I co-wrote my first science fiction novel between the ages of 11 and 12 with my friend Peter Sattler. It is called The Death Touch. We began working on a sequel, The Death Touch II: Return of the Mutants, but we got interrupted by the idea of girls and classic rock. I recorded my first song, "Cook Out", a parody of "Jerk Out" by the Time, in sixth grade. This was quickly followed by "I Want Your Socks," a George Michael Parody, and an obscure parody of "Roni" by Bobby Brown called "Rice-a-Roni." I was Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Musical, when I was in seventh grade. My first band was called Wicker Basket and our demo tape consisted of me playing the riffs to "Fly By Night" and "Back in Black," a song which I had never heard until that day. We had to stop recording because none of us knew how to tune a bass. The first big concert I saw was Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, live at Deer Creek music center. I won the tickets on the radio, along with a portable CD player and a ten dollar gift certificate to Blockbuster Video. The first commercial I starred in was for Insight Communications in Lafayette, IN. I portrayed a man in a shower who hears a trivia contest on the radio, jumps out of the shower (naked, grabbing a towel), consults all of his old college textbooks, but spends too much time doing it and loses the contest. I was paid in pay-per-view gift certificates. The second commercial I starred in was for Pay Less Supermarkets, a regional, Indiana based, grocery store. I starred as a bag boy who uses a ketchup bottle to announce all of the savings the customer is getting by using her Pay Less gold card. Finally, David Prowse, who was the person in the Darth Vader suit in the original Star Wars trilogy (not Sebastian Shaw, who was Anakin Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, or James Earl Jones, who was the voice, but the actual guy who walked around in the suit) and also the bodyguard in A Clockwork Orange, signed the back of my 1974 Telecaster Deluxe at a comic book store in Bloomington, IN, in 1998.

hide text