About Gorky
I was named after my grandfathers – Carl Brunzell and John Nolan. One I loved dearly and the other I never met, having passed long before I was born. To honor them, I like using both their names. That is why – since the mid-80s – I have stuck with the initials CJ.
I grew up in Milford, Connecticut. Though I assumed this was a small town, we actually had at least six high schools when I was growing up – three public schools, a girl’s school, a prep school and a technical school. There may have been others. Since the town was just off the turnpike, we had a large truck stop nearby. For years, I thought every town had a truck stop. My whole family came from Milford. My entire, immediate family still lives there. I do not live there. Though I love my family, I left Milford in many ways many years ago.
I started acting and writing in the 5th grade. Rather than writing a history paper, I decided to write a play instead. Therefore, I and a bunch of my friends got As for the performance of “Pocahontas and Captain John Smith”. A similar windfall occurred the next year with my classic “How Communism Came To Russia”. (Teachers love this stuff!) However, soon my focus shifted toward acting. At 14, I played the Stage Manager in “Our Town” and from then on performed in everything that came my way.
So, naturally, upon graduation with a four-point-something GPA – I went to theater school. This took me to Boston. I spent three years at Boston University before I left due to failing my Acting class. After leaving school, I starting working in Boston’s local theaters and was on stage it seemed like every night for three years. Acting! Learn by doing. Back then, the local theaters were Boston’s version of Off Broadway. Our shows were reviewed in every newspaper. Some were wild sellouts. Others… pretty dismal. But the people I worked with were talented and kind and taught me more than three years of intensive training at BU.
Through these people I met my wife to be, Kerry. She was working in the music business. We hung out in Irish bars. We laughed a lot. We fought A LOT! But it worked and has continued for the past 24 years. After a few years, we became pregnant. The night we found out, we were seeing Lou Reed at the Orpheum Theater and he must have known because he sang “Beginning of the Great Adventure” right to us. (Honest!) So – do you raise a child on low wages in an apartment outside of Boston in the late 80’s? While watching a car burn outside the crack house across the street – we decided “no”.
All Kerry’s people lived in New Jersey. So we loaded up the truck and drove there in one of the most horrific, one-shot U-Haul moves in human history (I will never forgive Hartford…). The only items that didn’t come with us were our cats – Bruce Springsteen and Emma Peel. They went to live with my parents since Kerry’s grandmother –who we were staying with – HATED cats. In a big way.
In October of ’89, Christopher Gabriel was born – smiling. He smiled all the time. To this day, he was the happiest child I have ever met.
Being the “breadwinner”, I began my 4 hour-a-day commutes into New York, doing the books for architects and designers (the closest I could get to the arts). Kerry worked weekends at a local rock ‘n roll radio station during the Grunge explosion. We moved three more times, which brought us back to our little town on the Jersey Shore.
Now, we both commute everyday into the city and my happy little son has become a mumbling teenager (right on schedule). I started acting and writing again about ten years ago, but it is very sporadic due to the commute and the lack of decent opportunities.
Now – this blog!
But who knows? “The Great Adventure” continues….