Life is full of ups and downs (or highs or lows) and there are many dates or anniversaries that can bring melancholy or smiles.
This week, I’m celebrating the 30th anniversary of a decision that changed my life.
As I drifted through my late-20s, I knew I needed to make a change in my life. I just didn’t know how to make it happen.
As my 20s were winding down, a weekend getaway provided the answer I needed and that’s when my life really started (and almost ended).
I made a move that introduced me to the big city and the world that George Bailey (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) never saw except in magazines.
I experienced the nightlife, I met a stalker that would almost kill me, I fell in love for the first time and I started my television news career.
KENTUCKY BOY
Except for four months in the summer of 1990 when I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I spent the first 29 years of my life in Mayfield, Kentucky, where I was born and raised (three of those years I lived 30 minutes away in Murray, Kentucky, where I attended Murray State University).
I was your typical southern boy — I went camping and fishing many weekends during the summer and I played basketball in the neighborhood (and I was pretty good).
Hunting was never my thing, but it really didn’t matter to my alcoholic, hateful father. Nothing was going to make me acceptable in his eyes.
Good thing, I was golden to my mother!
When I was in college and too young to legally drink, I started sneaking into the local gay bar in Paducah, Kentucky.
It was there, in 1986, that I met someone and started dating for the first time. While the relationship lasted four years, it was turbulent and not love.
The late 1980s were exciting, but, at the same time, unfulfilling.
I graduated college in 1989 and started applying for television weather jobs and the first station I sent a tape to was KTKA in Topeka, Kansas.
Could you just imagine me ending up in the same city as Fred Phelps and his cult, the Westboro Baptist Church?
Nothing happened in my career and I made the decision to move to Milwaukee in the summer of 1990. While it wasn’t a wise decision, I believe everything happens for a reason.
It was a short-term move, but it had its benefits: That college boyfriend and I broke up there after four years together and he moved to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to be with his grandparents and I met D’nell, the woman who would become “Mom” to me until she passed away in February 2009.
And, that fall, the NBC affiliate in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, offered me the evening weather position.
I considered the offer and declined it and I packed up the U-Haul to move back to Kentucky to be with my family.
In a sad twist of fate, my dear mother, Dessie, died of a heart attack at the age of 47, less than three weeks later!
I was miserable the next three years.
While dealing with the loss of my best friend, my mother (yes, I was a “Mama’s Boy”), I was already struggling with an eating disorder that started in 1986.
Once it gripped me, I was a practicing bulimic for eight consecutive years (until 1994) and my weight dropped from 169 pounds to 116 pounds!
With the ignorance and the stigma surrounding the AIDS epidemic, the 1980s and the 1990s were not ideal times for a gay man to be frighteningly thin.
However, there were definitely fun times in the early-1990s. I loved hanging out with my two besties, Steve and Dennis.
With Dennis, I went to Las Vegas for the first time.
And, we went to Cancun!
However, I was wasting away physically and mentally, and then in November 1993, my grandmother Helen (the last of my living parents and grandparents) died.
Taking care of her was really the main reason I was still in Kentucky.
While my sister, Tammy, was still there and we had grown closer after our mother’s death, she was young and she had her own family.
She’d be okay if I left Kentucky. But, I stayed and struggled through the 1993 holiday season and the winter months of 1994.
I often wondered if Reba McEntire was singing to me on her 1992 hit, “Is There Life Out There”?
NOW, here’s where life becomes more interesting and happier!
“TALES OF THE CITY”
I have my cousin and bestie, Steve, to thank for introducing me to Armistead Maupin, Laura Linney, Mary Ann Singleton and “Tales of the City”.
It sparked a “wanderlust” that gave me hope.
In early 1994, PBS started airing the English television series based on Maupin’s 1970s “San Francisco Chronicle” newspaper series of the same name. (The newspaper series was reworked into a book and the first one came out in in 1978. The latest, the tenth in the series, came out in early 2024!)
It’s about a group of San Franciscans at 28 Barbary Lane in the 1970s. But, it was Laura Linney’s Mary Ann Singleton that touched me the most and became my inspiration to make a “fantabulous” change in my life.
She was a small town girl (Cleveland, Ohio) that visited the city by the bay and never went back home.
After just working jobs to pay the bills, Mary Ann eventually became an on-air television personality!
MEMORIAL DAY 1994 CHANGED EVERYTHING
Months after I watched “Tales of the City”, Steve, Dennis, and I went to Chicago to party over the Memorial Day weekend and we had a blast!
At Gentry’s on Rush, the owner started sending over free cocktails, the men were very hot and the music was incredible!
