Adam Nelson began his career with an actor’s grant for gifted and talented children after an appearance on the Jerry Lewis annual Telethon. He was associated with some of New York’s most notable groups including Naked Angels, Cucaracha, Manhattan Class Company, Circle Rep, Arden Party and the Adobe Theater Company. In 1997, he was granted exclusive rights by the Lenny Bruce Estate, Bruce's mother Sally Marr, and producer Marvin Worth to produce and perform his one-person show How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: The Story of Lenny Bruce which moved Off-Broadway. Performances benefited God’s Love We Deliver and received critical acclaim from the Village Voice which praised his rendition as “restless, brilliant and hilarious” and TimeOut New York’s chief theater critic, Sam Whitehead, branded him “an impresario, a notorious theatrical madman.” After the tragedy of September 11th, he co-produced The 24 Hour Plays to aid The NY State WTC Relief Fund with a cast that included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosie Perez, Mary-Louise Parker, Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei, Kyra Sedgwick, Scarlett Johansson, Liev Schreiber, Robert Sean Leonard, Sam Rockwell, and more. He founded his independent creative agency Workhouse in 1999. Widely regarded for original thinking, imaginative ideas and strikingly unique hands-on approach, Workhouse brings a keen understanding and deep expertise to contemporary communications. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Nelson received the Clutch Global Leadership Award this year in recognition of his unorthodox industry command. In creating Boy Scout Nelson aims to honor the original spirit of those who continue to break revolutionary new ground through a wellspring of popular, untraditional, gay, and concrete culture. Listen and learn.
From the cave man to the campfire, the serenade of storytelling appears to be obscenely absent within the impatient immediate. In creating Boy Scout, I realized how very much I miss the art of listening. The bigness of biography. The siren of each soul singing. Tales of triumphs and tragedies. Of hopes and hardships. Of wants and desires. Of sound and fury.
I was standing before a masterwork of pointillism with my young son, explaining the genius strokes there at close inspection. As we moved further away, I described the greater mosaic. How it’s ultimate reveal allows for the breath and imagination of the artist’s palette. His grand design. The big idea. The work of art.
And it occurred to me that as I approach my 50th Birthday, what has often felt like the desperate walk of circles, may also reveal a greater stride.
These last couple of years have buckled my knees. Claimed combat over my spiritual center. And no matter how much I tax my mind, dive deep into the pulpit of prayer, starve myself for the sacrament of sanctuary, you cannot outrun fate. Greek myths catch every Achilles heel. In this arc of age, I realized that I might not have been walking at all. But rather enjoying a disharmonious ‘softshoe of the soul’ on ever uncertain ground.
This is the brutal beauty of storytelling.
Boy Scout illuminates the voice behind the words. The clarity of heart in the vocalization of each subject’s spirit. To hear passion and pride, nostalgia and need — this radio play return to truth — gives greater importance to the mystery of meaning, syntax, cadence and cool.
Listen and learn x
I was standing before a masterwork of pointillism with my young son, explaining the genius strokes there at close inspection. As we moved further away, I described the greater mosaic. How it’s ultimate reveal allows for the breath and imagination of the artist’s palette. His grand design. The big idea. The work of art.
And it occurred to me that as I approach my 50th Birthday, what has often felt like the desperate walk of circles, may also reveal a greater stride.
These last couple of years have buckled my knees. Claimed combat over my spiritual center. And no matter how much I tax my mind, dive deep into the pulpit of prayer, starve myself for the sacrament of sanctuary, you cannot outrun fate. Greek myths catch every Achilles heel. In this arc of age, I realized that I might not have been walking at all. But rather enjoying a disharmonious ‘softshoe of the soul’ on ever uncertain ground.
This is the brutal beauty of storytelling.
Boy Scout illuminates the voice behind the words. The clarity of heart in the vocalization of each subject’s spirit. To hear passion and pride, nostalgia and need — this radio play return to truth — gives greater importance to the mystery of meaning, syntax, cadence and cool.
Listen and learn x
Everything I never really wanted to know about Public Relations I learned from my father. He just wasn't around to teach it.
This shadowy figure from my conception, whose whereabouts remained a mystery, until one day in my late teens, my mother handed over a meticulously documented scrapbook that she'd apparently kept hidden throughout my childhood.
"Here," she said. "See for yourself."
