If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
I wrote that title a few weeks ago and saved it in Notes, because I knew it would come in handy eventually. When seeing today’s prompt I thought it was strictly apropos (which would be a bad title for my biography).
Looking back on an overview of my academic career, it seems that I stayed pretty much on track with my 31 years of teaching, and the years attending school before that. But on closer examination, you can see I’ve done a lot of different things.
Just in the job category (before my career started), I was a busboy, shoe salesman, gas station attendant, janitor, library card filer, Kelly temp (doing xeroxing one day and data entry for a few weeks), radio DJ, and multimedia consultant.
A lot of the things I’ve done have been what can be called “one-offs.” Something I thought might be the first of many similar events never continued. A few years back I helped arrange a prog rock concert on my campus; I thought this might lead to other bands appearing in my theatre. Sadly, the organizer was not very organized and, though the bands were good (District 97 and Valdez), I was not willing to work that hard for too little gain (like, almost no audience).
At the same time, I’ve visited many places in the US for conferences, and have finally begun traveling outside the continental United States. I hope to visit a few more places before Vladimir Putin or global climate change obliterate them.
And I continue to direct a wide variety of plays while trying other forms of writing, such as poetry, song-writing, memoir-writing novel-writing, and play/screenwriting. Then there’s the podcast, Audio Chimera. And the short films on my old YouTube channel stephenschrum and the new one for StoryZ/StoryZStudios.
Perhaps I could indulge my biographer to add Biography of a Renaissance Man as a subtitle to A Plethora of Miscellaneous.
MUSOFYR 