It was there that I fell in love with “Dreams” by Gabrielle (one of my 30 favorites songs of my first 35 years — yes, I love lists and countdowns) and Sarah Brightman’s “Once in a Lifetime” from the “Dive” album!
It was also that weekend I decided to move to Chicago!
Six weeks later, over the Fourth of July weekend, Dennis, Steve and I loaded up the U-Haul and my chow chow, Keshia, and I moved to the big city.
It was the best decision I ever made!
NO MORE COUNTRY BOY SMALLTOWN FOR ME
In 1975, Glen Campbell sang “Country boy, you got your feet in L.A./But your mind’s on Tennessee”.
While that “Country Boy” might have been missing home, this Kentucky boy didn’t!
I started waiting tables at T.G.I. Fridays and happened to stumble into Charlie’s, a gay country bar. It became a big part of my life through the summer of 1996.
THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT
Living in the big city not only provided me a nightlife, but there were fine restaurants, history, culture, art, and movies at my fingertips I’d never see back in western Kentucky.
One of those movies came a month after I arrived and I got to experience the incredible Australian film, “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” on the big screen!
I’ve watched it many times over the years. I saw it again recently and it holds up well.
And, I still can’t believe how incredibly sexy Guy Pearce was in his breakout role as Adam/Felicia Jollygoodfellow!
MEETING THE PSYCHO
That summer, I got on the wagon and ate sensibly for several months and gained a few pounds.
And then, in October, I met a charming psycho on my 30th birthday. Dating quickly turned into a cycle of domestic abuse leading to a spring 1995 break-up.
That turned into a stalker situation and a near-death experience at his violent hands. Needless to say, I fell off the wagon hard.
This is a photo just after that final attack with my bestie, Steve, who was visiting at the time.
You can see how alarmingly thin I was, the gash on my forehead and the black eye!
Okay, it’s in the past so I can laugh about this now.
When I went to the emergency room that night, the nurse looked at me still with blood on my face, and asked “Which of you is the victim?”. Steve and I still laugh about it to this day. (That facility looked like Haddonfield Memorial Hospital in 1981’s “Halloween 2” and was staffed as poorly!)
FALLING IN LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME
Back to my story… at the darkest point in the spring of 1995, I met Christopher, started my longest relationship and I got back on the wagon.
Even after we broke up nine years later (2004) and I started another relationship in 2009, I still fought the food demons.
While there have been temporary bulimic lapses, I’m eating healthier and keeping the food down.
FINALLY, THE CAREER HAPPENED!
It was also during my first residency in Chicago that my television news career finally took off in the spring of 1996. (Spoiler alert: I left Chicago that summer and moved back a second time from 2002-2004).
That first job was as a part-time reporter at a PBS station in Merrillville, Indiana, about 50 miles from Chicago, for $5 an hour.
I was only there for about six weeks — just long enough to do a few stories to update my resume tape (with an old 1989 weathercast).
And, here’s a connection to Central Illinois before I moved here in 2020: My 1996 news director in Merrillville, Dave Benton, moved to Champaign in 2005 where he anchored news until his death in 2015.
My first real network-affiliated television weather job was in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1996. From there, jobs in Texas, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, Florida, and Minnesota followed!
This is from the Mansfield, Ohio, station, on May 4, 2000, covering the 30th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre.
SUMMING IT UP
My career has given me the opportunity to live in many places and leave when I wanted to try something new.
I stayed in Chicago for almost two years the first time before moving to Rhinelander to start my career.
It was an interesting two years — bartending at Charlie’s, meeting a psycho that tried to kill me several times, and then falling in love.
And, speaking of that country bar, it was there that I discovered an unknown Canadian singer and the song, “What Made You Say That”.
That popular Charlie’s song only made it to #55 on the country chart in the U.S. But, I loved the self-titled album it was from.
And, in 1995, America, Canada and the world would discover Shania Twain with her follow-up blockbuster, “The Woman in Me”!
THANK YOU ARMISTEAD & MARY ANN (LAURA LINNEY)
Armistead Maupin, thank you for giving this small-town Kentucky boy the motivation and the courage to move to Chicago just three months shy of my 30th birthday, just as you allowed Mary Ann Singleton to leave Cleveland, Ohio, for San Francisco.
And, just like Mary Ann’s career as a television personality, I fulfilled my dream of becoming a television newscaster and meteorologist!
And, by the way, Steve, Dennis and I are still friends across the miles. I got to see them last month in Clarksville, Tennessee.
THAT’S IT
With all the craziness in the world, make it the best in your little part of it!
Anthony
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