Matthew Waynee

It's interesting to see, now that I'm a "grown-up", what the people that I grew up with are doing now. Some I have known since I was a kid have surprised me with what they decided to do career-wise and others that did not. Many have chosen to do some really neat things with their careers and an elite few were brave risk-takers that ended up breaking into their industry of choice and achieved worldwide notoriety and huge financial success.

One of those people is Billy Corgan (we went to middle school and high school together) of Smashing Pumpkins fame. He always was a little different, but a really nice guy and one that seemed to be very smart. I remember sitting next to him in an honors history class and being intimidated by his knowledge and ability to discuss a given topic - it made me feel so inadequate that it was one of the reasons that I dropped that honors class and switched to a regular class. I couldn't take the pressure.

Another is my cousin, Matthew Waynee. OK, he may not have the worldwide notoriety (yet) but we are still pretty darn proud of him and all he has achieved so far. He is just a normal guy from the midwest who was passionate about becoming a writer. He picked up and moved from Michigan to LA for graduate school and stayed in order to pursue his writing career. Recently he found some commercial success when he was able sell a screen play he wrote. Check out his website www.matthewwaynee.com or his IMDb profile here

Me, I'm just not a risk-taker. Even at a young age I worried about stuff like "how will I pay my mortgage?", or "um, I need to save for retirement/kid's college", etc. So I took the safe route in school, obtained a degree in finance and have been steadily working for the last 18 years (knock wood!). While I have a comfortable life I can't help but envy those that really put their heart and soul into something they loved and ran with it. They didn't know if they would ever find commercial success, but they did it because they loved their craft.

Anyway, back to the point of this post - Matthew Waynee! The screen play Matt sold was for the movie "Unknown" which was produced and released a few years ago - click here for a movie review . Hubby and I really enjoyed the movie and thought it was even more cool that Matt wrote it. But even if he didn't it was still a good story with lots of twists - you can find it on www.netflix.com.

Hopefully we will see more of him on the big screen or the NY Times best seller list. We'll all be even more proud of him, but deep down he'll always be cousin Matt to me - a genuine and down-to-earth guy whom I'm proud to have in my family.