There Is Always a First Time...

First Movie I saw In A Cinema: Batman (1966)

First Record I Ever Bought: Chicago XII (1977), it had Baby What A Big Surprise which I loved.

First Airflight I Ever Took: San Juan, PR to Caneel Bay, St. John, USVI (1965)

First Book Without Pictures I Ever Bought: Jaws (1974)

First Car: Ford Fairmont (1979)

First Crush: Peter Tork from The Monkees or was it Astroboy? I was 4 years old.

First Oscar: Ok, I'm kidding.

First Time I Had Coffee: 7 or 8 months old. My mother made us one shot lattes for our baby bottles...Really! I'm Latin it is cultural. We call it Café con leche.

First Job: Store Clerk at my Dad's Gift Shop/Armory Store. Mom liked porcelain figurines. Dad loved guns, he was a skeet champion. They reached a compromise. The weirdest concept for a store. The store didn't last that long. It had an iron cage in the middle where the guns, rifles, pistols and revolvers would be displayed.

First "real" Job- Translator at the Department of Education in Puerto Rico.

First Time Ever I Saw Your Face- Roberta Flack

First Time I Ate Frog- Montreal 1982, it tasted like chicken.

First Time I Realized The World Wasn't In Black and White Before I Was Born: July 1968

First Visit To The Confessionary At My Local Church- I was 7 years old, I didn't understand the whole concept of sin. I though I didn't have any. I shared this thought with my teachers. They told me that it was impossible, that everybody sins. Even saints sin, they told me, seven times a day (damn saints!) So I made up a few sins before I went to see the priest. At an early age I felt the need to keep up apereances and portray myself as a sinner.

First Existential Question Ever- I was 6 years old and was playing with my neighbors. We were pretending we were Romans and we were fighting the Vikings. Everybody was assigned a military position. They forgot about me. I got angry and yelled: "Who am I?, Who am I?"

First Time I Learned About Sex- I was 9 years old. My mom bought this book that explained how babies were created. I didn't believe it for a second. It didn't make any sense to me. As far as I knew you ordered a baby on the phone. Then when it was ready a nurse would call you up to pick the baby.

Phot of the number one by horizontal.integration from Flikr.

Films I Love: Rear Window (1954)

Spying on your neighbors becomes an art form in this classic film directed by the legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. Without giving out too much of the plot the film deals with the suspicion of a wheelchair bound photographer that a murder has been committed in his neighborhood. He has the vantage point of the view from a rear window in his apartment. He can see clearly a collection of city characters that come and go about their lives. But his roving eye catches some funny business going on in one of the apartments. He shares this with his upper crust fiancee Grace Kelly and his nurse Thelma Ritter and all three become involved in trying to solve the crime. What follows is a superb sequence of twists and turns that keep you fixed on the screen for the whole duration of the film. 55 years after this film made its debut critics still consider it to be one of the best suspense thrillers ever made.

I will add that this film is still relevant today. An underlying theme dealing with the loneliness and isolation experienced by many in a big city environment is very apparent. Without realizing it we live in a society that glorifies voyeurism in the forms of reality shows, youtube confessions and celebrity gossip. We all have rear windows where we can spy on people and pass judgement on them. But above all it is a very entertaining intelligent film, it plays beautifully against your sense of expectation, seamless from beginning to end, like a good crime story should be!