I never dreamed about being in the circus. I didn’t dream about being a performer. We didn’t do the circus when I was a kid. I found it a little bit later.

I haven’t thought about the future or dreams in that regard until later in my life when I had kids and I got married and I had a family. I very much lived in the moment, even as a kid. My friendships, my existence, the things that brought me joy and all of that were always about “the now” and the experience I was having in that moment.

Right out of high school I went to Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. I was a Ball State volleyball player and political science major. And then I realized I was not going to play volleyball, and so I started drinking a lot and hanging out with undesirable people in a really fun way. And then I went to a junior college in Santa Cruz California, where I drank more and took more drugs. And then I went to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. They had an actor-training program. I auditioned and got in and then I dropped out just before graduating so I could go to Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College. I went to clown college in the summer of ’97, and by the winter of ’97 I was in the circus’s winter quarters in Tampa.

I remember auditioning for Clown College and sitting in the center ring and looking up, and there was a high wire, and there were high-wire guys training between shows — sword-fighting on the wire, and I was like, this is crazy rad, you know?

Clown college was amazing: Thirty “A-types" in the same room and everybody was funny in some varying degree.

It was six days a week classes from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. and then we had open gym from 6 to 10. You had to write new material and put it in the show we did every weekend for the community.

And then the last two weeks of clown college you built a show and they had some production numbers that they put us all in and we performed the show for the owner of the circus. We all had little numbers pinned to our costumes, and he said, “Number 22, 13, 5 and 7. I want them to come onto the road. I was one. Changed my life, like lots of things did. And now I produce circus, I produce theater. I’m starting a Shakespeare festival in Nevada. I have a touring company of circus artists. I have a touring Shakespeare company where we do Shakespeare plays adapted for five actors, and they have a drinking game in there — audience participatory and very adult oriented. I do circus and I do theater and I'm always trying to find ways to sort of smash them together to create a different way of presentation.

The worlds are kinda different. Theater people don’t understand circus so much, they think red noses and floppy shoes and circus people couldn’t give a shit about Shakespeare. I'm unsure what the future holds in a really exciting way, though. Hopefully I can create something that sort of becomes something big in however many years.

I just think a life in the arts is rewarding and wonderful and I don’t think it’s any different than becoming a banker or whatever else you wanna be. You have to have a work ethic, you have to sort of push and drive and have ambition, but I think in America you can be an artist a working artist and support a family. At least this month!

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