Little Known Facts About Kel's Life

• My parents named me after Lord William Thompson Kelvin, the British physicist whose work with cold temperature scales, including the calculation of minus 273 degrees Celsius as Absolute Zero, resulted in absolute temperatures being named after him in "degrees Kelvin."

• I was born tall…my dad took this pic of me at age 20 months leaning down onto the bumper of his car…

• "Kelvin" means "great archer" in Celtic.
• My Chinese name, "Chen Jie Ru," which was given to me by my maternal grandfather, means “Meet and join with wisdom."
• I was born in Boston, spent my first 4 years in Natick, then in Norwood where I was the first Asian (maybe the first ethnic minority) to graduate from Norwood High School.
• Growing up, I was good in school, decent in all sports especially basketball, bunted in the winning run on a squeeze play for my 6th grade baseball team, played clarinet and tenor sax in the concert and jazz/stage bands, and had friends from all socioeconomic, athletic and academic backgrounds and abilities – the one common denominator being they were all good people who loved to laugh.
• In the 2nd grade, 6 of us were allowed to skip class so that we could work on a project designing and making a mosaic. I suggested an underwater scene — we made the tiles from scratch — baked, glazed and painted them — making a large 3’ x 5' mosaic mural that still hangs in the halls of Cleveland Elementary School, Norwood, MA. It is reminiscent of Roman murals.

• My senior year in high school, I auditioned at the Berklee School of Music in front of a panel of judges and was selected first chair tenor saxophone in the Massachusetts State Band.

• I took a French literature class at Dartmouth with Meryl Streep when she was "just some visiting upperclass(wo)man from Vassar" and I was a young French theatre major with a full head of hair…

• I taught a meditation weekend retreat in the Berkshires where I asked for someone in the audience to help demonstrate some yoga asanas for the group, and Andy Kaufman volunteered…Andy was a friend so I knew he might be up to something…and he proceeded to fake his way through the yoga positions intentionally messing them up in weird pretzel shapes speaking in his “Foreign Man” accent. It was before he was widely known, but he had by then been a regular on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. So, a few people sitting in the front row recognized him and started laughing. Most of the 75 people however were horrified that those several people would be so rude as to "laugh at” a young Hispanic guy having obvious difficulty demonstrating the yoga postures…which of course was exactly what Andy intended…