Hi, Dean: I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was then very badly raised by a father who learned his parenting skills at Okinawa and a mother whose favorite past-times were chain smoking and pretending nothing was wrong. Luckily, the soulless Boston suburb in which I was brought up happened to be a short bus ride to the love-ins, sit-ins, riots, concerts, coffeehouses, and general cultural fireworks that made the Cambridge/Boston area the unique place it was in the late '60s and '70s. >From '72 to '76 I went to college in Boston and lived in various city neighborhoods. Although I will always love Boston and I hope to live there again someday, by the late '80s I was ready to leave. So destiny took a hand and reached down and plucked me up and dropped me into a new job that I was suddenly offered in July of '88. That job was in Hawaii, which I guess sort of makes me a kamaina. I lived in Honolulu on Diamond Head in one of those tacky little apartment buildings on Kanaina Avenue that never seems to show up in the classic picture postcard views of Waikiki. Hawaii was beautiful, and I often miss it, but I only stayed there one year. I guess paradise just isn't all it can be when you have a 9 to 5 job downtown at the AmFac Towers. When I first moved there, I remember looking at people like they had two heads when they told me I'd miss the change of seasons, but they were right. Now I think maybe we become bio-chemically altered by the weather we've grown used to. In any case, I know that I was homesick because I remember lounging on some of the world's most beautiful beaches in mid-winter and missing old Cape Cod. So I moved closer to home, to New York City, without a job, and in a bad economy (1989, the last time a George Bush was President). I lived in an illegal sublet and freelanced a little bit for a few months, but times were hard. Then one morning, after a very long and dark night of the soul when I really didn't know what I'd do next, the phone rang and I had a great new job. (Oddly enough, my first major project at this job was a TV shoot in Hawaii!) I stayed in New York until '93. After four years in NYC I thought I deserved a break, so I moved to Martha's Vineyard for a year and did very little. When the money ran out in '94, it was time to get a job again. So after living on the islands of Oahu, Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard, I moved to Rhode Island, which isn't an island at all. Go figure. So for now you can put my pin on Providence, Rhode Island. But you may have to move it if that wanderlust hits again. Mahalo, --Bob
