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Story goes I was born in Hells Kitchen, New York in 1957. My brother Christopher being born heralded a relief from being strolled rooftop. The four of us moved to a small house near a ravine in Toronto, Canada. Where my brother Lucas was born a couple of years later.
My parents are talented and well known actors. While on their honeymoon, a guy named Tommy Fitz landed a plane in front of a bar, that he had bet he could. During the hours of the ox, story goes, he bet another intoxicated patron he could get back to the bar faster than the guy that dropped him off. Though neither owned an airplane, an airport was the starting destination. Fitz “borrowed” a plane and landed between buildings and parked cars on the streets in front of that same bar. The police aviation bureau said the odds against sticking a landing like that were a million to one.
When patrons of a bar didn’t believe him, two years later, he did it a second time. Christopher and I were born between those two flights.
I most probably joined Michael and Peter’s lives in Bermuda. My dad was filming as a titled lead in a bikini clad movie called Lost Lagoon. Christopher and I called them by their first name for the first years of our life. When Lucas was a child he called them mom and dad. It was a resounding success. Chris and I had a meeting. It was the first political conference I’d been to. We seceded. It has been versions of mom and dad since.
Close to when Lucas was born in Toronto, I saw Oleg Popov and The Moscow Circus. We met Popov the clown when we went backstage. He gave me a small bottle of coca cola to give to the bear. I met Soupy Sales when he was leaving a fan event I had arrived late for. Popov, Red Skeleton and he, with the Mouseketeers, were figures larger for me than the brilliant Shakespearian ones in Stratford, Ontario at the time.
I didn’t know that Popov was known around the world as the sunshine clown or solar clown. That the kindness in his acts touched the hearts of so many more than me.
The Shakespeare festival theater in Stratford is where my family was every summer. We would pack up and leave a couple of weeks early from school. Smells of creative majesty of theater are similar to those of the culinary arts. The creative voices and intonations I heard from the stage, as a child, will never fully unravel in me. A great desire to speak, in a way that conveys, was forged in me then. Never to express fully, the multi-alliance, as to where home is.
My first job was raking leaves in Canada at seven years old. After recovering from what turned out not to be Rheumatic fever in first grade. I had been prescribed the consumption of four horse size pills a day, of penicillin, for a year. Confined indoors and prescribed no exercise. When I prematurely intervened and told the doctor I was done with it he admitted it wasn’t what he thought. I probably shouldn't have taken all that penicillin, he said.
As an overweight prepubescent I was in a Royal Pudding commercial. I felt fat shamed and walked off set.
I volunteered for a red cross program at school when I was nine. A girl named Elizabeth and I got our pictures in a Toronto paper. It was all her lead.
A few years later I was an actor in Time of Your Life and sang acapella on the Geary theater stage in San Francisco. With some of the proceeds I bought a portable black and white Sony television set. So I could watch Dark Shadows in my room.
I was the only kid in my junior high that could not climb rope. Not even get on the bottom knot. As big as me, my friend James could get both feet on the knot at least. Niels was a friend who helped me. I followed his interest in activities like going to backpack in Yosemite. We road bikes with Doug. From San Francisco to Guerneville on the russian river. Participated in a Rocky Horror Picture show that evening and rode home the next day. He and I rode a bus home after helping pitchfork oil soaked straw out of the bay.
My first year of high school, at Monte Vista, I got suspended for two weeks. I helped the contractor, Walter, paint our house. He and I smoked Meshmican I had bought shortly before we moved to Alamo; two ounces for $30. It took longer than two weeks to paint the house.
Over the summer I worked with a guy named Marv doing renovation work in Berkley. Replacing rotted sills and baseplates and assorted tasks. One place needed inspection for a gas leak. In the crawl space underneath there were ten dead cats. Some asphyxiated and mummified to hairlessness. In another, the sweetest people I have met lived in a house that had narrow aisles between stacked bags filled with garbage. A frying pan, in use, had not been moved from it's spot in the time it had taken to accumulate them.
When we moved to Los Angeles I barked like a dog at a neighbor. We worked it out. She helped me enroll in a volunteer program at the zoo. I didn't stick with it long. Landscaping work is what fueled me through high-school, thanks to my friend Michael. I don't think I was particularly good at it. But I could climb trees, thanks to my friend John. Who would set up a slack rope at the beach and teach people how to walk it.
