How Did I Get Into This?

Perhaps the question I am most often asked, after “Would you please leave?” is “How did you get into that?” Of course they’re referring to my career.

Certainly not the leopard-print bustier and chain mail.

In high school I was deeply immersed in the theatre arts and had dreams of being an actor on Broadway, in Hollywood, or in Akron…whoever would take me! But, during sophomore year I sat next to Sam in English class. One could say Sam changed the course of my life. Others might say that my life wasn’t really going anywhere yet, and Sam was just colorful wallpaper. Whatever.

I didn’t know Sam. His was a name my best friend, Lu, had mentioned several times throughout junior high, and during freshman year as a “really, really funny kid.” Well, as I prided myself on being a really, really funny kid, I immediately resented Sam. I had never met him, and I had somehow ascribed his name to some other kid who I didn’t like, whose real name I didn’t know. So I didn’t like Sam.

Come sophomore year I wound up seated in whose would soon become my favorite teacher’s class, next to this strawberry-blond headed kid who, much to my surprise, turned out to be Sam. The teacher was the coolest woman-in-authority — not to mention the youngest — I had ever had throughout my education, and she was fairly tolerant of class clowns, provided they participated and performed up to her expectations in her classroom. So, being a really, really funny kid, I endeavored to crack up the class whenever I could. Not long after the school year started, however, I noticed that whenever the teacher said something and opened a hole wide enough for me to insert a witty wisecrack, Sam jumped on it, too. The odd thing was that, as he and I blurted out our wisecracks at the same time, most often we said the exact same thing! A friendship began to form.

Then, one day deep in the Chicago winter of our sophomore year, Sam leaned over to me in class and asked me if I wanted to make a movie that weekend. It seemed an odd request, but I accepted.

Fearing that Sam was one of those weird kids who would want to play Africa Explorer, and then tie me up and lock me in his bedroom closet and do disgusting things with me for a year until he tired of me and sliced me into little pieces and threw me in a creek, I went to his house with several excuses prepared to explain my hasty departure back home, despite the walk of several miles and a most assured case of frostbite by the time I got there.

Sam did turn out to be weird, but he’s my kind of weird. We shot his movie, “Battle On Planet 9,” on silent, Super8 color film, starring a cast of clay figures amid a world constructed solely of his mother’s sewing room wall, the top of a dresser and several pounds of Legos™, all assembled by Sam into space fighter craft, troop transports and battleships. In ensuing weeks we made more, slightly more sophisticated, stop-motion animated movies, and we applied goofy, comics style speech- and thought-balloons to his baseball, football and Star-Trek trading cards, and we played hours and hours of Risk and Monopoly, two games I have always hated, and playing them with Sam and our other friends only raised that hatred to a passion.

Along with my love for theatre came my newfound interest in filmmaking, thanks to Sam. As I looked ahead to graduation and my future, those were what I wanted to do.

Sam now lives in the Kentucky-side suburbs of Cincinnati, and we remain great friends. Whenever we're able to get together these days, and given enough time, we still fall into the groove where we can complete each other's jokes or immediately sense the set-up to tag-team an unsuspecting victim. Before I leave Sam behind, I want to point out a feature of our friendship that I’m not sure many other people experience in their lifetimes. Throughout our sophomore year our English teacher always ended her lengthier explanations of English topics and assignments by asking the class, “Are there any questions?”

The first time Sam had a question, he raised his hand and waited patiently for her to call on him. She did, and Sam asked, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?” It’s a question.

She laughed along with the rest of the class.

But she fell for it the next time. And the time after that. It was the same question every time, and she fell for it every time! This was Sam’s brainchild, and I never interfered with it. I simply marveled at how our teacher could fall for it time and again. Then, as we neared the end of the school year, my favorite teacher one day explained an assignment and again asked, “Are there any questions?”

Sam raised his hand, and she pointed at him with a playful look of scorn on her face. “I am not calling on you, Sam!”

If ever there was a perfect opening for the other shoe to drop, this was it. I, the other class clown, seated right next to Sam, innocently raised my hand.

“Yes, [Farrago]?”

I couldn’t keep a straight face as my own cleverness made itself known.

“What’s the capital of North Dakota?”

The class was in uproar and our teacher practically slapped her forehead and shouted “D’OH!” for setting herself up for it. Sam raised his hand for a high-five from me.

But time marched on. Junior year came and went. Sam and Lu and I, as well as a handful of other theatre friends, made good, frequent use of Sam’s old Bell & Howell Super8 camera, making wacky, Benny Hill-esque movies we called “Stuff” films (because they were just a bunch of stuff).

My oldest sister took her kids and left her husband, moving back home with my parents…and me. I had just finally gained my first-ever own room and true privacy upon the departure of my brother as he started his career, and mere months later I was forced to share a bedroom with two little kids.

Throughout senior year I had a serious case of cabin fever, peppered with sleep deprivation, as my three-year-old nephew always seemed to be able to time coming to me to complain about his sister being mean to him (their mother worked nights at a factory, so she wasn’t there to referee) with the very moment I drifted off to sleep. That always worked to postpone my falling asleep again for at least another hour.

