Family: My mother, father, and younger sister and her two children, who live in Pennsylvania; and here, my fiancée.

How did you meet your fiancée? We met at The Cadillac Ranch in Southington. It was a complete random by-chance meeting. When we were both in our 20s, we frequented but never met there. Then in our 40s we went back out of nostalgia, on the same night, and there were only about 20 people in the entire bar that evening. We met, and I asked her to go out.

Do you have any nicknames? Most people just call me Matt, although I had a dance partner who called me Mark for an entire year without me mentioning it.

Do you have any pets? For myself personally, no; but my fiancée and I have three dogs, Moose, River and Kaya.

How long have you lived in Newtown? About eight years.

Where do you work and how do you describe your occupation? I work for myself, under Ames Active, which is a dance, fitness, and entertainment company. I am an active aging coach, which simply means I’m not a personal trainer like “I pick things up and I put them down,” but “I sneeze and my back hurts, so I need help.” I work with different senior centers and community centers in order to do dance and fitness classes, as well as personal training, ballroom dance lessons, things like that. I’ve been doing this for the past ten years.

What do you like to do in your free time? In my free time I really enjoy sightseeing and traveling to different locations and cities, seeing the things that make towns and roadside attractions. It’s like Route 66 — I like to see the world’s biggest ball of string. Other than that, you can find me relaxing, watching TV, and just de-stressing.

Who or what has been your greatest influence on your life? The greatest influence on my life was my grandfather. He came back from Arizona, being given six months to live, and he decided to spend two months with each of his children and their children. He ended up living seven years, but with that diagnosis of six months he imparted with me words of wisdom, and stories of the Wild West, and just a very nice moral compass.

What was the most recent movie you saw in the theater? Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Favorite author? My favorite author is M.M. Crumbley. I’ve been pen pals with her for three years, and we just got to meet each other for the first time.

Favorite food? Easy! My favorite food is gumbo.

Favorite color? Most people mock me for this, but my favorite color is brown. It’s that earthy, nature — if you look at so many different animals and everything, there are so many shades. It’s so expressive.

What are your pet peeves? My pet peeves are really people just being rude. I always used to joke that if I could have the perfect parents, they would be Martha Stewart and Hannibal Lecter. Martha Stewart goes out of her way to make sure everything is pleasant, and Hannibal Lector only ate rude people.

What is something you cannot live without? Music.

Do you have a favorite travel destination? New Orleans.

What is your favorite thing about Newtown? My favorite thing about Newtown is that here it is a huge mix of people and it is, if you read about a New England town, we are that New England town. People know each other; you’ve got that rural, farming area kind of thing; you’ve also got the nice town street with the historic buildings; but at the same time it’s modern, it’s convenient to the city, it’s got everything that you would want in one package.

Is there something you would like to see covered, or covered further, in The Newtown Bee? I think you do a good job with the human interest stories — those are my favorites to see and read. I think that we have so many different parks and things like that, I don’t know that everyone knows everything that’s here that they can take advantage of. Some people know we have a pool at one of the parks, but others may not know about that outdoor swimming option. They may not know some of the parks have free music events, or the trail and all that’s available at The Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary. These are things that I’ve just learned about and I’ve been here eight years.

Do you have a personal credo? “No good deed goes unpunished” and “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”

I think about that second one daily, because I don’t think people always try to wrong you or scam you or do things that are nefarious. I think in the end, most times that you have negative interactions with people, it’s because they really just don’t know. They were unaware, or uneducated, or uninformed. It was a simple mistake and we shouldn’t get angry or create these big back-and-forths when, in the grand scheme of things, it was just somebody making a mistake. They didn’t realize that what they did was wrong.