History

When I look back on it, my childhood was pretty idyllic…except for junior high. That really sucked.

Theatre was the thing that made life make sense. I went from being an outcast loner with crooked teeth to the only one in his class who could sing all the parts of Billy Joel’s “For The Longest Time” on his own.

People accepted me. I started getting recognized for being ballsy enough to quote Dirty Johnny during Pizza Hit Night. The only thing that mattered was that I could hold an audience for a performance while our other assemblies bored the crap out of them.

This graduated nicely into the college years. Ball State was the perfect place to learn independence, as my roommate, Eric, and I flourished in the art of wordplay and silliness.

Studying theatre in college was, as they say, the most freeing time of my life.

Those camp counselor jobs at the YMCA were a nice backdrop for the community theatre my friends, Brett and Scott, cast me in. Oh man, did we put on the most stellar shows! Who else in town was doing something like Cool Beans Productions?

But the plan all along was to move to L.A. to be a “working actor.”

I packed up the Ford Thunderbird my mom gave me because I was spoiled and moved to Hollywood.

I had read all the books and done all the research. I was way ahead of the game, I knew it…except when it came to MLM companies.

I literally got suckered into one within the first month. They knew exactly how to target my naive go-getter disposition. My initiation into the adult world was sullied by a nasty pyramid scheme that I had no way of preparing for.

That wouldn’t stop me. I was gonna make it, gosh darn it. And I did. For, like, two years. (Which I heard later is a total cliche. Everyone makes it for two years, apparently.)

I had a bunch of initial success, getting cast in lots of student and independent films until I got my big break in the movie Pleasantville. I had a couple lines and got to work with the likes of Toby McGuire, but felt weirdly out of place the entire time and didn’t know why.

Right after Pleasantville, I was cast as a lead in a film called Lancelot: Guardian of Time. But I didn’t know how to behave as an adult in general, let alone on paying films…and I soon reverted to my immature ways.

Before long, I was again partying like a college student and had a hard time avoiding the pitfalls of Hollywood. Like many actors, I was a substitute teacher struggling with their own personal issues.

Even though I had only gotten a 390 on my English SATs, I started writing. That is the course many actors take when they hit a dead - let me write something I can act in.

But it is a long process, getting a script actually produced.

So nothing new happened, and I missed home. I never quite had the deep friendships in L.A. that I’d had in Indiana.

A whole bunch of stuff occurred over the next 20 years, a lot of it interesting, but not for our purposes here.

Except that I started doing stand-up comedy in 2009. What’s great about stand-up is you get to see something you’ve written come to life very quickly. It satisfies that need to produce something in a short amount of time.

In 2020, it only made sense to start acting again. We were all miserable, and that was a good time to reevaluate our lives.

I joined an agency here in the Midwest and started playing around with making small films anyone with a phone could make…all the while acting in community theatre productions and performing comedy here and there.

Somewhere in the last few years, it became apparent that the only thing I really love (besides my family and friends) is acting, writing, doing stand-up, and making films. It was like everything that I cared for when I was young came back to me.

Gosh darn it, am I grateful.

See you on Saturday!