I plopped down on our floral patterned couch in Houston, Texas and I flipped open the cover to find page after page of crinkled and faded newspaper clippings from the late 1960s.
One headline in particular caught my eye. "Long Island Dems Cry Spy -- With 2 Mata Haris!”
Nelson, a then 37-year-old, high-priced ($350 per week!) aide, had been accused of trying to bribe a pair of secretaries into giving up the goods. During the heat of the campaign, the Republicans were desperate to obtain a copy of the County Executive's budget prior to its release. A female staffer told my father that she could get him inside Nickerson's office after hours where he could take a copy for himself. But things didn't go that way and he was caught in the act.
The Newsday article went into great detail to describe what reporter Dick Zander had termed "The wildest cloak-and-dagger tale in the history of Long Island politics" and five years before the Watergate scandal:
(NEWSDAY, Oct. 27, 1967) Mineola--A political spy thriller, complete with a miniskirted courier, a phony document and a variety of other intrigue, burst into the Nassau County election campaign yesterday. Democrats accused a GOP campaign aide of offering $3,000 to obtain secrets about the administration of County Executive Nickerson. The Republicans vociferously denied the charge and countered that it was the Democrats themselves who had set the stage for the wildest cloak-and-dagger tale in the history of Long Island politics. Nassau Democratic Chairman John F. English publicly lit the fuse of the political bombshell at a press conference by producing two Democratic lady counter- spies. One charged that the GOP aide offered her $3,000 for confidential Nickerson documents and a key to the county executive's office. The other backed her story.
By evening's end, the GOP aide had quit his campaign post, his wife had been fired from her job as confidential secretary to a top Democratic county official, and District Attorney Cahn had pledged to look into the whole matter, after Election Day, to see whether any crime had been committed.
The spy story involved my father, William Nelson, the head of the citizen's committee for Nickerson's opponent, Republican Sol Wachtler. It turned on the question of whether (1) the Republican approached the Democrats to obtain information, or (2) the Democrats lured Nelson into seeking it. It included surprise after surprise, including an admission by Nickerson that he drew up, in his own handwriting, a partial and admittedly phony "budget message," which "recommended" a 16-percent tax increase next year, for the purpose of "feeding" misinformation into the espionage pipeline….
“I didn't have any qualms about it,” he was quoted unabashedly saying in the New York Times. "Hey, that’s just politics. This is as much of the game as anything else that goes on in a campaign,” he rationalized.
Naturally, he claimed that one of the secretaries had approached him first--“in desperate need of money,” he said--not the other way around. “I feel like I was sucked in and trapped” he explained.
Whatever the exact circumstances, the high-profile gaffe ultimately cost him his job. My mother, who at the time was his 28-year-old wife, had been ironically employed by the Democratic opposition, was working as a confidential secretary to the county clerk. She too was sacked.
“She can't be on both sides of this at the same time,” her boss had explained to the Times.
Their marriage wouldn't survive, though my father's James Bond-like libido may have had more to do with that than the political fallout.
Looming larger than the lurid text of this public spectacle, were the striking photos of the press-hounded couple.
I remember one snapshot in particular of my father holding the crook of my mother's back, pushing her from the doorway of some building in the Empire State, while hovering shutterbugs fired away. She was dressed stylishly in a short black number with pearls. My father, on the other hand, looked like a brow beaten Richard Nixon: sweaty, guilty, and gluttonous. Nothing truly says criminal more than bad photography.
I learned a lot about my father flipping through those clips. I realized that he was in the Army (dishonorably discharged). That he was something of an actor—with bit parts in Someone Up There Likes Me with Paul Newman and 12 Angry Men with Henry Fonda, to name a few–all prior to his finally achieving fame as a bumbling political saboteur.
But, more than anything, getting to know him through the press coverage of his pillory would prepare me well for a career in Public Relations.
Here you have a perfect case study in crisis management stemming straight from the family tree—a ream of rotten photographs, the enforcement of spin, and, in the case of my mother, what happens when you're dragged under the bus due to unkind association.
You would think that, after such a spectacular fall, my father would find himself confined to county lock up. Nope.
Mixed in the clutter of the same scrapbook was a bone-white press release on RC Crown Cola letterhead announcing some new fizzy initiative. The media contact? William Nelson, Director of Publicity.
It all seemed like a bad afterschool special.
