or who give them bad reviews (or no reviews). Since you don’t believe this, there’s nothing to worry about. 🙂