Senior year ended. My girlfriend dumped me at the end of the summer for the boyfriend she had dumped for me in the prior spring. I went to enroll in classes at the local junior college. I loved my father. When he asked me what I wanted to study in college, and I told him “Theatre. I want to be an actor,” he wasn’t comfortable. He didn’t act as too many fathers do, who forbid their children to pursue their dreams, but rather force them to choose among “practical” careers. My dad simply said, “Well, make sure you have something to fall back on.” Imagine the groan he must have had to suppress when I told him my fallback was filmmaking!

I spoke to the advisor of the Theatre Department and told him of my aspirations to be an actor. He listened to my voice as I spoke, and he told me that he had serious concerns that I would be able to achieve anything in my chosen field. He recommended that I talk to the advisor of the Speech Department and enroll in some classes in that curriculum in an effort to strengthen my voice and give me a better shot at a career in the Theatre.

I did as he suggested, and when I looked at the class syllabus and saw “Introduction to Radio Broadcasting,” and “Introduction to Television Broadcasting,” I thought those seemed pretty interesting. I signed up for them.

On the first day of classes I went to the Intro to Radio Broadcasting class. The instructor showed us the radio studio, which looked interesting, and he told us about the assignments and the projects we would have to work on. Interesting. The next night was the Intro to Television Broadcasting. Same thing: he told us of the assignments and the projects, and then he took us to the TV production studio. As things were, even then it was not much of a studio. The cameras were likely from the late 1960s, the videotape recorders probably weighed a quarter-ton each, and the editing console was probably from the first generation of electronic editing after cut-and-paste went by the wayside. But the projects were visual. They employed the use of cameras. We recorded SOUND as well as video!

I was hooked. It was everything I wanted of filmmaking, but it was more immediate and timely. We could roll tape, record whatever we needed to record, and then, as soon as we were done recording, we could rewind it and watch it immediately!

Time was running out. Rather, money was running out. My parents were too poor to send any of their kids through college. My oldest brother did two years of junior college and then joined the Air Force, where he eventually completed his degree. None of my sisters went to college. My other brother received financial aid and attended DeVry Institute of Technology (back before it was a university, and when it was only one campus anywhere). I, having not been such a great student in high school, and achieving the stunning score of 19 on my ACT (don’t remember my SAT, but it was less than stellar…way less!), wasn’t getting calls from university recruiters begging me to come to their schools. I was too proud to ask for financial aid, and I was attending junior college on my meager savings. I figured a four-year degree was not in the cards for me. My quick out — escape from the growing claustrophobia at home, and avoiding the dead end of my savings account and, thus, my post-secondary education — and what I believed was my only shot at a college education was the military. Upon entry there I figured one of two things would happen: I would find the career for me in the military and do that the rest of my life, or for the ensuing four years I would pine for a career in TV production.

The latter held true. It was all I could think about the entire time I was in. At three years in, I became eligible for cross-training from my current career field into another. I tried to cross-train into the Radio and TV Broadcasting Specialty, but I had to submit a voice audition. Again with the voice! And, with my raspy, Mel Torme voice (minus the crooning ability), I was rejected. Stupid voice!

Luckily for me, the State of Illinois, at the time of my separation from the Air Force, offered what was called the Illinois Veterans’ Grant, which allowed anyone who was an Illinois resident at the time of their enlistment, and who maintained their Illinois residency throughout their military service, who received an honorable discharge, and who remained an Illinois resident when they separated from their service, to attend any Illinois state run school with tuition and fees waived.

WAIVED!

When I got out of the Air Force I enrolled at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I gave my parents a heart attack in my first semester there by pulling a 4.0. They weren’t sure I was still their son! I couldn’t maintain that pace, but I earned my BA in Radio-TV, Emphasis: Production with a 3.4 GPA overall, and a 3.64 GPA in my major field of study. My parents were quite pleased.

After graduation I tried to break into the Chicago corporate/industrial video market just as the market was falling out, and corporations who had for years operated huge video production departments were shedding them. I wound up working nights at a nuclear power plant for about a year and a half. Right after workforce reductions resulted in my being laid off, I received a call from the production manager at a TV station in southern Illinois where I had sent a résumé, expressing interest in interviewing me for a position there. I interviewed and got the job.

I worked there for two years, creating, writing, producing, shooting and editing TV commercials and on-air promotions, and then jumped at an opportunity doing the same thing at a TV station in south Georgia, which proved to be a nightmare on several levels. From there I jumped to TCI cable, following a coworker who had taken the production manager position there and who became my boss when he hired me on.

I left that place 2 years and 3 months later to move in with my future ex-wife. After eight months of floundering in the Chicago freelance market, I landed a job with AT&T Media Services, which had only months earlier acquired the entire cable operations of TCI. Another year-and-three-month nightmare ensued, and I jumped that ship for this current one, where I’ve been slaving and traveling for what will be eight years come January.

There. Now aren’t you sorry you asked?