When the Old Ones gather to tell tales, the story is often told of Singer-Who-Laughs, or Mikey, as he has come to be known among the city folk. According to the legends, Mikey first appeared in the late 1960s in northern New Mexico. Like the Sandia Mountains themselves, his early life is shrouded in mystery - or perhaps tumbleweeds. Not much is known of his early years with the Albuquerque Hippies, but in time he was borne by the trade winds to Texas.
Eventually settling in Dallas, Mikey became acclimated to big city life. As time passed, he assembled some of the tools he would need in order to properly engage a postmodern world - tools such as spirituality, language, music, humor, logic, a library card, sushi, clean water, and an inexplicable attachment to the Oxford comma.
According to the Old Ones' stories, Mikey's educational journey took him along a relatively common path to the carnival ride of the Dallas public school system through the primeval forests of university life into that illusory plane of existence known as adulthood. A voracious consumer of knowledge (some of it actually useful!), Mikey was sighted at the Arts Magnet High School at Booker T. Washington, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Center for Christian Education. It is written that he studied music, language, literature, linguistics, composition, journalism, Radio/TV/Film, education, religion, philosophy, pratfalls, and advanced rationalization.
If we can believe the legends, Mikey has traveled an eclectic (some would say eccentric) career path. At various times, he's been an HR administrator, an accountant, a taxi driver, a medical courier, an FTD flower delivery driver, a soccer referee, a technology manager, a telecom sales engineer, a composer, a music producer/arranger, a multimedia minister, a comedy club music director, a voiceover artist, a journalist, a critic, an editor/proofreader, and a web designer/developer. He's been employed by organizations as small as three people to as large as 40,000, as well as being self-employed as both a sole proprietor and a small business owner.
The tale is often told of Mikey's first emigration to Colorado. He was deluded into believing that this leg of his journey was career-related. Little did he know that the Great Spirit was leading him there in order for Mikey to meet his lifemate. Laugher-Who-Sings, known as Janet to the masses, consented to be his bride, and graciously allowed him to bring her back to the D/FW metroplex for a season.
Once that season passed, Mikey again moved to Colorado, where he lives with Janet, a frighteningly smart blue heeler named Pirate, a codependent rat terrier named Terry, and Lobo, 'the cute one' - a black lab mix. Mikey spends his non-family time as a web developer, voiceover artist, and writer/editor/proofreader for The Pursuant Group; a freelance writer/editor/proofreader, voiceover artist, graphic/web designer, webmaster, composer/producer/arranger/performer; a member of the Stefano Elliott Band; and whatever else strikes his fancy.
At this point in the tale, the Old Ones typically collapse into peyote-induced trances, waiting for the next chapter of Mikey's story to be written. They wander through the spirit world, keeping tabs on Singer-Who-Laughs. So take heart, dear friends. As the next chapter unfolds, the Old Ones will be there to bear witness.