From what I gathered from the accompanying photo, he spent a good deal of time publicizing RC Cola by setting up shop in grocery store parking lots, singing and dancing in garish barber shop quartet costumes with two hot blondes. It's a picture I wish I'd never seen, but there it was. It's as if your mother walked into the room and said, "I didn't want to tell you, but your father is Bozo the Clown. And here's his original outfit!” In this new role, I don't think it took him long to ditch the parking lot entirely for the comfort of those two blondes and a pay-by-the-hour hotel.
We were living in the developing hamlet of Oakdale, NY, where my parents were building a house from the ground up. A century ago, Oakdale was known as a place where men of great fortune and power built South Shore mansions, the most prominent being William K. Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. And here we came, scarred political scruff selling soda pop. But before the house was even finished, my father abruptly removed all of his belongings and informed my mother he was through. The marriage was over. And with that, he simply... Disappeared.
I was two years old when my mother realized that we were financially spent. We subsisted on welfare checks and food stamps over the next six years. My mother, descended from generations of Borscht-belt bubbes, was never one to back down. She enrolled in night school while raising three kids alone during the economically challenged 1970s. Soon after graduation, she accepted a teaching position across the country. In 1979, we sold our house, loaded-up the station wagon and transplanted to the wild, wild west of Houston, Texas. It wasn't the best moment for a frizzy-headed Jewish kid from the land of pickles and coleslaw to relocate to a place where Rodeo was a junior high school elective. I, elected out.
I moved to Philadelphia immediately after graduation, enrolling at the University of the Arts, where I majored in, of all things, theater. Somewhere up in Olympus, a Greek chorus was foretelling that which was yet to come.
One weekend, my mother came to visit and we decided to take in a show. Flipping through New York magazine, I stumbled upon a listing for a riveting new production then running at the dilapidated Hudson Guild Theater. Almost Perfect concerned a philandering husband who leaves his wife. The production, directed by legendary screen star Geraldine Fitzgerald, featured Cathy Lee Crosby (from the TV show That’s Incredible), Ethan Phillips (from the hit TV show Benson) and Bill Nelson.
As a fledgling actor myself, I knew that Actor's Equity had one main rule: only one actor can have one name. Therefore, it only made sense that this Bill Nelson might very well be my father. My mother and I decided to drive to New York to see for ourselves.
We entered the theater just as the matinee was ending. I located the stage door and walked into the nearest dressing room. There, surrounded by actor scrum, was the bulbous brute himself. Eager for gratitude, the performers invited me in. An uncomfortable silence ensued. They begin to turn to one another asking: “Who is this guy?” I looked squarely upon the mountain of man before me, locking eyes, and answered: “I'm your son."
Even to television actors, it was a bad scene.
Everyone split but Bill. He sighed and scratched at the side of his neck, looking down at the floor. "Yeah, there's some things that we need to talk about," he said. "Who's here? Your mother?" I nodded. He sighed. "I'll meet you out front," he said.
At the bar around the corner, I ordered a bottle of whiskey even though I was underage. From the end of the table, I watched my mother and my father fight it out over 30 years of unresolved tension. After they were spent, my father turned to me and said, "So… what do you think?" I studied my father as he cried.
He quickly composed himself, "You know, your brother, Gil, would love to meet you,” he said. “He's written poems about you. Your sister Stephanie would also love to meet you." At this point, I realized we had become the friggin' Brady Brunch.
We went outside. Amid the chill, the space between us, the awkward silence. "I'll call you," he said. "We'll write, talk…whatever."
A few months later, he did call. He had an urgent request. "So, I'm doing this movie," with Robin Williams and Tim Robbins…."
Directed by Roger Donaldson, with an all-star cast also including Fran Drescher, Annabella Sciorra, Lori Petty, and Elaine Stritch, Cadillac Man was billed as “One disastrous week in the life of a Queens car salesman who's involved with three women, and is in jeopardy of losing his job, sanity, and life.” My assumption was that dad had been cast to type. But later I realized he wasn’t playing the car salesman but the owner of the used car dealership, Big Jack Turgeon. "I'd love for you to swing by the set," he said. "It'd be good to see you."
Apparently, my mother had told him that I was on my way to Yale University for the summer to study in their theater arts program. He asked me if I could make a slight detour en route and come visit.
