I live in a small college town in Southern Illinois, called Carbondale. I
moved here from Chicago in 2005. I live with my beautiful wife, Genevra,
our daughter, Ariana, and our Boston Terrier, Simon. Genevra is currently
attending graduate school and I spend most of my time at home with Ari
who was born April 10, 2006. I'm the owner/operator of a small business,
FirstPersonAstrology.com. Incidentally, Ariana is an Aries with a Pisces
rising and a Virgo moon.
Genevra and I met while working for the Neo-Futurists, a well known Chicago
theater company. We hired her a couple of years after I was cast in 1999.
She and I were friends who were very fond of each other, but had not considered
each other romantically until we were both single and our personal histories
somehow made it inevitable beyond our control.
I left the Neo-Futurists in 2005, around the same time my wife did. I
loved the place and the people, but I was
tired of theatre, two-minute plays and even of performing in general.
I am from a town called Billerica, MA, which is just outside of Lowell.
I went to college at Fitchburg State and studied English Literature. In
my junior year, I acted on stage for the first time in a student production
of The Marriage of Bette and Boo. From there I split my interest between
theater and filmmaking. I have no formal training in either.
I applied to NYU's graduate film program. Out of 800 or so applicants,
I made it into a cut of 40, but then bombed my interview so horrendously
that I did not make it into the final cut of 20. (When I say bombed, I
mean I couldn't even answer the question: "what kind of films do
you want to make?")
After those plans fell through, I decided to get into theater as an immediate
way to keep myself active in the arts while I either prepared to apply
again, or found some way of making a full-length feature worth anything.
After immersing myself in a comedy troupe that my friend Andy Hannah and
I started called Grand Malarkey, I began contemplating a move to someplace
that was more theatre-friendly. Boston is a terrible theatre town.
I did not want to move to New York, and even though I still had dreams
of getting back into film, Los Angeles never sounded at all appealing--even
my friends who live there complain about it. And I hear they don't have
much of a theatre scene. So I considered Chicago.
Some months later, my girlfriend at the time won a full scholarship
to the University of Chicago, so I decided that Chicago should be
the place. Actually, I hesitated over the move for a few months
until my brother died in February of 1999. Something about his death
really propelled me to move on my career.
I moved to Hyde Park with my then-girlfriend in July of 1999. I
temped for a while and tried to absorb as much as I could of my
surroundings, not pushing myself too hard to audition. In October
I felt ready. The first place I auditioned for was The Neo-Futurists
and I was cast. After that, I only auditioned when invited, which
is not that often--twice in fact: Roadworks and Steppenwolf, and
I didn't get hired by either of them. I can't believe I bought all
those headshots before I left Massachusetts. I used one, and for
an unpretentious company that would have accepted a polaroid if
I'd given them one.
At some point during my work in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind,
I decided that I didn't want to be an actor. I mean, I like performing.
It's fun. And I do miss acting--as in playing characters and pretending
to be some place that I'm not. But the life of an actor is not at
all for me: all that auditioning and working on projects that suck.
I met lots of actors and they're obviously meant for it, made from
a more durable stuff I think. Talent-wise, I think that I could
have had a decent run in Chicago as an actor. Personality-wise,
it never would have happened. I got called in to audition for a
commercial once (okay, so I was invited three times) and all the
people there were so tense and focused. The male part had only two
lines, the female part, one; yet everyone was grabbing each other
and asking to run lines in the hallway. I just got really tired,
and I kept looking around at all the people there who cared so much
and wanted it so badly. I thought to myself "if I get this,
I'm going to feel bad about it." Again, I didn't get the part.
I decided that writing was what I would primarily focus on, as
the life of a writer is much more tolerable to me (except for the
day after a review comes out). I enjoyed directing a lot. I really
got a lot out of directing A 60-Minute History of Humankind.
For that production, I was able to surround myself with specialists
who did all these things that either I can't do, or don't do nearly
as well. When you're not doing everything yourself, I think directing
is really fun. You find people who can tap into your vision and
who can then communicate to you within the context of your vision,
rather than the specifics of their area of expertise. That kind
of directing really turns me on. I loved walking into the theater
a few days before the show opened and being bombarded by set constructors,
my designer, my producer, my lighting designer, my stage manager--each
one of them wanting to talk about their jobs within the context
of my vision. At several points I had to stop and wonder how I got
so many people to pitch in and make something like that happen.
And then I got tired of performing Too Much Light Makes the
Baby Go Blind, and writing for it. I wanted to move onto something
better. In theatre (and I am biased, I admit) I don't think there
would have been a better gig for me than working with the Neo-Futurists,
so it simply made sense to leave theater altogether. My last performance
was in the fall of 2005, at the Neo-Futurarium, after the last performance
of Daredevils!, which, fittingly, was some of the most fun
I've ever had in a show.
My wife and I also wanted to move our new little family on to something
bigger and better. Around that time--during the summer of 2005--Genevra's
grandmother passed away, leaving us (in a roundabout kind of way) a house
in Carbondale that is close to Southern Illinois University. We decided
to change our lives drastically, all at once. We moved from the city,
began renovating this 1883 folk Victorian which was heavily remodeled
by Genevra's great-grandfather in 1905, and we got Genevra pregnant on
our first try. (I do hate to brag, but that was pretty sweet.) I decided
to apply to grad school and become a teacher of creative writing at the
college level.
Everything
but my getting into grad school worked out pretty well. It wasn't
the right program for me. Genevra decided to pursue her program
early (Educational Psychology) while I stayed at home with Ari,
continued to write my column for Time Out Chicago, renovated
the home and worked on anything else I could cook up.
After Time Out decided to move away from a horoscope page
in mid 2007, I surprised myself by feeling the urge to continue
the pursuit of professional astrology. I launched FirstPersonAstrology.com
in the fall of 2007 with the madly ambitious hope of creating a
niche market for custom weekly horoscopes based on the exact birth
times of every subscriber.
I was also commissioned by Rough and Tumble (a San Francisco-based
theatre company) to write a new play, which should be ready for
its world premier in late summer 2008. This officially took my theatre
carreer out of retirement.
My life is in many ways simpler and in many ways much more complicated.
I finally know what it's like to have a baby, and it's pretty amazing
and terrifying. I find most of the clichés are true, but not all
of them.
I haven't been to a movie in a while but now I can rewire my bathroom
and when working have taken to wearing overalls in the cooler weather.
Seriously. Ari is tremendous and incredibly cute.
Owning a home is also amazing and terrifying. Life never really gets
better, it just changes. Every milestone comes with some unforeseen setbacks.
But this is a good thing.
I
suggest you love what you have now. That never means you won't improve
or change your life, it just means you're already there. That is, you're
where you wanted to be a few years ago, and in a few years you're going
to be elsewhere. Love here, now. And then when you're there, love there
as much as you loved here. That's it.
It's all good.
