Most will be able to read my PDF format C.V.

Like many others, I started out as a child. Unlike most others, I was born in Palo Alto, California to a pair of students at Stanford University. Mom was getting her MFA in Painting and Dad was working on his Ph.D. in Political Science. Later I would choose to believe that this gave me an inheritance of traits that made me a perfect candidate for working in show business, the artistic from mom and the political from dad. Like everyone else here, I want to direct.

Unfortunately, neither of them owned a major motion picture studio, although we did make a movie when I was very young, on location, in Yucca Valley. I was a spear carrier, but I was spear carrier number one.

One day, my father came home from a trip to a conference in St. Louis, MO and announced, the legend has it, that we all needed to pack. It seemed that some people were having his name painted on a door in gold leaf, and so we were all moving from the Palo Alto area that seemed to be a heaven on earth to an unknown spot in a faraway and likely very dismal land called Missouri. This seemed a bad move, and so without realizing it, I began my career as a community organizer. I convinced my siblings to vote against this highly suspect upper management decision, and arranged a confrontation. We took a vote, and it was decided that we would stay in California, near to Moss Beach, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Zoo.

Shortly after that, we moved to St. Louis, Missouri. Earlier my dad had described the system society at large used as a democratic government, and explained what that meant. I made the mistake of presuming that my family also ran that way. Finding that it was not a democracy but perhaps an oligarchy was hard for me to take. Unable to let go of this bitter comeuppance at the hands of a single minded dictatorship, I took to writing back to friends in the West about how I lived near the River Despair, in St. Louis, Misery. We did actually live next to a small stream named for the famous French explorer Des Peres. Then, as now, any humor I may come up with starts out with a real world reference, twisted to my own purposes. My first job was working for my dad at Washington University doing data entry on a Wang Terminal of data about voting patterns. Not exciting or fulfilling, but it paid american currency.

One summer soon after that, I got a job on a dairy farm up the road from the family summer camp in northern New York state. I drove a tractor, cleaned the barn, herded the cows, spread the "fertilizer" I had cleaned out of the barn on the fields with a machine attached to a tractor and turned the hay to dry with a different machine attached to a tractor. The pay was not great, but I had a great thirteenth Summer.

That year I took another job in the Fall, assisting in an art class for kids. Once I saved enough money, I bought a camera, a Mamiya/Sekor SLR. This gave me a new and more productive way to annoy my friends at school. I have started scanning all the old negatives that have survived with me through several different cameras, some are from forty years ago, and many have just barely survived.

Some will start showing up on my Flickr account at some point.

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