Books, comics, TV, movies… I was a multimedia kid, pretty much from the start, taking in stories from many sources and appreciating the multiple perspectives that they inspired.
When I was a very young child my mother would read bedtime stories and sing me to sleep. The book I remember most vividly is Bambi. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the picture on the shiny hard cover. Of course, I also knew the story and images from the movie, which had made a powerful impression on me, especially the scene hinting at the mother’s death.
In elementary school, my favorite TV show was Batman. Too young to understand the tongue-in-cheek genre of the show, I was fully absorbed into the battles of good and evil annotated on-screen with exclamations like Biff! Bamm! and Kaboom! I knew these were the convention of comics because my favorite was a 3D Batman book that I would read with a flashlight, under the covers, late at night.
As a middle school student, reading for pleasure accompanied summer vacations at our family cottage in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. While I loved the hiking, skiing, and swimming that defined the season, I also savored quiet afternoon shade with a novel. I enjoyed thrillers like Day of the Jackal, and science fiction, like 2001 A Space Odyssey. The latter was first a film, which I saw as a wide-eyed ten-year-old with my father. Even at the time, I knew Arthur C. Clark had written both the screenplay and the novel, which I devoured trying to understand the metaphysical themes of the film. At first, I thought I did.
Back in school, I read literary classics, textbooks and then academic writing all the way through graduate school and into my professional life. This sort of non-fiction feeds my mind now, but as a child it was the texts of popular culture that tasted like dessert. Sweetest of all was my Mad Magazine collection hidden away at the cottage for summer consumption. The iconoclastic writers and artists of Mad introduced me to a satirical attitude towards movies, TV, consumer culture, and political life. With them, nothing was sacred. In fact, it was the “usual gang of idiots” who introduced me to “201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy”, and inspired me to write and perform my own plays with my best friend, Steve. They were the ones that opened up a different way of looking at the world than my everyday home life. And that has stayed with me, always.
