Kevin Gracey

Oh, all right...

For ten years I was in the record business, running record stores in New England and accumulating a ridiculously large but irrelevant LP collection and no money. From there, I had a brief stint as a studio photographer, where I acquired now-irrelevant skills and no money. Spotting a flaw in my work plan, I inflicted on myself a job as a "government consultant", (playing with documents, basically), which gave me no skills recognized by the rest of humanity -- or LPs-- but did give me money.

Yes, that's right, you can say it-- I sold out. I figured I could put up with the job while I indulged in the stuff I liked -- playing bass in blues bands, acting and producing in semi-pro theater -- without starving -- and waiting for the way to make something like that pay off so I could go do that.

I hardly need explain what happened, of course. Thirty years on, I took all that money I piled up from that "temporary" job, left the government pretty much the way I'd found it, and here I am. Somebody asked me once what the best part of my job was and I said having all my friends think I was really a spy, since they couldn't believe what I was describing was a real job. It was, and one that needed doing, but frankly, I'd rather you think of me as a retired spy. Think Robert Redford at the end of "Spy Game", without the Porsche.

P.S. I now have a ridiculously large and irrelevant CD collection.

What does it say about me that the first thing that comes to mind here is hitting Mr. Quist in the forehead with a paper airplane on the sidewalk outside the third-floor Log office?