Hi! My name is Brian. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the color orange. One of my first memories of school was having a very hard time writing a poem about my favorite color. Do you know why it was so hard? Well, it turns out the word orange doesn’t rhyme with any other words. Do you know any other words that don’t rhyme? (Hint: two more colors don’t rhyme.)

Besides the color orange, the other thing I have loved my whole life has been water. I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, which is in New England near the Atlantic Ocean. When I was young, I used to visit my grandparents on Cape Cod and I enjoyed swimming and playing in the salt water. Cape Cod is a peninsula in Massachusetts that stretches out into the ocean. From outer space, Cape Cod looks like a huge arm showing off its muscles.

One day, when I was playing on the beach, I made some friends who taught me how to catch crabs. First, we picked some really long pieces of sea grass. We tied the sea grass together to use as a fishing line. Next we found a sea mussel, which is a type of small shellfish. We cracked its hard shell between two rocks to get to the slimy meat inside.

We tied the meat to the end of the sea grass and held it in front of the crab holes. As soon as the crabs came out to get the meat, we grabbed them by their back legs and put them in a bucket. What do you think happened when we tried to pick them up by their front legs?

At the end of the day, our parents always made us dump the crabs back into the water so we could fish for them again the next day.

When I was 11 years old, I changed schools. I got to make new friends and try out lots of new things. I realized that I really liked acting and speaking in public. I also learned how to play football.