My parents put me in drama classes as a kid and I noticed I could make people laugh.  Sometimes they laughed when I did drama. Starting at age 7, I spent two summers trying to produce The Wizard of Oz on my back porch and couldn't understand why my sister and friends didn't want to sing and dance in front of the fine folk of Amsterdam, NY.  Back then I was really into porch theater. Twice in my life the lead dropped out of the play and I was moved up to the lead.  In college, when the lead dropped out and I became Pip in Great Expectations, I learned how to cry on stage by staying up and drinking the whole night before. While working in corporate America, I was always racing downtown at night to act, run lights or stage manage off off Broadway.  I lived in the mountains of Japan for a decade and was lucky enough to work on the Japanese NHK network, modeling English words for kids, like an AI version of myself. Eventually, acting in full sentences, I returned to NY.