I am a maker of stuff.

I was born in Northern California and grew up "in the middle of the woods" in Shingle Springs California.

My mother and father, Donna and Craig Milliron, found a house on a dirt road in 1990, fleeing the streets of Sacramento in favor of a work shed and livestock lifestyle.
While a local Mountain Lion made livestock unsustainable, Mom and Dad were able start
"Arrow Springs" in the shed.

The Family Business

Arrow Springs is a manufacturer and supplier of tools and glass for the lampworking community. Which doesn't mean a lot to a lot of people - so for context:

Lampworking, also known as flameworking, is a glassworking technique where glass rods are melted in the flame of a torch (usually propane and oxygen), allowing artists to create beads, sculptures, bongs and pipes and other toys, all using tools and gravity.

It's very delicate.
It's pretty industrial, a lot like welding. There's some dirtiness that comes with it.
It's very physics heavy with gravity, surface tension, coefficient of expansion, blah blah blah.
The people are unique.
The industry also makes bongs, beads are pretty big in alt/hippie culture, so that gathered a certain audience. There were seed beading and crafting hobbyists seeking more.
It's not a mainstream art form, you can't stumble on it in a craft store.
You gotta be a little off-axis to engage.

Pipe Makers, Cat Ladies, Dudes, Mechanics, LGBTQA+, all united around melting glass and making stuff.
The restaurant after a big gathering was full of people who wouldn't normally be together, except they had matching burns and could mutually gripe about fucking up their mandrel release. 

My mother was among them - she taught classes internationally, she chemically created her own line of glass (Bella Donna) which does some cool iridescent stuff because of its high silver content. She made some really cool bespoke pieces blending PMC, gemstones, and Pâte de verre.

My father is an old fashioned inventor. Most of the tools he has designed - of which there are hundreds - are from watching someone do something - and crafting a tool to help them do it better. He has a knack specifically around being able to visualize the mechanical function of an action - and simplify it to it's most reasonable solution.

Together they made waves in a burgeoning industry. Flameworking is just odd enough to be a pretty unique thing in any one community, and I suspect that with the emergence of common-use internet - these micro communities were able to grow pretty exponentially.

Arrow Springs grew, and I grew up around it. All sorts of people - mostly self proclaimed "odd ducks".
Really funky art. Couldn't talk about the artistic process with out including some sort of thermodynamic metric.

Also: Theater

I found theater at 11 - or rather it was assigned as a daycare and I happened to vibe with it.
Being socialized odd, theatre at least held space for the archetype. 
I grew up performing in a local community children's group, El Dorado Musical Theatre.
Similar to Arrow Springs, they were growing fast by providing much needed culture in the culture starved area of the rapidly developing El Dorado County.
I could flop around and make silly sounds and voices, and generally replicate the behaviors I had learned from Cat Ladies - and while it didn't get me social points - it got me laughs.

Then eventually, when I got taller, it got me social points.
I still didn't know what to do with them though.

Did a lot of shows, at one point in my senior year of high school I was either rehearsing or performing 5 shows. My grades were not stellar, and I didn't give a fuck about the institution. I thought degrees were dumb, and I didn't really care about home work. I did, however, get a scholarship of $100 for having the highest score in a district wide chemistry test (pSAT? I don't remember). I'm getting off topic.

Theatre was good, I felt obligated to be a good role model for the people that were younger than me, and I did my best to be consciously and unconsciously kind to everyone because it was a soft place for me to land, and I wanted it to be that way for everyone involved as well. I won 11 Sacramento Regional Theatre Alliance awards, called Elly's. 9 were for being a kiddo, 2 in the adult category as an actor.

I moved to Los Angeles with no real goals apart from being out of Shingle Springs. After a few months, I ended up in the chorus of a regional musical. From that I went to another and another. I signed with an agent in Los Angeles as a general local musical theatre male, and would bounce from district to district playing a few roles. I studied voice with Lee Coduti - and he got me singing well enough to join the chorus of Opera Pacific - an A house that complimented LA Opera in the Southern California Classical offerings.
That shut down (2008) right before my first contract, but it led to some bigger sings.

I never really had training or guidance business side of showbiz. I learned a lot more of how it worked when I worked for my talent agency.

They had a broken printer, I fixed it, and next thing I know I've spent a year in a converted home office with four chain smokers playing slots: actors resumes as the coins and Breakdowns Express the machine of Hollywood Payout dreams. 

I performed quite a bit, all things considered. Some was fancy. Some wasn't.

I did a show where I built the sets (Dorian Gray, Picture of Dorian Gray) and got to weep openly in front of an audience of 3.

I was a lead of an original musical written by Richard Sherman (Mary Poppins). That went so well, Martin Sheen came up to me afterwards to tell me he was flabbergasted that I was a young person and not a 50 year old Broadway pro. Maybe that was a backhanded compliment, I can't be sure.

