Ray The...

I've spent decades working in a high-stakes career among a variety of personalities (characters!), primarily in the largest city in the US, but also other large US cities. I've spent significant time in each of the top-10 US cities (except San Antonio), from ocean to ocean, for business and pleasure, and met many people (characters!) in those places.

I've been a Teamster loading tractor trailer trucks working with the salt of the earth, and a Managing Director advising CEOs. I've rubbed elbows with some of the poorest and richest people in the country while remaining distant enough to observe (I think) objectively. By the grace of God I've avoided poverty and extreme wealth, but there's still time.

I was accepted into every NYC-area PhD program in economics, and I've earned prestigious professional designations in Finance. A front-page WSJ columnist wrote that I am one of the smartest people/writers he follows (before I stopped blogging), and I had English teachers in high school who thought I'd be best suited for ditch digging. I had Math teachers in grammar school who wondered how I could convert fractions to percentages and vice versa so quickly in my head, before promptly placing me in basic math classes. They probably read my file, which said that my father was a bus mechanic and my mother was a homemaker.

I've worked with and for some of the smartest and most-honorable people I've ever met, and I have worked with and for total sociopaths (sociopaths seem to thrive in high-stakes industries.) I've worked with silver-tongued morons and reticent geniuses. I've worked with beautiful people and ugly. I've found it is best to travel on business with beautiful women for free airline and hotel upgrades, restaurant reservations, and drinks at crowded bars.

I've had a graduate from every Ivy League University (except Princeton) report to me--including some with Ivy undergraduate and graduate degrees--and I was an undergrad from a state school probably no one has heard of.

I recently discovered that my maternal haplogroup includes a Viking Shield Maiden, famous among Swedish archeologists for the discovery of her remarkable tomb. I discovered that there is a good chance that I am related to William the Conqueror and therefore every king and queen of England, but that my Polish ancestors are ghosts in the historical record. Thank you Church of England (and Ancestry dot com and 23 and Me). I also might be third-cousins with Bruce Willis.

I am writing my first TV pilot for a drama series and plan to draw on many of these experiences, characters, and facts. I hope they're sufficiently interesting.