About.
I’ve written breaking news and sketch comedy. Dabbled in 16mm film. Reported on tenant rights. MC’d burlesque shows. Served as Chief Twitter Officer for a friend’s dog daycare. Built a career leading creative and making work for some of the world’s biggest brands. And for reasons that take a little explaining, spent every spring since 2010 playing a red dwarf that gets chased out of Detroit.
I used to write the news.
I wrote for ClickOnDetroit, covering everything from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Columbia disaster, an MLB All-Star Game, a Pistons championship and the Malice at the Palace.
A TV reporter I worked with also once asked me to steal her purse in front of a classroom full of students. It was part of an experiment about eyewitness identification, and afterward they had to describe me to a police sketch artist. They weren’t even close. I still regret not asking for the sketch.
I’ve always wanted to make movies.
I studied 16mm filmmaking at the Detroit Film Coalition, took editing classes at Film/Video Arts in New York and volunteered at the Detroit Docs Film Festival, writing about the films and helping filmmakers find their way around.
I also subscribe to the Criterion Channel and hope to get invited into the closet someday. I’ve logged 783 films on Letterboxd and written 90 reviews that almost nobody has read.
I have a small collection of half-written screenplays, too, which I hope to finish before I die so they can be produced posthumously. Always a cool move.
I had a New York chapter.
Temps. Freelance gigs. Weird jobs. I worked as an assistant buyer for Ross Stores and a technical writer for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. I filled in for Demetri Martin at his old copy-editing job at Grey while he was off at the Montreal Comedy Festival.
I hung around UCB when it was cool, took improv for playwrights, acted in plays at Hunter College and an off-off-off-Broadway theater festival, reported on tenant rights for RentWars.com and MC’d shows with the World Famous Pontani Sisters.
I only lived there for a year and a half, but I still remember the Brooklyn-bound F train to Church Avenue. The little boy named Ivan next door who I’d play catch with from our windows. The Thai place across the street. How cheap fresh flowers were. And how jealous everyone was that somehow, in Brooklyn, we had a backyard.
Comedy has always been in there somewhere.
I was a member of the Second City Detroit touring company and wrote and performed with Planet Ant, including performing alongside Tim Robinson in Detour of Duty. I also won a MADtv sketch comedy contest, which came with a limo ride to a live taping in LA.
We somehow went in the wrong door and ended up watching the show from backstage, hanging out with the cast instead of sitting with the audience where we were supposed to be.
I’m also apparently a mythical red dwarf.
Since the first Marche du Nain Rouge in 2010, I’ve played the Nain Rouge, the legendary troublemaker thousands of costumed Detroiters gather to chase out of the city every spring.
Technically, my identity is supposed to be a secret. Nobody really cares about this except Vince, the guy who made the mask. So just don’t tell Vince.
Somehow, advertising makes sense.
Maybe it’s all the writers, filmmakers, comedians, artists, oddballs and occasional rock stars you meet along the way. Advertising turned out to be a pretty good place for someone interested in all of the above. I’ve written the work, made the films, invented characters, led teams, helped shape iconic brands and made things people might actually care about.
And I get to play a lot of different parts. Usually without the dwarf mask. And almost never stealing purses.