My birthday isn’t for another month, but I felt old, really old, last week at the Class of 2012 Leadership Brentwood kickoff reception. If it wasn’t for the wine and beer bar, I would have sworn I had walked into a Youth Leadership Brentwood event.

I stood with my mouth open as class member after class member was introduced. Yes, a handful may have hit 40, maybe 50, but most looked like they were 17. What’s more, their resumes left me feeling like I had a great big L on my forehead – and I don’t think I was the only one who felt that way.

Read the bios for yourself in our Business section. But today I’d like to share “the rest of the story.” Each year the LBW application asks candidates to list an “interesting fact” about themselves. If I didn’t know a lot of these people myself, I would believe most of them were made up. But liars shouldn’t be leaders, right?

Here are 10 of the most amazing or interesting. See if you can match the fact with the person. I’ll share the answers in the next BrentWord.

• Was offered a full scholarship to the Pittsburgh Institute of Art.
• Once headlined a concert at the Kennedy Center.
• Was once a target of an attempted murder.
• Auditioned for the movie Man in the Moon – the movie that launched Reese Witherspoon’s acting career.
• Was an SEC football coach at South Carolina.
• He and his son won the 2-on-2 tournament at a University of Kentucky basketball camp, beating 27 other father/son teams.
• Staffed the bill to bring the Amber Alert to the State of California, which is credited with saving numerous lives of abducted children.
• Hosted Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex (Queen Elizabeth’s youngest son) for both a formal brunch and a 12-person dinner.
• As a bellhop at Loew’s Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel during his college years, he met “a ton of famous folks.”
• Had her ears were pierced on the day she was born.

Attempted murder? That’s what it said. No doubt I need to find out “What’s Up with That?” too.

And now a ‘comment’… or two

It’s been a long week here at the BHP office, including some reader dissatisfaction with our censoring of comments made on stories relating to the Monday sentencing of Garret Bullock. Bullock, you may recall, pled guilty to felony charges stemming from a DUI accident that left Brentwood mom Elaine Scholes a quadriplegic.

I want to take a minute to explain both our policy on comments and a little about the BHP workload.

First, we love reader comments and reader interaction. We love email, phone calls and Facebook posts. But we don’t like or allow personal attacks, foul language and threats. As is typical of news websites, we don’t require full names to be used by posters though you must be a BHP member to leave a comment. Either my business partner Kelly Gilfillan or I must approve every comment before it’s posted.

Several of the comments we posted this week were very pointed to Judge Robbie Beal, who sentenced Bullock to four three-year terms but allowed them to be served concurrently instead of consecutively, along with an 11-month, 29-day sentence of which six months must be served.

The sentencing story posted, and commented on, was a very basic report from the three-hour hearing held Monday afternoon. I had every intention – and still do – of writing a much longer piece on the hearing. It would lead with the words Beal used to explain the sentence and his strong belief that despite legal thresholds that prevented him from ordering consecutive terms, the law enforcement community and judicial system must enforce the notion that drinking while impaired will not be tolerated.

But I have not written that story … yet. And when some of the comments posted on the first, shorter version without that context became more targeted toward Beal, I opted to delete them knowing what was coming.

So why haven’t I written that story? Truth be told, by Tuesday afternoon, I had a headache that made working impossible. By Wednesday I was better, but did not have the time to invest in a story that cannot be rushed.

Almost two years after our launch, we remain a very small, “smoke and mirrors” operation that reports, produces and posts an amazing amount of Brentwood news on a daily basis – much more than our much-larger competition, and we don’t charge our readers to receive it. We have tried to live up to our goals of being independent, credible and essential. While we've grown, we still don’t have a staff of reporters to pick up the slack when someone calls in sick. We just don't get sick, at least not very often thank goodness.

The story will come. Soon. And comments will be welcomed – as long as you play nice, or at least keep it civil.

Susan Leathers is editor of Brentwood Home Page. Click here to read previous columns. Email her at susan@brentwoodhomepage.com