Raised a middle child in a middle-class family in Levittown, a suburb of Philadelphia notorious for mediocrity, Christopher Michael thought he had his proverbial rut carved out for him from the very beginning, daydreaming of greater things to come as he successfully assimilated into the blue collar American dream. Then on one fateful Memorial Day morning, reality came crashing down upon him in the form of a double homicide/suicide on his street. Even though the tragedy wasn't his own, these things only happened on television, and suddenly he felt thrown into a new world.

 

Eventually, the excitement waned and the daydreams returned, always threatening to turn into pipe dreams, but the compulsion had always remained for Christopher to capture the excitement of that tragic morning, so he wrote—a lot. The trouble was that he never sought an audience for his work, other than sharing it with a few close friends. His writing became deeper and more personal as he explored his inner self through theater, which abruptly came to an end when he took a job coaching gymnastics.

 

Having never had anything to do with the sport before, Christopher threw himself headlong into it, learning everything he could, not just about tumbling and balance beams, but about children and parents and people. It led him down some unusual paths when he started taking on autistic students before anyone knew what autism was beyond “Rain Man.”

 

Fifteen years later, Christopher decided it was time to return to writing and theater. He managed to crank out a terrific novel, but currently, the writing has had to make way for mail delivery. The cost of living doesn't pay for itself.