The Star Sitting Next To You

Los Angelean Kevin Sheridan has appeared in over a dozen television guest spots, and just wrapped up writing, producing, and starring in his very own film, Leaving Barstow.

Kevin Sheridan sits with his new toy, a brand new MacBook, utterly immersed in its shiny new screen displaying his next feature film writing endeavor.  He seems to be half listening, half creating as his eyes focus acutely on what's directly in front of him.  The screen, not me.  It's amazing how someone so intense could be such an amicable interviewee while still remaining so concentrated on the work that succeeds him.

This seems to be the way that Sheridan works though.  Both hands must always be dipping in opposing tasks or how could one be as successful as this 26-year-old?

When asked about his freshest career move as writer, producer and lead actor in his coming of age film Leaving Barstow, up comes that brilliantly youthful face from the laptop screen, "I did it myself.  I just grabbed it and said, ‘I'm making a movie,' and I made a movie," says Sheridan with his patented nonchalant modesty that serves him so well.  He'd seemingly blush if I mentioned it, but there is a hint of pride dazzling behind those eyes, and well there should be.

Sheridan is a Los Angeles native.  He grew up in Hancock Park, moving to the Pacific Palisades at 12-years-old.  He's the oldest of three boys, the younger gents being Chris, 18 and Colin, 15.  His mother Dannine is president of The Sheridan Group, a highly acclaimed Southern California interior design team, while father Scott is a managing partner of Sheridan/Ebbert real estate development.  Talk about a family with Southern California roots!
When asked what he believes is the most instrumental force behind his career Sheridan answers without hesitation, before my lips can even finish the inquiry, "My mom, for sure."  Sheridan remembers one evening when he was about 12-years-old, his parents took him out to dinner to have "the talk" about his desire to pursue acting.  Following that talk, auditions and roles started and haven't stopped since.

When he was 15-years-old, Sheridan landed a leading role in the well loved sitcom Soul Man by the producers of Home Improvement.  While his friends were newly adjusting to high school and the freshman football season, Sheridan was flying to New York City for three week increments to portray Dan Akroyd's eldest son on nationally syndicated television.  He candidly speaks of celebrating Liv Tyler's 21st birthday with her and smoking his first cigarettes with Kate Moss as I watch him fervently chomping his nicorette gum.  
Over the last ten years Sheridan has since landed over a dozen television guest-starring roles  including but not limited to such high rated shows as Boston Public, Veronica Mars, Without a Trace, Justice and last but not least The Closer, his favorite role yet to date.

 He muses of a trip heading to the Breckenridge Film Festival recently where Leaving Barstow was screening.  "I know you.  You were on Law and Order," an excited young woman gawked as he was heading to his assigned airline seat.  He calmly reassured her that, although he's been on almost every other crime show on television, that no, he's not that guy from Law and Order.

Sheridan's close friend, director of Leaving Barstow, and star of Showtime's Queer as Folk, Peter Paige playfully suggests, "Oh yeah, don't get in the car with baby-killer Kevin, there's something strange about that guy," regarding all of Sheridan's mysterious character roles on his several crime show debuts.

Sheridan would of course love to break away from character roles as he furthers his career to grow and shine as perhaps a leading man.  There's no doubt that his handsome baby-face will help him eventually attain a seamless transition no matter where his ambition and desires lead.

So the next time you're boarding your flight to destination unknown, maybe you'll be lucky enough to run into Sheridan, and thankfully this time, you won't mistake him for that Law and Order guy.

