About Me, in General

You already know about my affinity for music, theatre, travel, and pedantry. Here's the full story, abridged.

For my first 22 years, my hometown was Newton, Massachusetts, the home of the Fig Newton, the birthplace of the Stanley Steamer, and the country's safest city. Two important things happened in 1980: I had my first piano lesson and I gained a brother. That piano lesson, the spark of my entire career, was the result of an elaborate, painstakingly thought-involved Saturday-morning conversation that went something like this:

Mom: "Would you like to try piano lessons?"

Me: "Sure." I was never the loquacious type. I'll try anything legal once, except bungee-jumping.

My brother, Josh, graduated from Syracuse in 2003. He then spent eight months in Australia, followed by a year in Washington, D.C., where he rose from floor salesperson to manager at City Sports. Hearing that a new Manhattan location was soon to be opened, he convinced the higher-ups that he should be a manager there, and he moved to New York City in October 2005. He's a musician, too, writing his own songs and performing them on the guitar.

My parents, Joan and Jerome, are a professor of mathematics and computer science at Pine Manor College and Harvard's Extension School and a lawyer specializing in labor and employment law at Sullivan, Weinstein & McQuay, respectively. My father is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and an ardent Wolverines football fan (nearly everything in our Newton house is maize and blue); my mother graduated from Vassar and loves the Boston Red Sox enough to get the team's logo on her car plates. They live close to my father's mother, who turned 95 in April 2007. And then there's Bo, the opera-singing golden retriever, named after Michigan's former head football coach.

I grew up as a classical pianist, studying with Sandra Porter-Engelhart and Lily Dumont in Boston, and occasionally delving into theatre (to play the little boy, Theo, at Pine Manor's production of Pippin and to play the emperor in my elementary school's production of The Emperor's New Clothes), but never considering theatre as a career option. For five summers in the 1980s, I attended Camp Encore/Coda, a music camp in Sweden, Maine (I told people I was going to Sweden for the summer). One of my camp piano teachers, Rudolfo Brito, introduced me to Khachaturian's piano concerto, which is what I think of as my signature piece, if I can be said to have one. I got to perform part of the concerto at the Interlochen Arts Camp (then the National Music Camp); I also attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

My parents are responsible for my travel addiction: The odd week in Israel and England (for starters) during my childhood provoked a mode of thinking that (1) it's not such a bad idea to get out of the country once in a while and (2) other cultures are very much worth exploring. The travel bug, combined with my love for foreign languages and my inability to withstand nine consecutive months of high school, led me to participate in month-long student exchange programs to Russia, Costa Rica, and Spain. Where would you rather be as a tenth-grader in April - in class, learning the causes of the Sino-Japanese War, or figuring out how to get to Gorki Leninskiye when you've mistakenly taken the train to Biryulevo?

And so, when I entered Harvard, I auditioned for (and joined) the Harvard Glee Club, lured by the trip to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan planned for the following summer. My affinity for theatre began in college: One of my favorite musicals (Into the Woods) was to be performed my freshman year, and they needed a pianist. Then I saw a performance of a student-written musical, and I was inspired to write a musical based on Judith Guest's Ordinary People, which was performed at Harvard in May 1996.

Four months later, I became a New Yorker, moving into a tiny studio apartment on West 45th Street in Hell's Kitchen, which is perhaps the greatest place to live in the world. Besides all the Broadway theatres (and many of the Off-Broadway ones), there's the ethnically diverse plethora of restaurants on Ninth Avenue: I can walk out of my apartment and be enjoying any of 25 countries' cuisines in less than 15 minutes. Then there are the Stiles Farmer's Market, the International Grocery, the Sea Breeze Fish Market, which constitute my main specialty-food shopping destinations other than Chinatown. Hell's Kitchen is also near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Penn Station, and Grand Central Terminal, so I have easy access to places such as Red Bank (where I've conducted a bunch of musicals), Cold Spring (a starting point for great hikes), and Atlantic City (my biggest vice).

Since I couldn't move to New York City and instantly earn a living as a music director, I took advantage of my father's connection with Scudder, Stevens & Clark, an investment-management firm, and started a temp job there. That job evolved into a real job consisting of Web design and human-resources communications that provided steady income for five years. After merging with Zurich Kemper Investments, the company changed its name to Scudder Kemper Investments; then it became Zurich Scudder Investments; and when Deutsche Bank took it over and had no use for an extra human-resources department, I was let go. But my little stint with Zurich Scudder Kemper Deutsche Clark Whatever-It-Is-This-Week enabled me to move from that tiny apartment to a medium-sized one-bedroom on West 50th Street, one with a 29th-floor view of the Hudson River and some mind-boggling sunsets.

From October 2002 to May 2004 I toured with the international company of the musical Fosse as a keyboard player and kept a needlessly verbose running travelogue of the experience. Since then I've been back on 50th Street, where I spend much of my time playing cabaret shows, conducting musicals, planning trips that involve advance visas and expensive vaccinations, strengthening my poker abilities, and finding people with whom to share New York's gastronomical delights. My musical How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, which I wrote with Jonathan Karp, played for two months Off-Broadway in 2006, and I premiered my classical-piano piece The Chagall Suite in North Carolina in 2007.