- I plan to have an encore career
My Groups
- Encore Nation
My Interests
My Issues
My Encore Story
In a way, I’ve been maintaining two or (depending on how you count) three careers my entire life. As I’m writing this, I’m closing in on thirty years at AT&T, the last 20 or thereabouts in the IT department as a resident expert on various aspects of desktop PC technology and a webmaster. For even longer, however, I’ve been an actor, sometime director, and theater critic as well as a radio broadcaster/producer/podcaster.Most of the money has come from AT&T while most (but by no means all) of personal satisfaction has come from my not-very-profitable careers in the entertainment business.
So, here I am about to turn 60 (and thereby officially become a Geezer) and wondering what I’d like to do when I retire from that first career and how I’m going to manage it. Ideally, I’d like to go on doing something that allowed my to combine my technical and artistic knowledge but I’m not really sure how to go about it. Failing that, providing PC support for a small nonprofit would also be a nice option. I’m joining encore.org (which I found out about courtesy of Jane Brody’s column in the NY Times) in hopes of finding some useful information – and maybe even a way to an encore career.
Until then I’m in something of a holding pattern; not the worst place to be, but a locus of uncertainty nevertheless.
My Bio
I was a standard-issue kid, more or less, until I got bitten by the performing bug 5th grade or thereabouts and joined the school band – followed, eventually, by the orchestra and stage band. I toured with my own magic act for a while as a pre-teen and even contemplated a career in music before deciding that I might be better off in experimental psychology.
I actually worked in the field for a few years after getting my graduate degree until the grant money ran out. When the dust cleared I was in technical sales support at what was then Southwestern Bell Telephone. Eventually they became AT&T and I became a Computer Geek (all right, officially Technology Manager, but the propeller beanie is the same), but I never lost my love of performance.
I still act, do theatrical sound design, and write theater criticism for a local radio station where, until recently, I also did a weekly show.My wife and I and our two cats happily reside in a historic (i.e. old) house in the Soulard neighborhood in St. Louis, conveniently close to both of our current workplaces. I maintain two blogs (The Technology Curmudgeon and Stage Left), which I fail to update on a regular basis due to the fact that there simply enough hours in the day to do everything that I want to do.
That includes writing a short biography, apparently.