It was on eve of my birthday. My girlfriend at the time decided to accompany me on the journey. On the train, she gifted me with a handsome vintage Yale baseball jersey, one she said had once belonged to U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. I have no idea who sold her that line of bullshit, but she was really proud of her purchase and insisted that I wear it.
I was possessed with a mixture of excitement, powered by the locomotives lullaby as she steamed toward New York City. But I also had a profound sense of dread about what might await me upon arrival at Grand Central Station. We eventually made our way to the Queens where the cast was filming at a local car dealership. “Adam!” My father took me by the shoulders, touring me around the set and introducing me to everyone in range, exclaiming, "This is my son Adam; he's going to Yale tomorrow!" as he pointed to the letters upon my chest.
He turned to my girlfriend. “Do you mind if I talk to Adam for a moment?” He ditched her at craft services, spiriting me away to the confines of his trailer. “So, you like the set?” he asked. Better than the trailer, I thought: plastic furniture, florescent lights, Styrofoam cups. All the glamour of being on a Hollywood film was drained by the grim reality of a cruddy backstage, with its cardboard motif, folding chairs, card tables, and port-o-potties. But what did I expect? It was a used car dealership.
My father asked me to take a seat and he began his soliloquy:
“I made some good money on this movie—about two hundred grand—but --- I blew it all,” he said with a sniffle, “on cocaine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Did you know,” he went on, “on every film, you've got to get a physical? So, I went to the doctor. Well, damned if my kidneys haven’t turned to shit.”
Now, I was stultified.
“I was talking to your mother,” he continued. “Did you know? You and I, we're the same blood type. Son, I need a big favor. Think you could spare me a kidney?”
In one moment, I had the full preparation for a life in celebrity publicity.
What follows is the creation of Boy Scout magazine. It’s about loyalty in a post-loyal culture, about service and pride, about acting out, about message and medium. But most of all it’s about being beaten, bruised and bloody, flat out on the floor and still having the steam to stand up on your own two feet and shamelessly ask, “So... is this going to be in the print edition or only online?”
To learn more about Adam Nelson, visit him here
*Story from Art Pimp written in collaboration with Chris Shott
This shadowy figure from my conception, whose whereabouts remained a mystery, until one day in my late teens, my mother handed over a meticulously documented scrapbook that she'd apparently kept hidden throughout my childhood.
"Here," she said. "See for yourself."
I plopped down on our floral patterned couch in Houston, Texas and I flipped open the cover to find page after page of crinkled and faded newspaper clippings from the late 1960s.
One headline in particular caught my eye. "Long Island Dems Cry Spy -- With 2 Mata Haris!”
Nelson, a then 37-year-old, high-priced ($350 per week!) aide, had been accused of trying to bribe a pair of secretaries into giving up the goods. During the heat of the campaign, the Republicans were desperate to obtain a copy of the County Executive's budget prior to its release. A female staffer told my father that she could get him inside Nickerson's office after hours where he could take a copy for himself. But things didn't go that way and he was caught in the act.
The Newsday article went into great detail to describe what reporter Dick Zander had termed "The wildest cloak-and-dagger tale in the history of Long Island politics" and five years before the Watergate scandal:
(NEWSDAY, Oct. 27, 1967) Mineola--A political spy thriller, complete with a miniskirted courier, a phony document and a variety of other intrigue, burst into the Nassau County election campaign yesterday. Democrats accused a GOP campaign aide of offering $3,000 to obtain secrets about the administration of County Executive Nickerson. The Republicans vociferously denied the charge and countered that it was the Democrats themselves who had set the stage for the wildest cloak-and-dagger tale in the history of Long Island politics. Nassau Democratic Chairman John F. English publicly lit the fuse of the political bombshell at a press conference by producing two Democratic lady counter- spies. One charged that the GOP aide offered her $3,000 for confidential Nickerson documents and a key to the county executive's office. The other backed her story.
By evening's end, the GOP aide had quit his campaign post, his wife had been fired from her job as confidential secretary to a top Democratic county official, and District Attorney Cahn had pledged to look into the whole matter, after Election Day, to see whether any crime had been committed.
The spy story involved my father, William Nelson, the head of the citizen's committee for Nickerson's opponent, Republican Sol Wachtler. It turned on the question of whether (1) the Republican approached the Democrats to obtain information, or (2) the Democrats lured Nelson into seeking it. It included surprise after surprise, including an admission by Nickerson that he drew up, in his own handwriting, a partial and admittedly phony "budget message," which "recommended" a 16-percent tax increase next year, for the purpose of "feeding" misinformation into the espionage pipeline….
