Timeline

In 1980 I was born in Greensboro, NC and named after two victims of the Greensboro Massacre.

In 1982 my parents moved to Atlanta, GA where my mom worked in Public Access television.

In 1985 my parents moved to Columbus, GA where my dad was organizing textile mills. My main exposure to anything like live performance was when my parents made me go to demonstrations and when we sang songs with our family friend Bev Grant.

In 1988 I knew I wanted to play saxophone, which I think was a result of a strong identification with the sax solos that happened 2/3 of the way through most 80s songs. 

 In 1990 my parents moved back to Greensboro, NC. One day in school they asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to be in band. Even though I knew I did, I was too shy to raise my hand. I was able to join band the following year.

In 1993 I decided I wanted to be a professional bari sax player, even though I was unsure if that was a thing.

In 1994 I told my Uncle Michael I was learning guitar but that I only had my dad’s old beat up acoustic. He got my relatives to all pitch in to buy me an electric guitar.

 In 1996 I sold all of my CDs that weren’t jazz. Because I thought that I only needed to listen to jazz for the rest of my life.

In 1997 I got a decent scholarship to go to Interlochen Arts Academy to study saxophone, but I had to sell the electric guitar my uncle bought me to help pay the tuition.

In 1998 I started a 16 piece salsa band called “César y Los Bomberos” and we received some heavy criticism.

In the spring of 1999 I was struck with severe tendonitis in both of my hands and I couldn’t play saxophone. I thought I should pursue social change by being a religious leader, but I didn’t belong to any religion.

In the fall of 1999 I enrolled as a freshman at Oberlin as a Jazz Saxophone and Religion major even though my hands were injured and I couldn’t really play saxophone. (I did not tell them this)

 In the summer of 2000 I was a camp counselor, and saw a production of Blue Man Group on a camp field trip. I called my mom and said, “I want to be a performance artist!”

In 2001 I started writing songs and deeply regretted selling my electric guitar and all my CDs that weren’t Jazz.

In 2004 I toured around the country as a singer-songwriter and felt lonely and sad on stage by myself with an acoustic guitar. When I got home I took out a line of credit at the local music store and bought an electric guitar, but I still felt sad.

Later in 2004 Sammy Tunis sang one of my songs in a hotel room in Amsterdam and we half-joked that we should start a band called The Lisps.

In 2007 I was driving through Virginia and I wondered if there was ever a Civil War soldier who read science fiction.

In 2008 I wrote a first draft of a musical about a civil war soldier who was writing science fiction, FUTURITY, as my masters thesis for an MFA in sound art at Bard. The ragtag presentation received some heavy criticism.

In 2009 I was walking through a parking lot behind a bank in Bloomfield, NJ on my way to my adjunct teaching gig and I realized that I wanted to focus on writing musicals, which I found genuinely shocking given that I had already gotten out of grad school, and I knew almost nothing about writing musicals.

In 2010 I got married on top of a mountain to my best friend and collaborator Emily Orling. The wedding was a potluck.

In 2012 FUTURITY world premiered at American Repertory Theater and it received some heavy criticism.

In 2013 Emily and I lost a close friend to suicide and I started to write The Elementary Spacetime Show to make sense of her choice and the grief we were feeling.

In 2014 we turned Babycastles Gallery into a spaceship for four months and ran a DIY production of my participatory space voyage musical The Universe is a Small Hat.

In 2015 FUTURITY had its Off-Broadway premiere and things went better than they ever had.

In 2016 society wasn’t working very well, and I wrote a musical called NOISE about a bunch of musicians trying to fix it with music.

In 2017 I got commissioned to write a musical about my parents five friends who were murdered by the KKK in 1979, and I was having a lot of feelings about writing it, but I needed the money, and that was awkward because the five friends were killed because they were trying to destroy capitalism. But I asked their ghosts for help, and they helped me, and they even sort of sympathized with the predicament of participating in capitalism. And my parents seemed to like the second draft. I called it The Potluck.