On the seacoast of bohemia....

Saw Erykah Badu and her kid last week at Albertson's. She was paying for groceries at the automatic check-out stand, while showing her son how to scan stuff. At first I didn't recognize her. I was gawking only because the child was so exquisitely beautiful, like a pale brown Caravaggio street urchin, complete with an angel's face and crowned with dull gold curls. Then I glanced over at her, admiring the sleek shape of her skull wrapped in a plain cotton scarf, and her lovely narrow face.

Like me, her clothes weren't look-worthy, she wore no make-up, and even more like me, she was just going about her day. For some odd reason, spying on Erykah Bahu's ordinary few minutes got me thinking about what I do.

I trained for many years to be a New York-style gallery painter. Then, for about seven more years, I worked as an independent artist, occasionally living in my studio and chilling yogurt on the window sill, when I couldn't afford either an apartment or a refrigerator. Then two seminal events, a head-on car collision and a reception at Jack's Gallery in NY, eventually shoved me into the work-a-daddy world. The car crash busted up any notions of my invincibility, while the gallery reception wiped-out my illusions of happy anonymity.

A few years ago, I phoned my old studio partner, a talented and brilliant man, one whom I have always loved without reservation.

In the middle of our chitchat, he asked abruptly, "So how does it feel to be a corporate sell-out?"

I was shocked into silence before mumbling some truism about how I designed and wrote stuff for broadcast rather than what I'd done for a narrowcast world. He listened politely and we both hung up fast: two old friends who had skidded dangerously close to our first quarrel. But my sense of hurt, of being unfairly misjudged lingered for a long, long time.

Finally I remembered something. Selling-out is one of the cherished myths shared by most residents on the seacoast of bohemia--the idea that all you need to do is lay down your brushes and show up in the IBM lobby as the hipster you are, to be rewarded with a $200K job. As an ex-hipster artist who transferred into the corporate world, I didn't disabuse my old friend. With rare exception, the last thing a corporation wants is an artist: sell-out or not. My slide into big bad business--accompanied by mocking haw-haws all the way--was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Now, a free-lancer, my clients are still large corporations, for whom I write all sorts of things: broadcast scripts, advertising, brochures, campaigns, press-releases, just name it. Am I a fine-arts whore? A fallen angel? Some poor slob who couldn't hack it in the art world? I've never once felt that way. What I feel like is a good craftsman, up to my ankles in fresh wood shavings.

At night I write my own fiction, but it doesn't seem any more worthy than my daytime gigs. It's just different. For me, writing advertising is trickier than writing a sonnet. Somehow I have to connect with a mega-audience whose only connection to me is a shared-humanity. And I have to do it in the very first sentence. Thanks to my years in art, I've learned some things about capturing audience attention, creating a sense of belief, and triggering imaginative thought. It's served me well.

To my way of thinking, I never sold out. I just got curious about the world beyond bohemia. I kept wondering what people actually did in those skyscrapers and shining glass buildings. And so I went adventuring.

Not everyone who wanders is lost.