“I didn't have any qualms about it,” he was quoted unabashedly saying in the New York Times. "Hey, that’s just politics. This is as much of the game as anything else that goes on in a campaign,” he rationalized.
Naturally, he claimed that one of the secretaries had approached him first--“in desperate need of money,” he said--not the other way around. “I feel like I was sucked in and trapped” he explained.
Whatever the exact circumstances, the high-profile gaffe ultimately cost him his job. My mother, who at the time was his 28-year-old wife, had been ironically employed by the Democratic opposition, was working as a confidential secretary to the county clerk. She too was sacked.
“She can't be on both sides of this at the same time,” her boss had explained to the Times.
Their marriage wouldn't survive, though my father's James Bond-like libido may have had more to do with that than the political fallout.
Looming larger than the lurid text of this public spectacle, were the striking photos of the press-hounded couple.
I remember one snapshot in particular of my father holding the crook of my mother's back, pushing her from the doorway of some building in the Empire State, while hovering shutterbugs fired away. She was dressed stylishly in a short black number with pearls. My father, on the other hand, looked like a brow beaten Richard Nixon: sweaty, guilty, and gluttonous. Nothing truly says criminal more than bad photography.
I learned a lot about my father flipping through those clips. I realized that he was in the Army (dishonorably discharged). That he was something of an actor—with bit parts in Someone Up There Likes Me with Paul Newman and 12 Angry Men with Henry Fonda, to name a few–all prior to his finally achieving fame as a bumbling political saboteur.
But, more than anything, getting to know him through the press coverage of his pillory would prepare me well for a career in Public Relations.
Here you have a perfect case study in crisis management stemming straight from the family tree—a ream of rotten photographs, the enforcement of spin, and, in the case of my mother, what happens when you're dragged under the bus due to unkind association.
You would think that, after such a spectacular fall, my father would find himself confined to county lock up. Nope.
Mixed in the clutter of the same scrapbook was a bone-white press release on RC Crown Cola letterhead announcing some new fizzy initiative. The media contact? William Nelson, Director of Publicity.
It all seemed like a bad afterschool special.
From what I gathered from the accompanying photo, he spent a good deal of time publicizing RC Cola by setting up shop in grocery store parking lots, singing and dancing in garish barber shop quartet costumes with two hot blondes. It's a picture I wish I'd never seen, but there it was. It's as if your mother walked into the room and said, "I didn't want to tell you, but your father is Bozo the Clown. And here's his original outfit!” In this new role, I don't think it took him long to ditch the parking lot entirely for the comfort of those two blondes and a pay-by-the-hour hotel.
We were living in the developing hamlet of Oakdale, NY, where my parents were building a house from the ground up. A century ago, Oakdale was known as a place where men of great fortune and power built South Shore mansions, the most prominent being William K. Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. And here we came, scarred political scruff selling soda pop. But before the house was even finished, my father abruptly removed all of his belongings and informed my mother he was through. The marriage was over. And with that, he simply... Disappeared.
I was two years old when my mother realized that we were financially spent. We subsisted on welfare checks and food stamps over the next six years. My mother, descended from generations of Borscht-belt bubbes, was never one to back down. She enrolled in night school while raising three kids alone during the economically challenged 1970s. Soon after graduation, she accepted a teaching position across the country. In 1979, we sold our house, loaded-up the station wagon and transplanted to the wild, wild west of Houston, Texas. It wasn't the best moment for a frizzy-headed Jewish kid from the land of pickles and coleslaw to relocate to a place where Rodeo was a junior high school elective. I, elected out.
I moved to Philadelphia immediately after graduation, enrolling at the University of the Arts, where I majored in, of all things, theater. Somewhere up in Olympus, a Greek chorus was foretelling that which was yet to come.
One weekend, my mother came to visit and we decided to take in a show. Flipping through New York magazine, I stumbled upon a listing for a riveting new production then running at the dilapidated Hudson Guild Theater. Almost Perfect concerned a philandering husband who leaves his wife. The production, directed by legendary screen star Geraldine Fitzgerald, featured Cathy Lee Crosby (from the TV show That’s Incredible), Ethan Phillips (from the hit TV show Benson) and Bill Nelson.
