Just when you thought you knew your favorite bloggers, along comes the Bubble Gum Interviews. We ask the really tough questions about things like food preferences, high school stories and favorite hair products. Today we talk to Todd (not to be confused with the Ted) Carpenter of the mari-bex-fiesta-rama blogs about everything you didn’t want to know about Todd but will now have burned into your memory:

Tell us a story about yourself involving drool.

Well, I’m a big Beyonce fan, and I’m not talking about her music.

You lose your hearing or your sense of taste- which would you rather and why?

I would way rather loose my taste. Then I could eat celery, rice cakes, Lean Cuisine, or whatever else that would help me loose weight. I weigh the same as I did in high school, which is still to much. One of my biggest problems is that I happen to be a great cook. Temptation surrounds me just walking into the kitchen.

What is the ugliest thing in your closet?

I’ve owned plenty of ugly clothes, but none of them are in my closet. If I’m not wearing something, it goes to the Good Will.

Name the scariest thing you’ve seen in a body of water.

It happened while sailing in the British Virgin Islands with my family. My mother and her friend were snorkeling along a reef and I was getting ready to join them. One of the crew was also in the water and swam back to the boat, saying that she had just seen a really big shark. So my mom is like 100 yards away, the yacht is anchored, the Captain took the dingy to go get some supplies on a local island. My choice is to stay in the boat, or go get my mom. The way I figured it, there was a slim chance that the shark could kill me or my mom. But if I didn’t go out and tell her, my mom most definitely would have killed me, so my chances were better with the shark. I jumped in, and didn’t see anything. I swam out to them and said, “Hey, she thinks it was just a nurse shark (lie!) but Mary saw a shark just a few minutes ago”. That was enough for them to make a bee-line back to the boat. My mask was leaking so I paused to let the water out. As soon as I dunked my head back into the water, a shark was swimming directly below me. Maybe 15 feet down. It was actually just a reef shark, about seven feet long. But in the few seconds it took me to process the potential danger, I think I had about four heart attacks. My mom and her friend never did see the shark. But it swam below us (just behind them) almost all the way back to the boat.

You meet The Rock and he wants to have a pillow fight with you- what do you say?

I’d say, “Hey The Rock, you know when you played that sissy boy bouncer in Be Cool? That’s like the only acting role you ever had that was believable! You want a pillow fight? Bring it on pebbles!” Of course I will have already stuffed my pillow case with a folding chair. Everyone knows the chair is The Rock’s kryptonite.

Tell us about something kind you’ve done for a stranger that you never saw again.

Every day, to hundreds if not thousands of strangers, I grace them with my presence. What could be more kind?

Seriously though, I sort of have a story that fits. While I was still in school, I worked at the Sears Auto Center as a service advisor. Basically the sales guy for the mechanics. A girl came in and asked me to give her an estimate on replacing her transmission. I asked her what was wrong with it. She said it won’t hardly go into gear, and that Midas told her she needed a new one. Her quote from them was $1200.00. I said, “did you check your clutch fluid level?”. She had no idea what I was talking about. I took her out to her car, popped the hood, and yep, the fluid was very low. I told her, ” I can sell you a pint of fluid for a dollar, and see what happens.” So I added the fluid, and bam! The tranny works again, just like new. I told her that there may be a leak in the system and that we may need to replace the clutch master cylinder, but that the transmission is fine. I told her to come back if it all leaked out again.

This story sort of fits your question because I never intended to see her again. I don’t know if I’d call it kindness, or just doing the right thing. I was happy to have helped her. Anyway, a week went by, and she was back. I figures the fluid must have leaked out, but I was mistaken. She asked me to come out and look at the car. When I got outside, she gave me a hundred dollar bill. She insisted I take it, told me she was way ahead, and appreciated my honesty. Later she came back to have her brakes worked on, and even later, I did a mortgage for her. For me, it was a reinforcing moment in my life to always do the right thing.

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So, there you have it.  Todd has torn feelings between Beyonce and The Rock dressed in a tight blue casual suit, has screamed under water like a girl just because of a little shark fish, and would cut his tongue off to shed a few pounds, but it’s all good because he always remembers to do the right thing!  Now that you really know Todd, what do you think?