Termite TV - Life Stories

My name's Sam Z, and I'm visiting in Boulder with my very good friends. This for me is something like a home away from home. I'm actually from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and um... you're asking me to talk about my life in five minutes. My birthday is coming up and I'm about to be fifty years of age and with this new millennium coming up this really is a very serious time for me to reflect. Also a time to be frivolous, so I'm building into my life lots of trips and lots of happy times. But uh, I basically have five minutes to talk about fifty years, which is 300 seconds, which is about six seconds per year, so let me get on it. I was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, which is a steel town in Western Pennsylvania. It's a very good place to be from. Lots of hardworking people. Lots of diversity. And through that experience I came up feeling that I enjoyed people. My dad's name was _____. He was a Hungarian American, and my mother Betty was a Russian American. My dad was a traveling salesman and a great kibitzer. He was really good with dealing with people and I have a feeling that a lot of that has rubbed off on me, I like people, too, as I told you. Together they had, after my father stopped being a traveling salesman he had a restaurant delicatessen and I spent lots of afternoons there doing my homework and watching people work hard and I've never been afraid of hard work I think because of that. I have a brother named Jerry. My brother's a ____ I guess you would say, he's a professor of communication and musicologist at Penn State University. A musician, his specialty I think is the roots of rhythm and blues. Presently he's writing a book about the Dixie Hummingbirds, a gospel group. And perhaps it was his influence and my parent's love of music that has planted within me a deep passion in music and chasing it wherever I can find it. Together we collected lots of records in high school and I was a disk jockey doing high school hops, which was a lot of fun. And I always wanted to be a drummer. I think that probably stemmed back to when I was a child I used to bounce my head on the pillow before I went to sleep. That rhythm is with me still. I'v played congas, and I've studied with some of the finest Afro-Cuban and African American drummers in Philadelphia and this is a passion of mine, and I'm a trap set drummer in a band called the Tone Benders in Philadelphia, too. I got married when I was 21 years of age and I probably got married the first time for all the wrong reasons. But the prize from that from that marraige was two beautiful daughters. I have Zeze a 26 year old, She lives on the big island of Hawaii. She studies Chinese herbology and acupuncture and my daughter Emily she's 21 and she just gave birth to my first grandchild so I'm a grandfather at 49. Look out. Things are moving quickly. I studied film and video and photography at Temple University and came out of there went to Woodstock, by the way, which I think was definitely a defining moment in my life, but beyond that, if I think about a defining moment, I used to swim at the art museum in Philadelphia and once I saw some kids taking a dive from one level to the next and I tried it, and almost broke my neck doing it. I'm surprised I'm not a quadriplegic because of it. But I think ever since then it may explain why I make my living working with lawyers documenting the tragedies and difficulties and uplifting abilities of catastrophically injured people to deal with their daily existence. And that's how I make a living. I've had zillions of jobs in my life. I've been a hippie clothing salesman, I headshop store manager, a short order cook, I ran a roller coaster on steal pier, Atlantic City, I was a janitor, a DJ, I told you about, an insurance broker, a real estate salesman, mortgage service clerk, fund raiser, lots of things. Ultimately I've been married again, I have a son now, he's 10 years old named Josh, who's my new prize, and he's a rock and roller, and pretty hip kid, and I'm blessed in that way. At this point, I think what I want to do as I enter this new millennium is become an artist and put all of this responsibility that relates to serving the legal community behind, and be a film maker. I've met the termites, collaborated with them on some work, and it's been very rewarding for me, and if anything it's inspirational. I'd like to do a lot more of this stuff, and seeing you here just fuels my fire.