The showbiz seeds were planted early when my parents gave me a Jerry Mahoney dummy for Christmas along with Paul Winchell's book Ventriloquism For Fun and Profit.
Then, when I was in college, it took over!
My love affair with pens and drawing paper was temporarily eclipsed by the lure of greasepaint and smelly costumes.
There's no way to overstate the impact on my life of Dr. Arnold Powell (above, standing) the brilliant playwright and director who chaired the Drama & Speech Department while I attended Birmingham-Southern College.
Here I am in Fredrich Duerenmatt's The Visit, in which I played an eccentric fellow who walked around a small Swiss town with white shoe polish in his hair.
Above: Look! I'm a bewigged British barrister in N. F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum. Now I'm a bewigged Moliere fop in The Imaginary Invalid.
In Samuel Beckett's Endgame I played a legless fellow who lived in a garbage can.

I knew the role would be demanding, but what surprised me was that the re-attachment surgery after the production closed was much more grueling that the initial amputation.
Don't say I wasn't loyal
to my friends who "knew me when"!
I gave my childhood buddy (seen above with untied shoelaces) a plum role in my Advanced Playwright's Lab project The Sixth Story.
And my showbiz career even branched out into television, folks!
Keep clicking
to watch a rube
meet the boob tube.