The legendary Jack Benny was known to agonize over the crafting of his opening lines. You can imagine, then, how hard he worked on what to say when his microphone opened for the very first time on the premiere of his radio show in 1932.
What he said was, “Hello, this is Jack Benny. There will now be a brief message from our sponsor while everybody says, ‘Who cares?’”
Yeah, it feels kinda like that.
Welcome to my blog, One (or 1) Creative View. I’m Steve, and if you don’t know me personally you may be asking yourself, “A-Number-One, who is this guy, and, B-Number-Two, why should I care about his no-doubt exquisitely crafted ramblings?”
Well, the easy answer to B-Number-Two (and I commend you on your lovely phrasing of that question) is because, if I’ve done my job right, these pages will be fun to read. Sometimes even thought-provoking. But A-Number-One requires me to provide some semblance of bona fides. I’ll give it a shot.
More than forty-five years ago, I gleefully jettisoned academic potential to become a joke-telling, record-spinning, ad-reading voice emerging from automotive dashboards. I’ve been one form or another of creative professional ever since. It has not, alas, made me famous (nor even worse, rich), so you needn’t feel ignorant if you’ve never heard of me. While I’ve been a reasonably sized fish in a few small ponds, you’d find most of those waters pretty boring unless you swim in them yourself. So broad strokes then.
I’ve been:
- A high-rated radio personality in a few small and medium markets.
- An award-winning (yet humble) writer and producer of broadcast and print advertising.
- A successful writer and editor of educational and training material.
- An award-winning (and yet still humble) writer/editor for a non-profit corporation.
- A wordsmith for hire, keyboard-clickety-clacking out magazine articles and marketing materials for a wide variety of companies, many of which you know.
- A semi-professional psychic entertainer who will never be a star but whose ideas have been adopted by far bigger names in magic and mentalism.
In short, I’m one of those relative unknowns who even some knowns listen to — not so much because I have The Answers as because I can be a clever bugger when needs be and generate the occasional laugh in the process.
It’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook as there’s hardly a plethora of folks named Stefan Alexxis out there. You can also reach me at steve@sagcs.net. Unfortunately, half a gazillion email lists have already discovered that fact so if you’d like to write me (and I would, truly, be happy to hear from you) please use a subject title that lets both my software and I see that your letter isn’t part of the spam barrage.
So now that I’ve met my minimum obligation to introduce myself, I’m thinking it would make for fitting symmetry if I harkened back to my initial citing of Jack Benny’s opening line and end with a reference to one of his closings. Yeah, good idea! Here it is.