I have climbed trees with chainsaws on a property that was used filming original Tarzan movies. My first day of work John picked me up in his blue Volkswagen bug. We rolled up the windows and began to smoke a large joint on the way. Quickly filling the space and obscuring the view completely. We were driving down the sidewalk for a brief moment.
We climbed trees in the 26 acre wildness in our neighborhood in the Hollywood hills. Elder juveniles with us made a teepee from dump scrap. The wide canopy of a white oak concealed it from surveillance. Even helicopters we guessed because they flew around all the time. It could seat ten people. Another oak tree, closer to where a creek is, was a huge tree. There were cargo nets and a mattress. For people nervous about climbing there was a block and tackle rope elevator. A couple of years later my friend Glenn must have climbed when he decided to hang himself there.
At fifteen I visited an author friend of my grandparents in Isleboro, Maine. Who wrote fascinating books. He didn't want to talk about them. I mowed the lawn and rode a bike that was there. I tried to get beer at a small bar nearby to no avail.
On to London I met with my grandmother Betty and aunt Philippa. Betty wanted to take me to Stonehenge. I preferred to party with my aunt's friends. I pissed all over the streets of Kings Cross because, after beers at a pub, my aunt told me there were no public restrooms.
We then met up with my brother Lucas and our epigenetic grandmother Leotine Blair in Ireland. After kissing the blarney stone I bought some Waterford crystal. We then toured through the countryside of Ireland for several days. Two elderly women and three teenagers. Eating and sleeping in a horse drawn cart. One of us smoking a pipe he bought in London.
Next for me was travel to Tunisia to see my grandfather, Bruce, and Cusi's family. Where I stood chest deep in shallow waters of the Mediterranean. With moonlight clearly illuminating my feet.
I went to Hollywood High for the beginning of tenth grade. First day I looked for people I had seen or met. I had begun to descend the stairs to a courtyard that was abandoned and noticed the garbage cans on fire. Turning immediately proved to be too late as three pretty large dudes asked for money.
I was not intimidated. Telling them that I had no more than two dollars and forty cents and I needed it. For lunch. Two of them picked me up and turned me upside down. The third guy put his hand in my pockets and plucked the fabric out. The dollars and change in his hand, a nickel dropped.
Discarded and flailing on the steps I stood back up. Put my empty pockets back in.
I took a school bus. Walking home from the drop off point I saw John and my friend Fran looking up and walking around aimlessly. Fran was in my math class and stood at the door to say hi to people as we came in to sit. As I got close it was clear that there was a white bird they were hoping to rescue. Fran knew who the owner of the lost bird was. Apparently I looked like it’s owner as the beautiful white dove landed on my hand. It allowed me to hand it over to them and I felt like a mystic.
I went to a Waldorf school beginning the end of 10th grade. The two years there were a life saver. A cross path of lifetimes. I had classes with brilliant people. I am skeptical when I reflect on my behavior. It was the closest I had come to enjoy school learning. I'm sure I reverse communicated that. I had a familiar place in the detention area. Equating the pattern of a tidepool to my attention span would be accurate.
Around this time my parents divorce finalized on an evening that my dad and I were together. It was the second time I saw him cry. He had a way where you didn’t feel it was your responsibility to do something about it. The first time was when Chris and I went down to the basement guest room where the TV was. Usually not on at this hour. He was watching the news of an American president’s assasination.
Dad and I had been cooped up for a couple of days in an A-frame cabin on Point Reyes Peninsula. When the rains subsided we went to a favorite beach. At the time white stags of axis deer could be seen among with the caribou and California deer. When we arrived on the beach the sand was strewn with an apeirgon of starfish. In sizes as diverse. Stranded above the tideline. He and I operated from a different communication than words. He rolled the bottoms of his tan corduroy pants up. We began throwing multitudes of large starfish back into the sea. An enduring image is seeing him in his maroon cotton turtleneck. After a heroic but futile attempt to hurl a gigantic starfish. With his full human integrity. I tried to help. It must have been seventy pounds. After attempts thwarted a few times we eventually dragged it knee deep into the ocean.
After graduating high-school I attended a theater school in Niagara on the lake with my friend Lia. Studying Commedia, mask and movement arts. After a year they lost solvency and had to close the school. We rented a small house that was rumored to have hid slaves during the underground railroad. It was next to a small vineyard and haunted. Two wonderful tall trees in the backyard were the perfect distance. I made a manilla tightrope. Which I left strung between the trunks during the summer.