LOCAL REFUGE FOUND

    Here’s a question I never in my lifetime thought I would be addressing.  What do Britney Spears, my little brother, and almost half of the United States have in common?   They are all battling what can be inevitably defined as some sort of mental illness. 
    It was shockingly effortless and natural for America to lounge around and watch 26-year-old pop and media sensation Britney Spears unravel in the public eye, being placed from one psychiatric emergency hold to the next.  We giggled, and gossiped, and judged while a young woman’s struggles were placed in the spotlight.  All we could say and feel at the time was, now that’s entertainment.
    It’s not so easy to swallow when it is a member of your very own family.  The little brother you played catch with.  The little brother you read bedtime stories to.  The little brother that you love.
An individual who is a danger to him or herself, a danger to others, or gravely disabled is placed on a 72-hour mental health hold, often called a 5150.  When my 22-year-old brother was placed on this emergency psychiatric hold, it was no longer a two-bit sideshow.  It was our life.  This was not the first time, but I pray every day that it is the last.  I needed to know that I was not alone.  There was the Britney Spears’ case, but it was not enough.  I burned with questions and a desire to find once and for all where someone could go in Southern California to seek help for young people experiencing debilitating forms of mental illness.
    My prayers were answered almost instantaneously.  Leading a quest for a place with answers, I found nothing short of a local miracle, Daniel’s Place.
Founded in 1998, Daniel’s Place is a program of Step Up on Second, a nationally recognized Santa Monica recovery center for individuals middle age or older who have chronic mental illness.  But Daniel’s Place itself is something even more specialized in the fight against mental illness.  It provides constant care, support, and education to not only young people from 18-28 years-old suffering from issues relating to mental health, but to their families as well.
    Next thing I knew, I found myself eating a greasy grilled cheese sandwich at an even greasier local Venice burger joint, across from 60-year-old Wayne Bauer.  Bauer has been working at Daniel’s Place, which is located in Santa Monica, for six years.  Despite his friendly eyes and undeniably charismatic, intelligent, and articulate demeanor, I was still skeptical that from behind his soggy egg breakfast he was going to answer my burning questions and desires surrounding my brother’s overwhelming mental health issues.
    As if he had read my mind, without knowing a thing about my personal troubles he said, “It is just really hard on the families.  Parents bring their kids in and the parents have no idea what to do.  I mean, they’re just blown away.  They literally just don’t know what happened to them”.
    Over the last ten years, Daniel’s Place has become a home away from home for many Southern California young adults struggling with mental illnesses and pursuing recovery.  It is sure to provide support and hope, catering to a taboo illness that still to this day carries a constant social stigma and elicits a noticeable drought of compassion.  Bauer says, “The ‘C’ word isn’t the worst word you can hear.  The ‘S’ word is the worst.  When you get cancer, people can’t do enough to help you.  When you get schizophrenia, everybody runs.  So I think it’s very important to have compassion”.
    As high as three-quarters of the young people that Bauer works with at Daniel’s Place are diagnosed schizophrenics.  “Some of them have very, very detailed delusions, and they have this whole fantasy world worked up with monsters in it.  They’re not evaluating life like we are.  Schizophrenia causes a filtering problem.  They’re filtering the wrong way”.
    Daniel’s Place was funded originally by Arthur Greenberg, a founding partner of the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker, and his wife, Audrey.  The program itself was named after their son, Daniel, a healthy boy that loved to play football, and studied acting.  Daniel, like most people who experience mental health issues throughout their life, had his first psychotic outbreak as a young adult while attending college at Princeton University.  Through his family’s support, treatment, and medication, he went on to graduate from Princeton and spent several years first as a client, and then as a caseworker and outreach worker at Step Up on Second.
    What happened next was every family member’s worst nightmare.  Daniel continued to fight with his mental illness and his personal battle ultimately ended in his suicide in 1997.  “He blew himself up with a fire bomb in his car.  Burned to death right in front of his mother and father,” Bauer said with a severe sadness behind those friendly eyes I had so quickly become accustomed to.
    In finding his niche through becoming the service coordinator and primary case manager for Daniel’s Place, Bauer has come an impressive and distant way from getting his law degree from The People’s College of Law, a progressive law school in Los Angeles.  When asked how he can possibly shake the hard work and emotional toil at the end of the day he says, “The thing that helps me most in this line of business is Buddhism.  I meditate at the end of every night, do some Buddhist chanting”.
    Bauer has dedicated every day for the last six years, fighting for and amongst these young adults that seek refuge in Daniel’s Place.  “We all have this great potential, but we can’t take are of each other,” Bauer says with a resounding Dalai Lama-like presence from behind his bacon.  “It’s a dark world you know.  I love the job.  I mean, at the end of the day, I really try to help people.  I never come home and say I’ve had a bad day anymore”.

