Okay, I'll skip a lot of the in between stuff. We moved a few times, wound up in Conway, SC which is where I'll say I'm from if you ask me. After high school (Conway High, class of '75) I went to Furman University where I kept a low enough profile that they awarded me a degree (B.A., Political Science, 1979) thinking I had earned it. (It'll be our little secret,OK?)
Somewhere along the way I took up the fiddle and found it to be the best outlet for my lifelong need to play music. The rockstar thing wasn't working out and Lawrence Welk had died, so fiddling was the most logical alternative.
This fiddling bidness took up all my time. Hey, check out my dazzling list of accomplishments as a musician. I moved to New Hampshire in 1989 to see what it would be like to live there. I worked as a freelance musician. It's a pretty good deal if you don't mind working nights and weekends and being broke all the time.
All right, you've stuck with me this far, I'll give you an amusing anecdote. When Kim and I moved here to Charlottesville (Sept. '93) I applied to the University for work. I was a little nervous about having to explain being out of the business for four years but I included in my employment history "1989-present: freelance musician." So I get his phone call (from the guy who is now my boss) about setting up an interview. He says "I do have one question: It says here you've been a freelance physician?" I had no idea what he was talking about but I laughed and said "Yeah, I worked out of the garage, doing appendectomies and the occasional liver transplant, nothing too complicated." Somebody had seen "musician" and read it as "physician" and mistranscribed my writing. We still laugh about that, especially when I get wrong number calls for the cardiology lab. Speaking of wrong number phone calls, I seem to get more than my share.