A couple that knew my friend Geri lived above a theater restaurant. We would visit and have drinks occasionally. The bear was King Henry for the dining show and feast. Dwight was a circus performer with vague trapeze type descriptions.
Dwight loved the tightrope. I went into my backyard one morning. With a cup of coffee in my hand. I found Dwight hanging by the neck from a branch over the tightrope. I don't remember anything else about that day. Other than him suddenly animating and assuring me it was okay. He was just strength exercising for his routine. He was down promptly and came in for some coffee.
After a short stint back in Los Angeles playing with chainsaws in trees I moved again. My friend Geri got us a job managing a set of small cabins on the shore of lake Tahoe. Delicious drinking water came directly from the lake. I smoked Lucky Strike no filter and ate Macrobiotic. There was a dock we sat on with a dog who came to stay.
The stars in the sky and water there are brighter, I think, than even many ancestors have seen.
On the evening of one of the worst snowstorms on record I drove with three people on an unplowed road on a return trip past Emerald bay. Inside the red Volkswagen bug with snow chains, the four of us were chanting NamMyohoRengeKyo. Her two brothers were overstuffed in the back. Geri, who had first heard Nichiren's phrase, and I in front. All transposed our fear. Under the baseboards of the car the snow sounded like animal balloons being twisted as we pressed on. One car had left tracks which, with such a limited view, were immensely useful. Until they went off road and over the incline. Around the bend were emergency vehicles. I never found out about their recovery. Local news was about the tragic loss of life close by. A cable severed a populated tram at a local olympic ski site. Cutting through metal and people dropping.
Moving to Niagara Falls the first thing to see was love canal. A neighborhood area that had been abruptly evacuated because of toxins in the groundwater. It was fenced off but sitting there as it ever was. Walking around in there was like wandering around in the old Barham estate in Burbank. Only there were neighborhoods and five gallon barrels oozing orange stuff littered around in creeks. Unrelated, but the smell of the nearby Carborundum factory could be tasted. A lead acrid hovering in local's breath.
I worked in a crew that installed hardware cable TV runs. That no other crews wanted. The morning was spent running a length of heavy strand wire and laying it next to a line of poles. Then climbing up a telephone pole 30' with gaff spurs and fifteen pounds of toolbelt. Arbor drilling a 1" through-hole by hand. Then wrench tightening a bolt through the pole, affixing the clamp. Ground crew then lifting the wire strand with extension sticks. Tightening the strand in the clamp. Cimbing back down and (depending on crew size) walking to the next, two or three poles away and climbing it for a repeat of that routine. After noon we repeated the same course of climbing each pole again. This time to run and wire lash the cable between poles.
Many of our runs were easments through backyards or crappy streets. I fell almost 30' off a rotted pole. Into the street and worked the rest of the day. Two of the guys I worked with were petty thieves who ended up on the evening news, in a tree, when an elderly woman held them at gun point well after law enforcement arrived. It may have been this event that helped to the company folding. The day after I hurt my back quite badly, they disappeared.
Before recuperating, from what felt like the relocation of parts of my back, I drove with an ice pack for a few hours. Then got into a motorboat to the small island where my grandfather had a cabin. In Aylen lake, Ontario. I didn't go there or leave knowing it would be the last time I would see them there.
Geri and I broke up the night John Lennon was shot. We were in a bar. I thought it was just another "Paul is dead" prank.
When her mom had an aneurysm and was in a coma at Buffalo General. I was cutting window glass for an apartment rehabilitation where our electrician Marvin had died on the steps before work one day. The hospital said her mom Mae would die if she was moved. Geri found a doctor in London Ontario that saved her life. She was flown by helicopter.
When I moved to Buffalo and shared an apartment and separate studio with an artist friend. I helped with murals, sign painting and faux finish commissions my friend Mark got. In addition I was, for awhile, a miserable waiter and happy college student.
My friend Tammy called one day to see if I was interested in salvage. I followed through and went to an obscure warehouse in industrial Buffalo to meet David.
I managed operations for D&D Salvage in partnership with South Pacific Clothing. The first move was to a first floor space in the old Pierce Arrow factory on Elmwood Ave in Buffalo. Here we imported salvage military goods and international vintage clothing and coats. Often visited by Eugene who managed Rick James costume storage two floors above.