I got my Equity Card in a blood and guts zombie musical that played a month at Edenborough Fringe.

I once flew to Atlanta to dress like a greek god and pass out beans in a supermarket for a failed social media commercial campaign.

I was an on-stage cover on an equity national tour of I LOVE LUCY Live On Stage.
I did my cover tracks more than my normal one, thank you paybump.

I got to New York and dropped into the hustle - I think the most interesting thing was what I didn't do: I once had a weekend where I had later-stage call backs for Blue Man Group and Phantom of the Opera. 

I was the voice of Walter the Walrus and Sir-Scoops-a-Lot in the Disney Jr. show P.King Duckling.

The last bit of theatre I did was being a vacation swing for the Off-Broadway production of SPAMILTON. 
Hi-ho an actors life for me.

I don't miss it over all.
I miss making people laugh and surprising people that I am not quite what they presumed.
I didn't like getting parts when other people wanted them. I didn't like not getting parts when I wanted them. I think the business is really two or three realities stacked on top of each other - interposed and in total opposition.

I'm glad I was never good at Show Business, I think it would have made a crummy person out of me. 

Also: Computers.

I built my first computer at 11 with the help of my father.
Computer trade shows were a big excitement for us.
My interest in tech, video games centered, was a big occupier of my time.
There were no neighbor kids "in the middle of the woods", so it was a lot of RPGs and other long-play solo adventures. I learned HTML and built websites on platforms like Angelfire. Comped things together in photoshop and paint. Wrote code in notepad like a cool kid.
I have built or worked on all of the PCs in the studio - and I have self taught every program I work in. The learning curve was big with no map, but I am now fairly confident that I can open any NLE or DAW and swing a club around well enough to produce a result. I am designing a few apps and would love someone to partner with on the endeavor!


Also: Painting

I started painting in earnest at 19. I had done some drawing as a child.
From 2007 to about 2011 I rendered about 400 canvases. I assure you - lots of trash.
When I was studying voice with Lee, I would walk from my apartment in Long Beach, California - over to his home a mile or so away. I'd sing for a bit, then paint canvases in the backyard. Lee and I had been defenestrated from our career paths when Opera Pacific closed, and his main gig had layoffs too. 
2008. What a year. SO we went into a bit of business - I would paint canvases and cards and stuff, we'd go to art walks, we'd make a couple bucks. It was enough to eat and occasionally pay my rent. 

I've sold about 350 over the years, the biggest ticket item maybe being a $1200 custom job some years back.

I do have canvases internationally, I have been in a curated art show, I've done the coffee shop artist wall thing a few times in New York and LA.

I once sold a canvas to a VP of Imagineering at Disney. He asked me to put together a package of my art to put through to the Disney fold - but I thought at the time I didn't want Disney to own my ideas.
Remind me to go lecture that 21 year old kid, as I believe he may owe me a 401k.

I once sold a painting to a woman who said she'd use it as a writing prompt for her students. It featured a really rough sad looking character and was listed for $65. I did $20 because she was a teacher and I thought that was so cool. I am really bad at business.

I had a man call me out of the blue and ask me how much he should insure a painting he received through a will. It was a big abstract piece that I was rather fond of too. I had to tell him "not much", but I did promise him that I'd work hard to make it worth something at some point.

Now - I do quite a bit - but nothing very lofty. I'm very in to painting partitions of cardboard boxes. I paint the installations of the studio. 

Someday though - watch out. 


Also: Music

I wrote 2 musicals: The Children of Gaia, and Tell Tale. When I was studying voice, I was welcomed to learn some music theory, and play with Lee's Finale Program if it was ever available. 

I produced Tell Tale at the Thespis Theatre Festival in New York in 2015. It was a finalist (Top 4 of 56) for best show, which was pretty dang cool. The piece is a small chamber musical for five folks, just set to piano, and explores the complex lives of those with and those take care of dementia patients. Bound by the plot points of Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Real toe tapper.

The other musical was a big socio-economic, post apocalypse, religious persecution, police brutality, recursive human conflict commentary that had lots of big songs and dance fighting and big orchestrations. The characters were named after Greek myths. 
It was wildly ambitious, but someday when I have the wealth necessary to produce large scale art - maybe I'll toss it up for revisiting. 

As it stands, most of the musical was lost. It was on a laptop that I had in a backpack while I was working a catering shift at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I was told that the CC footage that might reveal the theft was too expensive to pursue, as it was the back of the house and could have happened over a several hour window. I let it go, accepted that fate was fate, hoped the person who took it REALLY needed the money, and didn't get properly angry about it till years later.

That incident DID allow me to reassess what I cared about, what I could actually do, and what next steps would be be in building Milliron Studios.