>> I went to college for sound engineering at Columbia College in Chicago.
My theater career started in high school.
I was a sophomore in high school.
We had a great theater program at my high school.
And I really fell in love with theater at the time.
And I tried to learn everything I possibly could about lighting
or sound or anything along those lines.
And then there was a small dinner theater on the South Side of Chicago, it's gone now,
called Candlelight Dinner Playhouse.
They hired me when I was 16 as a spotlight operator.
I would come in; I would run a spotlight.
When I graduated high school in '89, they were looking for a new position
for Head Back-Stage Person downstairs.
And I interviewed for I job.
They hired me and they moved me into that position.
And then, that year I worked with, we did 42nd Street, I worked with Marc Robin that year.
About 3 or 4 years later, he ended up being the Artistic Director
over at the Drury Lane Theatre in Evergreen Park.
And I get a phone call from him out of the blue saying, hey, I'm looking for a technicians.
I'm looking for a technical director.
I think you would be perfect.
It would be running sound for the shows and being the technical director,
production manager for the space.
So I moved over there.
And I remained their technical director and production manager and their sound designer,
sound engineer for about 11 years.
And then that theater closed down.
They were building this facility over here at that time.
So I actually made the lateral move over to this facility.
I was only off work for about 2 weeks.
So luckily, in the 20 plus years that I've been in theater, both professional and, you know,
professional high school level, I guess you could call it, I've really only been off work
for about 2 weeks during that entire time, which is an amazing feat in theater.
It's really not what people should expect.
Theater, especially these days, is a lot of freelance work.
So you can expect to be off work for a couple, a couple weeks or a couple months here or there.
But when you do work, it's extraordinarily rewarding.
Everything you learn from past experiences helps you in theater.