What's it about?

You could say the story of my life has been completely made up.

Well, not in that James Frey kind of way, but in Escaping Redneckistan (Stories of a Sensitive Boy), a 65,000-word collection of true personal stories, I weave together over 40-years and dozens of the real and imagined character re-inventions that drove one misfit kid with an identity-crisis-gone-mad to finally become the man of his dreams.

Through whimsical fantasies and the gutsy determination to make them real, this is the memoir of one man’s serial transformations from love-starved loser to Sybill-like success, along  the way irritating (and impressing) some of the most notable people in the world.

It began with the usual unusual upbringing that made me strive to become a somebody, or more aptly: somebody else. An immigrant father who shackled me to an accordion in the psychedelic Hendrix era, to ensure I’d become the next great polka virtuoso. A dutiful mother who force-fed us thousands of pounds of roast beef—every single night for years—hoping red meat might put much-needed hair on my anemic chest. Then there was my all-nun fan club, who honored me as our school lavatory’s official “pee monitor,” and… sigh. The hapless underdog with no friends or contemporary role models, I learned to hide my true self; what peculiar people like me did just to get by. To finally escape the many redneck ghosts of my past, I embarked on a critical lifelong mission: to simply find out who else I would rather be.  

It began with trying on new identities: becoming a fabulous French lothario.  Morphing into an oxy-moronic “poet-bodybuilder.” Even evolving into a debonair spy, while getting derailed by actual CIA agents after one case went too far...

As these early Walter Mitty-style adventures turned real and much more high profile, they catapulted me from board room whipping boy for Donald Trump to unwitting millionaire, media mogul and co-founder of the television network CNBC. In the interim I also became a sexually-confused drag impersonator, a celebrity-distressed cameraman for the Today Show, a no-star chef working under TV’s Jacques Pepin, and an off-beat bassoonist for a prominent NY symphony. 

A lifetime of clumsy and poignant reinventions directed by self-doubt, I ultimately discover a universal truth about self-identity: changing others’ perceptions of me was less important than embracing that which was unusual about myself.  Escaping Redneckistan proves how challenging (and funny) that can be...