Hello, Fellow Teen Students

How many full time jobs is too many?

I am back in school after 35 years to finish what I started. Let me tell you why getting a 200 out of 200 on my final project for my rhetoric class is the most amazing thing in the world for all of us.

In 1988, I saw The Second City Touring Company perform at Centennial Auditorium at the University of Arizona. And somehow talked my way into going to get dinner with them afterwards at El Cholo café. There, I got to meet Tim Meadows, who was very nice to me. Who was I then? A college student in a sketch comedy group with dreams of doing something like that. I heard that if you were in the Touring Company, you would make SEVENTY-FIVE dollars a show.

SEVENTY-FIVE dollars a show. That’s like making TWO HUNDRED dollars a show in 2025. If you did that, maybe four shows a week, that would equal being poor as hell in both 1988 and 2025. But who cares about money? When I heard you could get paid to do that, I was determined to get to Chicago. The only thing stopping me was getting the rest of the classes to get my college degree. But it seemed to me that having a college degree or not having one didn’t really matter in show business. And that’s what I was heading towards. SHOW BUSINESS! I finished up the Fall 1988 semester and in February of 1989, I left town to get to Chicago. A year after that, I was in an improv group called Mocking Michaelangelo. I was proud that when we needed to get a name for ourselves, I still had my Humanities textbook and we opened it to a random page and there was that phrase, “Mocking Michaelangelo.” BOOM. Thanks, College. Moving through the world from that point, a year after that, I was in the Touring Company, getting to see things like Boise, Idaho and New Bedford, MA. A ski resort in Idaho. Falling off the side of a snowy mountain road in a van. And know what Tim Meadows didn’t tell me? It wasn’t just SEVENTY-FIVE dollars a gig. I also got a per diem for food on the road. TWENTY-FIVE dollars a day. So on a show day, 100 bucks. I felt like the richest man who travelled in a passenger van with eight other people and stayed at Best Western Motels could feel. SHOW BUSINESS.

One thing led to another, and I got a career, a wife, a family and a house. All from being a writer. And sometimes, in Hollywood, I made more than a HUNDRED bucks a day. All the while, I would occasionally miss the fact that I wasn’t a college graduate. When it would come up, I would think to myself, “Come on, don’t need to go back there. If you are going to spend money, it has to be on your kids and their education.” Then about ten years ago, I got asked to teach at AFI, The American Film Institute. I went for the interview and they hired me. When I asked them about not having a degree, they told me that my career was my resume. I had achieved enough that they wanted me to teach writing. And off I went to teach at one of the top ten film schools in the country. I got recruited to move to Arizona State University not too many years later and became a Professor of Practice and I’m so blessed and excited to be at The Sidney Poitier Film School there. The students and the work and my colleagues inspire me. Learning inspires me, too. I’ve dropped in on classes on how to use the Unreal game engine, and virtual production. I’ve been loaned out to the Theater department to teach the MFA playwrighting students. And for the last few years, as my youngest has become a senior and is about to graduate, it dawned on me that if I wanted, I could go back to school. So, I did. After 35 years of working as a professional writer, I’m back in school to finish my English degree, in writing. Proving that not only is it never too late to finish something, or start something, it’s important that you do these things because the benefits go beyond the piece of paper. Beyond the credit hours. Engaging yourself in the world around you feels almost like that’s the biggest job any of us has. Ever. The past six months, while I’ve been doing the full time job of being a professor, and the full time job of being a writer, I’ve also been going to school. But part time for that, because even I don’t think I could handle THREE full time jobs.

It's been great talking to transfer students in a class I’m teaching about how they’ve been having trouble getting all their credits to transfer over and how long that process takes. And to tell them, “Oh yeah, I know. I had to find course descriptions from 1986 and get copies to the transfer folks, too. And then just wait and hope.” It’s been great looking at what classes I still need and what ones are going to be interesting to me. How about a class that counts towards one of my needed credits that’s all about this:

Resilient American Futures: An Academic Road Trip
America's 2,400-mile Interstate 10 highway most acutely represents the frontline of our shared future. Connecting the fastest growing, most demographically diverse and most disaster-vulnerable U.S. cities from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, the I-10 provides a living observatory for understanding the present and envisioning more sustainable and inclusive futures.

You had me at Road Trip. The only way it could be more perfect is if it was about Route 66, honestly. “Mexican American History from 1900 forward.” Another class. Boom. Let’s go. I’m exactly this guy, right?

I’ve seen this gif many times. My favorite is the shirt. “Music Band.” Reminds me of this shirt from Wizards that I had Selena to wear to have her character answer the question, “What is your Halloween costume going to be?”

And that shirt was inspired by this memory I had of another anti-hero along the lines of Alex Russo.

And all that leads back to college and me. And this. A 200 out of 200 points on my final project for a class called “ENG 309: Rhetoric.” Am I bragging? When aren’t I? But the brag on this isn’t a brag about my score. It’s about how modern courses are designed and taught by good professors. We learned all about the tools for putting together rhetorical arguments, we learned the history of rhetoric and we put it into usage. But it wasn’t broken down into those sections. We started off right away with exercise one being about identifying a community problem. From our community. Something we would care at least enough about to work on it all semester. And each week was like building a scaffold where you’d do research, analyze texts and build and build until it was time for you to write a paper addressing that problem to an intended audience that could affect the change needed to attend to that problem. Here's my paper. It’s about Dodger Stadium. And the neighborhoods of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde. All gone with Dodger Stadium built on top of them. I got excited to think about what could be meaningful to bring stakeholders together and do something about it.

Murrieta Solution Proposal Finaldraft

91.9KB ∙ PDF file

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Take a read. It’s a proposal for the City Council of Los Angeles. It’s nothing huge. But it is something. Let me know what you think of it. We can grab a coffee and talk about it at the Student Union. You know, student to student.

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Okay, some updates. I got honored last week by The Imagen Foundation as one of the Influential Latinos In Media for 2025. One of the best things about that award is that I get to bring students of ASU Film School to it. I did last year when I won (BRAGGERT). And this year, too. And my pal, Ligiah Villalobos who teaches at Cal State L.A. and is an amazing writer herself won and also brought students with her. Helen Hernandez, the co-founder of The Imagen Foundation gave a keynote speech and I was so surprised and delighted that she mentioned Ligiah and I by name in her speech as being people that continue to press forward with their own work while mentoring and teaching the next generation. She made Ligiah and I stand up to be recognized in that moment. And to top it off? My mom and dad and sister came to the ceremony, too. Here’s a pic of Ligiah and me and our students.

No pics of my family. But get ready, because my Mom was the subscriber who put me over the top on the next big milestone for us here at Muy American. She had been reading it because my sister forwarded it to her. She said now she can comment on posts. So watch out.

Read my paper. Tell me what you think. Go do something you didn’t think you could do, like jumping back into school after three decades. Tell me about that, too. Let’s GO!

The Most Important Chicano In Hollywood That You Don’t Know About