There a lot of people in my world who keep expecting my next piece to be an edgy – hip play that pushes the boundaries and has lots of cool swear words and images. That isn’t going to happen. I just ain’t edgy.

People figure since I’m a blue collar dude from Chicago, I should be cranking out Mametian work rife with angst and f-bombs. There really is no reason to – Mamet already does it and very few do it better.

I try to tell stories that create a world that I would want to live in or at the very least control in some way or another. In some cases I want to recreate a moment so I can go back and fix what was broken for me – or for someone I love – in that moment. Sometimes I go back to pay tribute to the people or the event – or both. Sometimes I just want to go back because things were simpler in the twenty-first century.

My father used to take me to movies that were way over my head when I was a little kid and afterward we would go to the Majestic restaurant and get a cup of sherbet and he would patiently explain it to me. This created a passion for creating art that could be shared with a family across generations.

My mother and I used to write (terrible) pop songs. We pulled every cliché out of the book and arranged them with a forced rhyme scheme which I then typed up on her Princess Electra typewriter. Even the melodies we banged out on that old Sear guitar were predictable – but what a time we had. This created a passion to develop art with someone I love.

I tell the stories I tell because they are mine. They are my moments. They are my memories. I only hope I strike some universal chord with them and inspire someone else to mine their history for their own stories to share.