Making The Rounds

Thursday July 30th, 2009 - Chicago, IL

The number one ingredient of making dreams come true is ACTION. Dreams are where it all starts but without action they rot. Too many people have a lifetime of dreams rotting on the vine and I don’t want to join them. I want to press on and make something happen.

That’s what I tried to do today as I realized the month and year and life are slipping into the past faster than I can keep up. It’s that way for everyone and unless action is taken I’ll be just like everyone else. It’s easy to sit still and let life pass by but I want to be different.

I want to tap into as many people’s positive creative energy as possible. I will hand pick those I think I can mesh with and try to team up. Kip Karstedt is a voice over wizard with a ton of talent that was part of a group that did some recorded comedy bits in 2004 when I worked at the Loop. We’ve kept in contact and he lives very close to me in Lindenhurst.

One of the production guys at the Loop was named Bob Dunsworth who is also a major voice talent and a very funny guy too. He knew an actor named Josh Swanson who knew an improv guy named T.J. Jagadowski who does national TV commercials for the Sonic chain. I knew Bob from work and he asked if I wanted to sit in and be part of the group.

We never did come up with a name but we sure did have a blast creating funny material and we managed to put together a CD length compilation of bits we wrote and recorded at that time. Our official name became ‘The Unnamed Audio Project’ which kind of became a joke in itself but there’s no doubt there was a lot of talent and spark with that bunch.

Bob Dunsworth moved to L.A. and is doing well and Joshua Swanson is still acting and is always going back and forth between L.A. and New York and Chicago. T.J. is a master at improv and teaches and performs at Improv Olympic and Kip does commercials out of a studio in his house. These are the kind of creative people I want to be around in my life.

Kip saw my TV shot and was very complimentary. He misses the fun we had recording those bits as much as I do and he said he’d like to start back up doing it again. I’ve always wanted to have a crew of people to do bits like that because nobody’s really doing that on a regular basis. Firesign Theatre and Cheech and Chong are the last ones to use that style.

After lunch with Kip I went to Bill Gorgo’s house to work on comedy class lessons. He is an actual high school teacher by trade and has a lot to offer as far as teaching me how I should organize my lessons so that was worth the trip into the city. We worked very hard but also got a lot done and I could feel the creative energy between us the whole time.

After that I went to meet with Jerry Agar about Jerry’s Kidders and how we can move it along so we can do some live shows and generate some income. We also bounced around some ideas about Uranus Factory Outlet with his sons and they added to the mix as well. I don’t care where the ideas come from, I just want to generate them so I can begin to take action and make something good happen. I put in a full day’s work making connections.