In the early ’80s Myers-Briggs came around, sweeping the Irvine Unified School District into its cyclone path, spitting out personality type info ad hoc. I worked at a small elementary school with perhaps two dozen staff – and everyone was an ENFJ!

Coincidence – perhaps not, for the staff was hand-picked – with kid gloves – to open a new school in a high social-economic area, a community where children were Stanford or Harvard bound at birth. We needed every ounce of personality, prowess, and perfection we could team-muster to deal with the forebears of this generation’s ‘helicopter parents’, the ones who taught them how.

Since we were all well-schooled in the poise, perfection, and prowess of IUSD, the educational equivalent to divine Disneyland, this naive young lass from Indiana (yes, me!) believed the tool to be an in-house personality profile. It’s length and in-depth questioning paralleled the interview process that had gotten me the job, moving me away from blizzards.

But, in the ever-expanding universe of compulsive creative thinkers (yes, me too) this charting of personality types has spawned a diverse array of re-incarnations:

• in the Star Wars system, I am Padame Amidela aka Natale Portman, who got all of the great outfits and a hair-do improvement over the Cinnabons on each side of Princes Leia’s head
• in the Harry Potter schemata, I am Dumbledor, a sage old wizard, a mantle I could wear sans the facial hair and other appendage
• in the Downton Abbey – well, my character is Lady Sybil Cora Branson, the family rebel among the aristocrats. (But she is dead, so I’ll transmigrate to Shirley MacClaine’s character)
• in the United States, I should have grown up in Michigan
• in the Animal system of personality types, I am a dog, though I will specify Golden Retriever, my favorite breed
• in the….well, you get the gist

When Vinlovers recently created a system of wine preferences based on the 16 personality types, I drank it in, reading every profile – and then spit it out! I do NOT like my wine type! I am signing up to retake the test post haste.

No wait, I’ll just run to the wine cellar (our pantry) and open a bottle of my favorite: ‘Seven Deadly Zins’. Old Vine Zinfandel, among the first grapes in California, wasn’t even named. Who were these vinlovers to typecast me?

Wine poured and slurped, back to Google I went, surfing to find the test…and then I found the Prayer list by Myers-Briggs Personality Type.

I had a good laugh as I fingered myself on the chart, heartened that everything is covered, even the Seven Deadly Sins.