born 31 August 1970

Bill Gentry, Quantico, Virginia, extra

Chad Arganbright, Big Spring, Texas, short filmmaker

Debbie Gibson, Brooklyn, New York, musician/stage actress

Floortje Dessing, Heemstede, The Netherlands, TV travel show hostess

Greg Tharp, Houston, Texas, producer

Michael Rast, Graz, Austria, actor

Mona Lisa, Tacoma, Washington, porn star

Robin Brodsky, Brockton, Massachusetts, writer

Yvonne Haß, Winnenden, West Germany, actress

Zack Ward, Toronto, Ontario, actor

I can’t think of Today’s Winner without remembering my life at the time she emerged as a pop phenomenon. I was a Rockbottom stockboy. It was my first W-2-issuing job. (Rockbottom Stores, for those of my readers not resident in the New York suburbs in the 80s, comprised a medium-sized drugstore chain that was eventually ingested and shat out by Duane Reade.)

Not much happened in that job, as you might imagine. Here are a handful of the things I can recall:

- My boss, Kent, an Asian night school med student who would dispense sage and sardonic advice between cigarette breaks. I hear his voice in my head whenever I’m in the shampoo and makeup section of a large drugstore, or as Kent would call it, “HBA”. (For “health and beauty aids”.)

- Having a thug warn me away from a girl I was working my way toward, whose soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was away at college. That was kind of awesome, actually. I believe I was minding my own business in the toy and game aisle when that happened. It might have been stationery, though.

- The massive cardboard-crushing machine. When the cardboard had been sufficiently compressed into enormous cubes, the stockboys had to tie the cubes into submission with wire, like hay bales. It was manly work. I enjoyed that part of it, even though the wire would occasionally damage your hands.

- Just the general sense working there gave me for the layout of one of those stores, any one, anywhere. It was like that Nabokov passage I dimly recall, where he’s talking about the ordering of the storefronts in the smaller Russian towns he envisions from his youth. There’s a logic hidden in the manner by which they organize themselves. The butcher and the blacksmith and the dry goods emporium spring up in legible fashion, similarly, in towns of like size many miles apart. You can observe that kind of thing wherever you go, once you’re looking for it.

No, wait, it’s actually Tiffany whom I can’t think of without remembering all of those things. Never mind.