Hip-Hop Pioneer Speaks Volumes

  Tonight, Friday, June 26th, kicks off this weekend’s amazing Sunset Music Festival with performances by, practically everyone, at world famous venues like the Viper Room, The Roxy Theatre, Whisky A-Go-Go, House of Blues, Cat Club, and Key Club on the Notorious Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
But that’s not why I’m here.
It’s 20 minutes to seven o’clock and with all the excitement in close proximity for the festival, there’s one spot that remains bizarrely unaffected.   All is still queerly quiet at Book Soup, the 32 year old independent book store that lives on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.  Right now it’s just me paling amongst a giant sea of books, excitedly awaiting the arrival of Joseph Saddler, better known as hip-hop pioneer, Grandmaster Flash.  He’s coming to present the release of his new tell-all book, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats.   Even the quiet store boasts their anticipation with the atypical hip-hop beats registering from some mysterious speakers living in the labyrinth of books.
The anxious crowd begins to multiply as it gets closer to Flash’s arrival.  That familiarly ripe happy hour fragrance permeates the small store.  A tall and handsome deejay comes and sets up some turntables.  So now, we’ve got two turntables and a microphone.   The real beats start now sending the small crowd soaring.  Black faces, white faces, pink nails, backwards caps, suits and wrinkles are all bobbing and tapping.  The energy rises and the speakers beg, “Everybody say party” and then the music inexplicably shuts off.  Someone is heard in another corner that is not mine, asking meekly, “Did he cut off the music because we didn’t say party?”  You can’t make stuff like this up.
Suddenly a young man steps up to the microphone.  It takes a few moments, and then I join the crowd in recognition, welcoming him.  His name is DJ Felli Fel and it occurs to me what a perfect introduction this serves for the Grandmaster himself.  Felli Fel is no stranger to the art of hip-hop pioneering.  As one of the most influential DJ’s on the West Coast, he has already played an integral part in shaping the sound of popular music in America.  Most of us locals are familiar with him because of his nightly show on Los Angeles’ top rated radio station, Power 106, and he’s recently gained nationwide notoriety with the release of his self-produced certified Gold single “Get Buck in Here”.  He excitedly stands before us like a kid in a candy store explaining how he grew up emulating the scratching sounds he heard on Grandmaster Flash’s hip-hop records, “I took it and put it on my mom’s turntable and tore her turntables up!  That was the first record I actually scratched on,” and then he introduces our man with,” I could talk to Flash all night long.”
Flash finally strides out in all his hip-hip glory.  He’s dazzlingly bright in his white Kangol cap and LaCrosse polo.  His earlobes are unrecognizable, hidden under sparkling diamond post earrings, the right one a large “G” and the left of course a matching “F”.  As I stand and ponder how his choice of jewelry probably set him back more than my expenses for an entire fiscal year, he begins to introduce his newly published book. 
Right from the start he’s much more of a storyteller than anyone could have expected.  I notice that he’s delivering his story directly from the first pages of the book, but just in Grandmaster fashion, he does it in style.  Where the pages in any biography lean towards being stale and one-dimensional, Flash acts out his childhood with all the strength, physicality and sense of wonder that a 50-year-old could muster…and then some.  His storytelling is like a new dance move fluidly matching the now hushed volume of the beats in the background.
He doesn’t look as rough as his early days suggest, however you can take the boy out of the Bronx, but you can’t take the Bronx out of the man.  “Yo, could you stop with that flashing in my face, it’s really starting to annoy me,” he says to an over zealous photog that is snapping away at his every move.  It’s in this moment that I have to pause and chuckle at the fact that Flash can’t deal with the flashes.  It’s ironic and poetic at the same time.
He leaves us with the worldview that sometimes you’ve just got to, “Forgive, let go, and let God”.  Then he righteously steps up to the turntables and I can feel the hot breath on my shoulder as the crowd collectively moves in. 
He reluctantly leaves his spinning, with the persuasion of a Book Soup employee to start the token signing of the books.  I graciously step to the back of the 50 person queue, hoping perhaps for another mild Bronx blow up at some unsuspecting fan.  His patience waned towards the end of the line as he grew visibly annoyed with the gentleman in front of me who had two books and a poster to be signed. 
I heard an audible sigh of relief when he looked up to see my 20-something low cut summer top as I flashed my smile and said, “Thanks for coming”.  He smiled back, took a second to regain his composure and added, suavely, “Thanks for listening”. 
He’s welcome.  As I take my freshly signed copy of The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats out of Book Soup that night, I also take with me one unforgettable event.