Look and Listen

Biography

I was born in the Mojave Desert in an army hospital, "untimely ripped from my mother's womb." Nothing out of the ordinary there. Two years later, I awoke in Philadelphia, confused but potty trained, and surrounded by a mother, a father, two brothers and a younger sister. There were also a Grandmother and an Aunt on the premises, so you can see why I potty trained fast. The only place I could get a moment to myself was in the bathroom. My upbringing was totally unremarkable, although I do remember my first visit to a nearby library being somewhat special. My mother took out Peter Rabbit for me. A book that I instantly grew bored with. The subsequent memories from there are a blur, a sort of amalgamation of Warner Brothers cartoons, the Three Stooges and Catholic School. Anyway, there was a lot of hitting going on. Somewhere in there Mad Magazine put the zap on my head--to paraphrase Martin Sheen from "Apocalypse Now"--and I was never to view the world the same again. For a while there, I wanted to write and draw humorous stories and movie parodies. Add to the mix "The Phantom Tollbooth," a book I truly never wanted to have end, various Peanuts Collections and other great books ("Bedknobs and Broomsticks," "A Thousand and One Dalmations," and a joke book which clearly shouldn't have been given to me until I was much older), and you can see the problem. Science fiction predictably came next, and I spent a lot of time reading Piers Anthony, Stephen R. Donaldson, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, James Blish (Mostly his Star Trek work), and J. R. R. Tolkien. After growing bored with science fiction and Fantasy, I happened to purchase a copy of James Thurber's "My Life and Hard Times," and started reading a lot of humorists: More Thurber, Stephen Leacock, Robert Benchley, Peter Devries, S. J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman. In there were also Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller, Cervantes, Ian Fleming and Evelyn Waugh.

Inspiration

Mad Magazine fueled my artistic bent from about the fifth grade on through my 20's, inspiring me to fill a copy book with my own comics and movie parodies the summer between the 7th and 8th grade. It might not have been the same for everybody, but Mad gave me a different view of the world and what I was being told. I wasn't sure whether to be an artist or a writer by the end of high school, and then I saw the movie version of "The World According To Garp." Aside from Garp getting shot, it made being a writer look like the life for me, and helped focus a lot of my energies into filling a lot of pages with really bad stories.