“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface.   Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY.   JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark.   Member of NYS and Federal Bars.  Quit drinking 2005.  Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans.  Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele.  Writing continually, rarely fiction.  Drawing and painting since age three or so.   Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized.  Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.  

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear).  Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy felt the same about me.    Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator:  bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.    

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country.   Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves.  Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness.  Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.  

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn.  Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes.  Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.  

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up.  Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love.  The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely.  Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow.  I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.  Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.