I'm an artist. I was born and raised in Niles, Michigan, one-time home to Ring Lardner, and the Crystal Blue Persuader, Tommy James, less the Shondells.

I sold my first painting when I was 13, a portrait of what I wanted to look like when I grew up. I ran out of india ink, so I finished it with my father's liquid shoe polish. There are two things here that I think are funny. One, I'm still clutching the money. Two, evidently, I thought my nose was going to get smaller as I got older.

I attended and dropped out of a couple of good art schools, the Munson Willlams Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was a merit scholar there, and no kidding, someone from the administration noticed I was missing and called me concerned about my absence, just shy of ten years after I left.