I oversaw an in-house sewing staff converting green Spanish military raincoats to Bomber jackets ready to be dyed black. Processing hundreds of pounds of dye lots of assorted clothing goods out of Trenton, New Jersey. The warehouse outlet was always busy. David opened a retail store run by my friend Fran.
I began screen printing cotton clothing on my own. I left South Pacific and began work as a silk screener for a greeting card company called Great Arrow Graphics. My friends Alan and Donna had it located in the other half of the Pierce Arrow Bldg.
I became engaged to a woman in Chicago and moved. For the first three years I worked as a faux finish artist at Finishes by Bruno. Among new millwork applications I refinished imported furniture hundreds of years old. Joe Bruno taught me ways to approach things that I still use.
An opportunity arose to work at the Field Museum. I worked as an exhibit lead and interactive specialist for six years. I built a permanent case for an elephant skeleton and have seen a 5,000 year old Egyptian ship few other people have. Scientists, educators, artists and engineers lead a magnificent ingenuity there. I brag that I installed the first LED interactive there with my friend Matt.
Starting a family, doubling my income, I began work at an exhibit company. For 12 years I worked at Proto Productions. There we built impossible things for zoos, aquariums and museums. I was not alone but often tasked with the impossible things nobody else wanted.
Divorce has no words that quell the uproot. Mine was no different than most.
In 2006, a tercentenary commitee commissioned a giant pair of Ben Franklin interactive glasses for a traveling exhibit. It had over 1,400 independently moving pieces. I created it with the supervision of Daniel Rozin (Wooden Mirror, 1999) Powered by computer controlled servo motors, non reflective surfaces captured visitors moving image in real time via embedded cameras. It was among 40 other interactive exhibits I engineered and built for it.
To date it is the thing I feel most accomplished in having been able to make. The bullet ant and assorted tanks I made for the Shedd Amazon Rising exhibit, too. Some exhibits at the Brookfield zoo and in particular the Regenstein Center for African Apes.
The interactive exhibits I made there included fabricating bronze sculptures. Interactive maps and touchscreen monitors. For behind the scenes, I engineered and built a touchscreen monitor and pellet reward system for Gorillas. The rolling kiosk was part of a cognitive skill study conducted by the late primatologist Steve Ross.
2008 compromised the museum industry as well as others. I had been looking elsewhere for work when the company laid us all off without compensation or severance pay.
I began work as the production manager at Redmoon theater the day after. My friend Casey became technical director soon after I that. The company created unimaginable pagent and puppetry. I identified with the tag line "Engineering Wonder". It proved to not be as perfect a fit for me as initially thought. I threw myself into it. A remount of Redmoon's award winning Hunchback production was wonderfully recieved at the New Victory theater in NYC. An original production of Dr. Egg and the Man with no Ear met rave reviews in Chicago. A Boneyard Prayer review claimed it as a standard for the reinvention of theatrical thought. Artists were supported internationally and locally. Joey, a Dutch artist from Australia, built an opera singer chariot of steel. With six foot wagon wheels. Contraptions were made, fund raisers and celebrity parties.
Before the end of the year, I among several others, were let go.
2009 was a rough year. With museum work, odd jobs suck if you need them to buy groceries. Theater may be worse. As a single parent I was paying full custody for kids who lived with me most of the time. I used unemployment benefits I had built up. I lost an appeal to reduce child support payments. As an adult now, my son tells me, as a child, he was not fed at times in his mother's house. My daughter was locked out of her house and abandoned by her in another state while a minor.
A water interactive for a nature center in florida. An aoelian wind interactive. NASA Challenger learning center repairs. A magnificent exhibit, that never came to be, about the Haitian revolution. A weaving interactive. Longing for something the size of a $50,000.00 side job I did for a Science museum years before.
I met a friend named Kelli helping some favorite people at Acme Displays. She worked at a company named Fabric Images. I had sent them my resume with no response. Within a couple days of talking to Kelli I was talking to them. They were struggling with a job at the Adler Planetarium. As an outside contractor I met the delivery truck with Fabric Images crew at the loading dock of the Adler Planetarium. It was a couple of days late and the project manager for Adler’s contractor was unhappy. We made fast work of it but in a couple of days it became apparent that it didn’t fit. We had to take it all apart and back to the fabricator. It eventually got done. The immersive fabric installation we installed has visitor interactive projections on it.