As a fledgling actor myself, I knew that Actor's Equity had one main rule: only one actor can have one name. Therefore, it only made sense that this Bill Nelson might very well be my father. My mother and I decided to drive to New York to see for ourselves.
We entered the theater just as the matinee was ending. I located the stage door and walked into the nearest dressing room. There, surrounded by actor scrum, was the bulbous brute himself. Eager for gratitude, the performers invited me in. An uncomfortable silence ensued. They begin to turn to one another asking: “Who is this guy?” I looked squarely upon the mountain of man before me, locking eyes, and answered: “I'm your son."
Even to television actors, it was a bad scene.
Everyone split but Bill. He sighed and scratched at the side of his neck, looking down at the floor. "Yeah, there's some things that we need to talk about," he said. "Who's here? Your mother?" I nodded. He sighed. "I'll meet you out front," he said.
At the bar around the corner, I ordered a bottle of whiskey even though I was underage. From the end of the table, I watched my mother and my father fight it out over 30 years of unresolved tension. After they were spent, my father turned to me and said, "So… what do you think?" I studied my father as he cried.
He quickly composed himself, "You know, your brother, Gil, would love to meet you,” he said. “He's written poems about you. Your sister Stephanie would also love to meet you." At this point, I realized we had become the friggin' Brady Brunch.
We went outside. Amid the chill, the space between us, the awkward silence. "I'll call you," he said. "We'll write, talk…whatever."
A few months later, he did call. He had an urgent request. "So, I'm doing this movie," with Robin Williams and Tim Robbins…."
Directed by Roger Donaldson, with an all-star cast also including Fran Drescher, Annabella Sciorra, Lori Petty, and Elaine Stritch, Cadillac Man was billed as “One disastrous week in the life of a Queens car salesman who's involved with three women, and is in jeopardy of losing his job, sanity, and life.” My assumption was that dad had been cast to type. But later I realized he wasn’t playing the car salesman but the owner of the used car dealership, Big Jack Turgeon. "I'd love for you to swing by the set," he said. "It'd be good to see you."
Apparently, my mother had told him that I was on my way to Yale University for the summer to study in their theater arts program. He asked me if I could make a slight detour en route and come visit.
It was on eve of my birthday. My girlfriend at the time decided to accompany me on the journey. On the train, she gifted me with a handsome vintage Yale baseball jersey, one she said had once belonged to U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. I have no idea who sold her that line of bullshit, but she was really proud of her purchase and insisted that I wear it.
I was possessed with a mixture of excitement, powered by the locomotives lullaby as she steamed toward New York City. But I also had a profound sense of dread about what might await me upon arrival at Grand Central Station. We eventually made our way to the Queens where the cast was filming at a local car dealership. “Adam!” My father took me by the shoulders, touring me around the set and introducing me to everyone in range, exclaiming, "This is my son Adam; he's going to Yale tomorrow!" as he pointed to the letters upon my chest.
He turned to my girlfriend. “Do you mind if I talk to Adam for a moment?” He ditched her at craft services, spiriting me away to the confines of his trailer. “So, you like the set?” he asked. Better than the trailer, I thought: plastic furniture, florescent lights, Styrofoam cups. All the glamour of being on a Hollywood film was drained by the grim reality of a cruddy backstage, with its cardboard motif, folding chairs, card tables, and port-o-potties. But what did I expect? It was a used car dealership.
My father asked me to take a seat and he began his soliloquy:
“I made some good money on this movie—about two hundred grand—but --- I blew it all,” he said with a sniffle, “on cocaine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Did you know,” he went on, “on every film, you've got to get a physical? So, I went to the doctor. Well, damned if my kidneys haven’t turned to shit.”
Now, I was stultified.
“I was talking to your mother,” he continued. “Did you know? You and I, we're the same blood type. Son, I need a big favor. Think you could spare me a kidney?”
In one moment, I had the full preparation for a life in celebrity publicity.
What follows is the creation of Boy Scout magazine. It’s about loyalty in a post-loyal culture, about service and pride, about acting out, about message and medium. But most of all it’s about being beaten, bruised and bloody, flat out on the floor and still having the steam to stand up on your own two feet and shamelessly ask, “So... is this going to be in the print edition or only online?”
To learn more about Adam Nelson, visit him here
*Story from Art Pimp written in collaboration with Chris Shott
