I started performing professionally at age 8.  By the time I got out of HIgh School I had appeared in four or five films and a handful of TV shows and knew what kind of work I wanted to do, so I started in acting or, to be more precise, waiting tables.   It took about two years, but at age 20 I started making a living as an actor and managed to sustain that for over 20 years. By the time I was in my late Twenties/early Thirties I had acheived almost everything I wanted (small part in a big film, big part in a small film, etc) and found myself working behind the camera on a huge and hugely expensive effects picture thinking "there has to be more than this".  So I started writing.  It was screenplays at first, naturally, but then I gravitated towards non-fiction about subjects that interested me.  Maybe it's the arrogance of the auto-didact (I never went to college but I do consider myself an educated person) but my curiosity about things like music, the environment, and food and wine led to a point where I was actually publishing on those subjects - in magazines, mostly, but also in two books: TALES FROM THE JUNGLE - a Rainforest Reader (Crown, 1996), and EIGHTY EIGHT KEYS: the Making of a Steinway Piano (Clarkson Potter, 1998).  The second is now in it's fourteenth printing and on its second publisher; I'm happy to say it's found a life on its own. So I continue to pursue subjects of interest to me - lately it's been a series of biographical sketches of the leaders of the Steinway company - and trying to figure out what The Reader wants to read, and The Pubisher wants to publish.  If anybody figures that out, please let me know.

Two published books
over 25 feature magazine pieces
James Beard award 2006, "Best Writing about Restaurants"