Someone has to be an audience for the play you people are always improvising. All of you trying for the center stage. All of you trying to get the audience to notice you, to declare you the star, so that when you die, the curtain will come down and the show will end. But it never does. No one was the star after all.
That’s the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings.
Which should imply that it has no meaning.
I mean my own life. I mean what I do.Orson Scott Card, EARTHBORN
There are knowers and there are doers.
Freon was born surrounded by small machines. Some of them gave him light, some gave him oxygen, and some had cold rubber gloves on that made him giggle. Only five years later he found that most small machines could be disassembled.
By the time Freon was ten years old he had taken apart a telephone, an alarm clock, a Zenith twenty-inch television, a typewriter, three bicycles, a lawn mower, an electric weed trimmer, a toaster, a milk shake mixer, a record player, an Easy-Bake oven and a 35 mm camera. He had burned out a chemistry set, and was about to start on a pipe organ when he was forced to move to the States and continue his reign of adolescent terror under a much lower departmental budget.
(When Freon was eleven years old he KNEW that liquid kerosene was a popular rocket fuel. Being eleven, he wasn’t allowed to purchase kerosene from the local Esso station, so he designed a rocket (built from soda cans) that would have refined the precious fuel from simple crude oil. Of course, he couldn’t find or purchase crude oil either. )
When Freon was thirteen he found that the controlled burn rate of model rocket motors and the nature of common christmas lamps combined neatly into pyrotechnics for an 8mm space epic which only cost him his entire model airplane collection, one smelly explosion at a time.
At fourteen Freon found out that LucasFilm wasn’t hiring.
When Freon was fifteen he blew his right eyebrow off during the test firing of a solid rocket booster made from bamboo and cordite. Thankfully, his right eybrow now nearly matched his left, which had been torn off by a mad squirrel monkey the year before.
When Freon was sixteen he discovered that the small machines around him could actually be put back together in working condition before he lost interest. This crucial point was never quite clear to him before he got under the hood of a car.
The next year his high school career advisor Mr Little, given all of the above, urged Freon to stay in school. So he applied to and attended Michigan State for the next two years.
During these two years three important things happened: Freon met his future wife, Shalla. Freon found out that the GPA for entering the School of Engineering was 4.1. Freon found out that you didn’t need a degree from MSU to be a mechanic. Many unimportant things happened since, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay. The most important unimportant thing was that he attended something called a science fiction convention (namely ConFusion) in 1989 and discovered something called fandom.
(The year before, Freon had graduated the one-year program at Motech as an auto service tech. Top honors. Somehow that equated to grounds for hiring him as a IS tech support staffer for a mortgage company in Bloomfield Hills. Okay, so this is the abbreviated version of ten years in the work force.)
Freon’s time in the cubefarm left him with both a cynical attitude and a laptop, which figured greatly in steering him into a stretch of writing which has yielded a stack of essays and a collection of short fiction that is almost as interesting as his real life.
He’d write about his real life, but he’d of course have to use a pen name.
Freon’s Penguicon bio*:
Freon has been in Michigan fandom for years. He is one of those fans who will work himself mercilessly. Not only does he work hard, Freon does his best to get others to enjoy fandom. He’s very very good at that. Freon is one of the people who makes you proud to be a fan… and a friend.
Several years ago, back when ConFusion was in Warren, Freon and friends orchestrated Radio Free ConFusion. That became RadioFreeFandom. RFF could therefore be set up at other cons - and it was. Imagine a radio show during the convention. That’s only a small part of RFF. It takes a lot of time and equipment to run a radio show, especially in an environment like a con.
He’s been a dueling DJ with Bill Putt. Even when he’s not officially Ops, somehow Freon’s always working in Ops anyway. Fixing a technical issue here, finding something for someone else over there, building marshmallow catapults… I (Anne Zanoni) affectionately call Freon a mad scientist. He writes prose and radio plays, does newsletters, fixes computers and cars and houses…
Like most authors, he loathes the telephone, but he loves his Nextel walkie-talkie.
Freon ran a very successful 2005 WritersWorkshop. Formerly it was known as the PenguiCon Writer’s Workshops. It has been renamed since its inception. Like Radio Free Fandom, this too can be shared to other conventions. Now “the Writer’s Workshop that we at the Sanctuary Press opened at Penguicon 3.0″ is the Sanctuary Press Writer’s Workshop.
Freon was also instrumental in keeping the final ConTraption alive and kicking. He’s the one who pulled people together in 2000-2001. It was worth it.
FREON is the fannish pseudo for a man named Michael A. Andaluz, a longtime fan, author and major participant in SF/F fandom in Michigan. He has been instrumental in organizing several lasting phenomena for Michigan Fandom including RadioFreeFandom, Sanctuary Press Writers Workshops, MichiganFandom discussion groups, and he has published both essays and short stories in Science Fiction’s Small Press both online and in print. His debut novella, THE JAM, appeared online as a Sept 11th tribute. He’s edited the Ann Arbor SF Association’s ‘zine, TANSTAAFL, and his first short-story collection, ASCENT STAGE I was released in 2004.
*and he knows the links are broken.
1-28 1995 Open Costuming and Mask Making - ConFusion 10101
For two hours our expert costumers Melody Asplund-Faith, Mike (Freon) Andaluz, and Lynn Jones will be available to assist you in bringing to life your character conceptions. We will have on hand a serger, hot glue gun, fabric, and, of course, duct tape.
1-28 1995 Computer Animation ConFusion 10101
Michael O’Connell and Michael (Freon) Andaluz show how-to tips on creating fractal animations.