- The Washington Times - Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Before Kim Jong-un, 30, was a North Korean dictator threatening to wipe out the West with nuclear bombs he held a different job — as a skinny-boned, leather jacket wearing member of a “good” gang in an all-American theatrical production of Grease.

Yes, he was an actor. And he starred as a member of the T-Birds gang, the New York Post reported. The Sun said he liked the gig so much his friends often caught him singing along to such hits as Summer Nights and You’re the One That I Want, as memorialized by John Travolta and Olivia Newton John.

But that’s not all. The anti-American despot engaged in other normal teen-time cultural past-times, too.

The Sun reported he loved comic books, and U.S. films like Jurassic Park. The newspaper also captured the dictator in photographs of his youth, age 11, in swimming suit and hanging with friends at his elite private school — the International School of Berne in Switzerland, which he attended 1994-97.

Former classmate Tal Rapp, 34, from Israel recalled the dictator as a quiet boy.

“Everyone now looks at him as a lunatic who hates the world, but the kid I remember was the quietest person I have ever met,” he said, as quoted by The Sun.

• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.

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