I don't know about other people's doting parents, but there's not much in my background to show that I would go where I have.

In grade school I successfully lobbied my mother to provide class violin lessons, which a door-to-door salesman had been promoting.. I dropped out within six weeks.

No-one in our family was a musician; no-one in our family had ever shown any interest or talent as to the visual or dramatic arts. I was a surprise to everybody, majoring in art education in college, with a minor in theater. I really didn't want to be a teacher; I wanted to be a creative visual artist, but knew that you had to put bread on the table some other way. I realized during my last quarter of practice teaching, "I don't like this! I won't do this for the rest of my life!" A little later I came to the painful realization that my talent for painting and printmaking, while there, was too slim to justify dedicating my life to it, so I got out of that and into another line of work, relying on my undoubted word-and-language centeredness.

So neither family tradition, and exposure nor doting parents explains my own direction, first into art and theater, then magic (which is really a branch of theater), nor folksinging/guitar/banjo.

To quote the kind of Siam: "Is a puzzlement."

Dave Oesterreich