Starting day as a full-time employee, Fabric Images was in a new building. I was escorted past the lush office space. Where I had interviewed and where my desk was...when they were done with that area. I was taken back through a huge warehouse with fifty or so employees. No introductions were made until we came to a pile of boxes and crates. I saw Bob, who I had met installing at Adler. We talked about how he was a volunteer diver at the Shedd Aquarium. He was told to get his stuff and leave.
At the time I was working part time at Elgin Community College as the Arts Center's Technical coordinator. I had a nice office and desk with computer, internet and phone line within the first week of employment. At Fabric Images after several months, in the farthest reaches of the warehouse, I had a cage that I had built. With a tool shed and desk in it. Introducing rigging safety, hardware rating and inventory. The weight and balance of the hanging frame needed engineering and testing that I participated in and often led. I became the on site installation manager. Out of town installations often had twenty or more people involved that I would give instruction to. Electrical and lighting capabilities received a steep improvement while I was there. I developed the lighting system for fabric covered frames. When I finally did have a desk in the front office area. I was out of town most of the time. I had to let go of the technical coordinator job at the college.
I had amazing experiences in the trade show industry. Installing tension fabric things a story high and bigger. Huge green slime around a Sponge Bob blowing bubbles. An enormous, internally lit, lantern for the Lunar New Year over the streets of Los Angeles. Entire show floors of towering fabric twenty to thirty feet high. Out of town, days on end, was not in the best interest for my kids or me. Small temporary towns set up and taken down in days. Ephemera of sales. The fun of making oversize spectacle, then to disappear overnight, is miraculous as the circus. Equally abusive to it’s performers.
Like with any clamoring of molecules in a tightening space. The experiences I had pressing in with so many other people had moments of great synchronicity. After a late load-in, on a Monday night, I was one of the last to leave from the New Orleans convention center. No cabs were available. I was boycotting Uber in solidarity with people that charged me more. I endeavored the thirty minute walk to the Pontchartrain Hotel. Without awareness of how much of the trek was beneath the expressway. Shadows and figures here and there forced me to make peace with my organs. I hoped they would benefit someone if taken. I doubt my stomach would be of much use as I was so hungry. I don’t know if there is a black market circuit for stomachs.
When I returned to regular streets there was a streetcar. I chose to continue walking to stop by a chain restaurant that had salmon and greens and drinks. I have never been more grateful. Prematurely. As it was well past ten at night and it was closed. Everything on St. Charles avenue was. I resigned to drink beer for nutrition at the lonely bar, that didn’t serve food, that was never lit, in the Pontchartrain Hotel.
That night the lights were on in the bar! Almost festively. Someone who looked like she had stories and humor was tending it. I entered the hotel thinking more of wine than beer. I held the door for a woman who had a backpack and enough stuff to live there for a month. I helped her in a feeble way. Mostly just holding the door. She smiled and thanked me while we stacked her mountain of stuff so she could check in. Then I went upstairs to dump stuff I had with me in my room.
Moments later I was sitting at the bar chatting with the bartender about the malbec I had ordered. I was alone at the bar. Others sat at tables that, previous to that night, I didn’t know were there. A woman walked in and sat in a chair next to me on my left. She reminded me of a old girlfriend who is still dear to me; even more so, of her sister. When she asked the bartender what red wine was good I offered she try the malbec. She didn’t like it. She chose something else. The three of us talked about things to do in New Orleans. Graveyards were a big topic. Especially one, the bartender emphasized, was a must see, and the reasons why. The young woman next to me turned out to be working on a show called American Horror Story. She had just completed the last episode of the Covenant season. She was so young looking that I didn’t realize the seasoned professional I was conversing with.
The woman I held the door for earlier now entered the bar and sat on the other side of me. I benefitted from sitting between them. There was a miracle of conversation that kicked up. They had the conduit of purpose. The bartender and I watched in awe for the most part. The woman to my right was a stunt person. She was there to rig a stunt for the same show. Something to do with a cage. We joined as they somberly toasted an honor to another stunt person from earlier years. Whose death hit close to home for both of them. When it was time to go my stunt friend was met with a new group of people entering. Who all knew her. They were there doing stunt work for a Planet of the Apes movie.
At the New Orleans airport a former Mouseketeer sat next to me while waiting for my flight to Chicago. She was in the Planet of the Apes movie too, waiting for a return flight to Los Angeles. We talked about Waldorf schools. Her brother was a Mouseketeer when I was kid. We didn’t talk about any of that.