Nobody Walks Like My Daddy: A jazz song in syncopated counterpoint came about as a result of the birth of my youngest son in my 57th year on the planet.  After four marriages over the course of 36 years, I finally got the opportunity to raise one of my children.  I have always been in my children’s lives, but until my youngest son’s birth I never had the good fortune to live in the same city with them.  The mothers of my children didn’t only get weary of me as a struggling artist/husband, they also grew weary of the ZIP code where I chose to pursue my craft. So they moved and took the children with them.

There could be no weekend visits or sleepovers because the places that they called home were Ohio and Georgi. Sometimes it was a struggle for me to journey beyond the city limits of Washington, D.C.  So my contact with my children became a series of visits for a couple of weeks at a time, once or twice a year and regular weekly phone calls.  I could not have afforded the visits if not for the kindness of my mothers-in-law, who offered me shelter to defray the cost of a two-week hotel stay.  I wanted so badly to be with my children, but the erosion of my marriages over time made reconciliation impossible. But I continued to make the trips even without hope of us becoming a family again.

In 1978, I moved from Washington, DC to take on the challenges of New York City.  A number of my friends in the industry had ventured into the daily kaleidoscopic blender of Manhattan and succeeded, but my experience would be one of more struggling. So I opted out of the theater community and focused my attention on developing an audience in radio.  I just got tired of going to auditions and being called back as many as three times, then losing out to Ted Ross in the dance auditions.  I was so panic-stricken by dance auditions that every time someone said “5, 6, 7, 8,” it took all the strength I could muster not to run screaming from the room.  And through it all I continued to try to bring my children from three marriages together without success; I just wanted to see them all in one place together.

Then my oldest son, Guy, came to visit me in New York during his summer break from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and his younger brother, Alex, whom he had never met, convinced his mother that she should let him join us. I delighted in their company for five weeks.  It was the most joy that I had experienced as a father in my life.  I interviewed them on my radio show and introduced them to most of the people in my life, and I had an enormous party at the end of their visit.  The following year they returned and we picked up where we left off.   We were so hungry for information about one another that we spent most of the time during their visit talking about everything under the sun.  Then they were gone again, and this time I descended into a very dark place.  I missed them.  I wanted it all even though I knew it was impossible.

The opportunity to work as a writer in the industry came when a good friend, Stu Silver, invited me to come to Los Angeles and work as a writer trainee on his short-lived sitcom Good Grief.  During the 13-week run of the show, Stu gave me invaluable information about writing for screen and television and we even wrote a screenplay together.  It was during this time that I met my current wife Terry, After an eight-year courtship we married, and I was blessed (but surprised) with the opportunity to raise my son, be there for him every day.  It was such an enormously wonderful experience that I became a stay-at-home dad for the first three years of his life; the journey continues.  His birth has brought all of us closer together, but my dream of having them all come together was buried with the death of my oldest daughter Ramona in November of 2010.

The eight years that I have been developing Nobody Walks Like My Daddy have been cathartic.