One day it just hit me over the head that I was avoiding going after something that had been simmering inside for a long time...
As an actor, I am basically a n00b, as the kids would have said in 1999. One day it just hit me over the head that I was avoiding going after something that had been simmering inside for a long time—a recurring theme in my life, which explains my relatively late start at virtually everything except piano, even including exploring my sexuality—and so, on a whim or at a boiling point, I went online and searched for an acting teacher, did some research, and picked one.
Joanne Mosconi Piano (“The Performing Arts Coach”) turned out to be just what I needed for opening this world to me. I have always been invigorated by cross-pollination of disciplines and art-areas, because these things are so much more similar than we often think, and it’s of course also rewarding to find where they’re not similar. It’s been a wild and engrossing ride so far, and I look forward to exploring the acting space so much more. After all, we never truly know where life will take us.
Actor
Narrator
Well, this’ll be interesting, I thought: I get to jump right in with a 10-book series that all takes place in the same town, with recurring characters and places...Talk about testing my acting chops right off the bat!
At the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020—as I watched literally all of my music gigs disappear in less than 48 hours—an old friend reached out to me and told me that they had been writing gay (“MM” in the lingo) romance stories under a pseudonym and needed a new narrator. As this person had heard I was getting into acting, they thought I might be a good fit. (N.B. I'm keeping their pronoun gender-neutral for privacy reasons.)
Well, this’ll be interesting, I thought: I get to jump right in with a 10-book series that all takes place in the same town, with recurring characters and places (and, certainly, themes; each book is basically a meet-cute and then an evolving romance, some conflict, and a more or less pat resolution between the two leads; it is definitely a genre that follows convention). Talk about testing my acting chops right off the bat!
I chose a pseudonym for myself not because I was afraid of being linked to this sort of project—I am gay, and out, and proud, insofar as one can be "proud" of something one did not accomplish (I think we need a different word, but that's another discussion)—but mainly because I kept having this thought in the back of my mind that someone who is a few sandwiches short of a picnic might cotton to the way I say the word “cock” (yes, there are sex scenes; the stories contain full-blooded humans) and decide they might like to find me in person and try to engage me in a private performance handcuffed to a radiator in their basement. #romance indeed.
But, in preparing for this website to launch, I decided I no longer care. The chances of that happening are vanishingly small, and so I decided—in the name of presenting a more-or-less complete version of myself to the world—that I would include this aspect of my life. Also, the amount of times I have to say “cock” per book is fairly minimal, so you’d have to be Mother Teresa in order to object, and that assumes that she herself might not have enjoyed the occasional OH WOW would you look at the time haha [nervous laughter]
Anyhoo, so far this is the only project I’ve undertaken, and I look forward to doing more narrating under my own actual name soon; it’s a fun process (minus the editing/mastering learning curve and living in an EXTREMELY noisy environment), and I’ve been enjoying it.
