![]() Peter Billingsley sits on Santa's lap in a scene from the 1983 film A Christmas Story. “People love this movie,” says Brian Jones, owner of A Christmas Story House & Museum, about the sleeper hit by director Bob Clark, also known for directing the raunchy comedy Porky’s. It has long aired on a 24-hour TNT marathon on Christmas Day, cementing its scenes and lines in the memories of many adoring fans, myself included. But it was the rising popularity of home video and cable television that turned the movie into a megahit in the years to follow. Cleveland was chosen over 19 other cities to stand in for the Indiana steel town, because the Higbee’s department store management there was willing to let the crews film scenes inside the store.Ī Christmas Story did reasonably well at the box office, pulling in about $20.8 million worldwide. Shepherd’s stories came from his upbringing in Hammond, Indiana, although Cleveland anonymously represents his hometown in the movie. Jean Shepherd, an author and radio personality, narrates the movie, inspired by stories in his book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. ![]() The classic film, set in the 1940s, tells the story of 9-year-old Ralphie (played by the bespectacled Peter Billingsley) and his desperate quest to get the object of all his Christmas desires: a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle. But the giant leg lamp in the front window makes it unmistakable: This is Ralphie Parker’s family home from the beloved 1983 holiday movie A Christmas Story. There may be no snow, excessively bundled-up boys, bullies with yellow eyes, or smelly, ravenous hound dogs from the Bumpus house next door on this early November day. Then, as the mustard-colored house with green trim appears, I know just where I’ve seen this place before. Some recent publications from my bioinformatics collaborations are "Transcription Start Site Context Promoters" (Genome Biology, 2020) and "Photperiodic Response in Switchgrass" (Plant Cell and Environment, 2019), while some of my earlier statistical publications include "Confounding in Principal Stratification" (Statistics in Medicine, 2012), "Dirichlet Process Principal Stratification" (JASA, 2011), and "Birthweight and Censored Gestational Age" (Statistics in Medicine, 2010).As I drive through Cleveland, the streets and sights of its charming Tremont neighborhood look eerily familiar. ![]() With the advent of COVID, I returned to North America and to academia, first teaching in the new School of Data Science at the University of Virginia before moving to U of T. This quickly led to a move to New York city and a data science industry position with a heathtech startup, and then a move to Stockholm, Sweden for a position with a fintech startup. ![]() My focus during these years had centered on bioinformatics but, eventually eager for another adventure, I left academia to teach data science in a disruptive education context with an entrepreneurial start up. I took my first courses at the local community college, but eventually transferred to Trinity University in San Antonio where I discovered programming and statistics, and won a National Championship while playing with the soccer team! I left Texas to get a PhD in Statistical Sciences at Duke University in North Carolina, but then returned to my home state where I tried out both sides of the Texas experience, first spending time at Texas A&M in College Station and then the University of Texas at Austin. Never shy for adventure, I dived into a couple years of public school and then started college early after being homeschooled for much of my life.
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