Short one contestant, Jason was plucked from a busy hallway the way a child would choose a crayon. Thrown into an empty seat, he found himself in the prestigious 3rd grade, open-house-art-contest hosted by his Scarborough Elementary faculty and staff during the Fall Festival of ‘92.

“Paint the vase of flowers in the center of the table with these water colors,”
the art teacher instructed. “You’ll have 30 minutes.”

Men around the room all checked their watches in perfect unison like a dad ballet. He began painting the stems. Then the flowers. He captured nuanced details like the distorted faces of the other children through the vase and the cat-clock on the wall shifting it’s eyes back and forth with every ticking second that escaped. The dad ballet stretching their lower backs as they prepared for the audible growns crescendo portion of their evening performance.

Thirty minutes later, the timer dinged. Jason had finished his first painting.

It was then his mother and him agreed this was the single most important piece of art since his earlier play-doe work he could only in that moment see as juvenile and avant-garde. He still rememebers the intoxicating feeling.

“Jason won, too,” his mother would add.

This cannot be confirmed.

Years later, he sat next to a student who brought her pet iguana to class. A lizard with some ironic, human name like Harold, resting on her shoulder. It’s tail gently grazing his sleeve, or worse his neck. See herpetophobia, didaskaleinophobia, gargalaphobia.

One evening in Los Angeles, after a long day of shooting, he found himself seated at a table next to Emilio Estevez for dinner. He ordered the duck and didn’t once say quack. Another time, he sat on a four hour flight, drowning in free drinks, with a flight attendant genuinely convinced he was the “dude from Blackhawk Down.” 

He wasn’t.

Seat after seat, row after row, there are enough of these moments to fill a stadium. While the stories are sometimes more interesting than the seats themselves, each seat memorable not because of the anecdotes, but the lessons learned just by the opportunity to have a seat. 

Though the power of chance is not lost on Jason. If it wasn’t that first seat to show him he could be creative at all, he would have never sat in any of the interesting, unexpected and serendipitous places being a creative processional has pulled out a chair for him.