Alan Brown:  

Can't wait to see everyone next year. I'm sure we all have such odd stories about where we've been and what we've done. Me? I went to the wrong school for me (Hofstra) and was so sick of it all by the time that I graduated that I went to work fighting forest fires in eastern Washington state. Over the next few years, I traveled around the country, tried a few odd (very odd) jobs, and eventually wound up at a terrible industry newspaper -- but I was beyond thankful that they paid me to write. ("Learn how to write" would be a more exact description.) I eventually left, tried my hand at freelancing (and probably set a world record for the least amount of recorded income while doing so). I wound up in Princeton doing some consulting. Now, you may not have seen too much of my temper when I was in Hauppauge, but it was there and would sometimes come out at work. I was also compulsively honest about other people's failings. One day, the owner of the company called me into his office, told me that my work was fine but that nobody liked me, and fired me. That's how I became a freelance writer the second time. My ex-boss was one of my first customers. (Hey, he liked the work, he just didn't like me.) After making every mistake you could make (and then some), I figured it out (don't we all, eventually?). I met my wife, Linda, at a tennis party. We married a couple of years later. We have two children. Our son Alex graduated Syracuse two years ago with a degree in music industry (the business side of music) and is a fine drummer with a few different bands. He was working for Digital Choice, which programs the music channels on your cable box, but lost his job in December. He decided two years of trying to break into a collapsing music industry doing low level jobs for crappy pay was no fun. He's now applying to law schools. He as headstrong as I was at his age, but far more realistic. And very, very funny. He's going to Rutgers-Camden in the Fall. We'll see how funny he is after a few months at law school. My daughter is in her senior year at Phil...Expand for more