08/01/2024
We all have our dreams, the secret rooms in our minds where we can imagine being at the top, looked up to with respect, whether excelling in sports, business, the arts, etc. You may feel it’s important to be the best parent, best history teacher, best Dungeons and Dragons player, whatever you’re striving for, please remember being in control of your health will be the most important part of being in control of your life.
I sincerely hope that sharing my journey, the painful and the plentiful, will help you realize the universal, human emotions connecting all of us.
I would like to begin with my story. A story of dreams, self-doubt, acceptance, rejection, friendships, self-indulgence, self-hate, realization and hope. My story is magic, literally a life in magic, performing and producing. Your story may be something else, but hopefully you will relate to how we all can become trapped in our “kiss our own boo boo’s” indulgence. We self-medicate with drugs, food, alcohol, relationships, etc. and find yourself so addicted to our distractors, we are unable to break away.
Our goals and experiences may be different, but I truly believe the behavior modifications I will share can help you navigate your path to a more fulfilling life. The following is a treatment of where I start my journey. My team and I are "finding" my voice for this project. Feel free to get a taste of what's to come. The book will have many layers. I invite you to stop back from time to time and follow the progress. Because it's ALL about Progress!
THE *ESCAPE* ARTIST ~ Chapter One ~ (Partial Sample. pre edit review)
It’s Sunday night. The Wide World of Disney came on. I was an avid fan of the show. Everybody was back in 1969. I was nine years old, laying in front of the tv, hands on my cheeks propped up by my elbows. The Osmond family with Kurt Russell was being led through Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion. For whatever reason I fell in love with the fact that there was a haunted mansion at Disneyland. I had yet to visit Disney, but I felt like I had been there because of the television show.
I always had an interest in art and discovered I was able to draw and design. I loved crafting stuff as a kid, making things out of cardboard boxes and imagining what the cardboard boxes could or would become. Whether it was a car, rocket ship, whatever it was, my imagination was piqued. It fell right in line with the Disney philosophy. The talented people at Disney were able to take art and make it three-dimensional. I appreciated that. I was so fascinated by the way Walt was able to bring his stories to life and ultimately that is what I dreamed I would become, a storyteller.
To introduce this story, a journey of my life, I shall begin that night, watching the Wide World of Disney opening the creaky front doors of the Haunted Mansion. For some unexplained reason I felt right at home within those spooky, cobweb, darkly mysterious halls of that Mansion. Little did I know that four years later I would be consulting on my first haunted mansion with the Philadelphia JCs.
I also had a very respectful appreciation for the wonderful cartoons and animation of Walt Disney. I would take a piece of canvas and maybe draw the Country Bear Jamboree gang, or other Disney characters and I would cut the eyes out and draw new eyes behind the faces so I could animate the characters and bring them to life in my room. It intrigued me how important the eyes were in expressing the personality of the characters. The saying that the eyes are the window to the soul is so true, both in animation and in living creatures.
I was very much into kinetic art and making things work. What I always liked to say was, “It’s not what it is, but what you do with it.” How can things interrelate? If there’s a picture hanging on the wall of a monkey that’s one thing, but if the monkey is following you and you’re reading its eyes while it’s moving, it adds another dimension, another layer to the story telling. So, this is me at nine years old.... To be cont. Just A Beginning!
KL/JG/DS