Melchoir Datweiler was born in a town once called Datweil in the German part of Switzerland in 1703. As a young man, he emigrated to France to escape religious persecution and sailed to Philadelphia in 1736 for the same reason. He was what they now call "Amish." A few generations later, his great-great grandson, Gideon Detweiler, (somewhere along the way, the "a" became an "e") was a young man living near the hamlet of New Hampshire, Ohio, his father having moved the family from Pennsylvania to an Amish community in central Ohio. One day, as a young man, he purchased a pair of "English" shoes. His parents were upset that he displayed such disregard for their customs and told him to sell the shoes back. He refused. He was excommunicated from the Amish community he lived in. He chose his shoes over his family and religion. And a family legend was born. Some day, I will write a song or call a project "Choose the Shoes." I just need to.

He moved to New Hampshire, Ohio, and married a beautiful young lady named Melissa Carpenter. They had eight children, including my grandfather, Virgil Gaius, who came along in 1901. Virgil, in turn, met a rather short (4' 7") Irish-American daughter of immigrants, named Orpha Martella Bryan. They moved to the farming community of Tallmadge, Ohio, (near Akron) where they had eight children, four boys and four girls. My father, Donald, was the f
ifth child and fourth boy. On a blind date in 1959, he met a gorgeous young thing from the nearby Mantua, Ohio, and five months later married Mary Edith Taylor, despite the fact that her sister, Linda, flipped and totaled his prized 1956 Thunderbird convertible. They moved to lovely Marion, Ohio, famous for being the hometown of the worst president in the history of the United States, Warren G. Harding.

Several years later came me, the second
of four, after Karen, but before Kent and Kristen. They called me Kirk Taylor, Kirk because my mother liked the name and Taylor, because it is her maiden name. According to family legend, we are distantly related to William Jennings Bryan and Tom Selleck. Go figure. When I was 12, we moved out to "the country," seven miles away, outside the small town of Waldo, famous for fried Amish bologna sandwiches. Every small town in central Ohio is famous for, or has festivals for, some random thing, whether it be Bratwurst, popcorn, pumpkins, or... bologna.

After spending my freshman year at the Ohio State University (okay, the branch campus in Marion, affectionately known as "the twig"), I transferred to my parents' and older sister's alma mater, Kent State, where I graduated with a degree in telecommunications and minors in theater and dance. I sucked at dance. The only reason I minored in it is because a month before graduation, my advisor said I had enough credits in it to declare it as a minor. I only took a lot of classes because I wanted to be good. I sucked and still suck.

In the '80s, during college, I worked for two summers at an amusement park in Ohio called "Cedar Point." My second summer there, I worked in the same theater and befriended a fellow worker named Lisa Asher. Later that fall, sherecommended me for a job with a production company that she got a job with in Florida that cast for dinner theaters and cruise ship shows. For a year, I was a singing waiter in Orlando, West Palm and Vero Beach before landing the sweet gig as a boy singer in a 4-person revue, which did three shows on 7-day cruises out of Honolulu on the SS Independence for American-Hawaii Cruises. 23 years old, right out of college, in Hawaii for a year making $250 a week. I was in hog heaven.

One week, David Paich, the keyboardist and head songwriter for the band Toto, and his wife cruised with us. I hung out with him all week. He told me that I needed to go to Hollywood because I could be the next Michael J. Fox. I believed him. I moved to LA with my sister and our friend, Teresa Lee. I did singing telegrams. I took acting classes. I extraed my ass off. I had one line in a made-for-TV miniseries on CBS called "Guts & Glory: The Oliver North Story." When I saw it on TV, they dubbed over my voice with someone else's because I wasn't SAG yet. But it's definitely my hair. After about 6 months, I couldn't get back on a ship fast enough. Real life wasn't for me. So for the last 75 years, I have been at sea, working for Royal Caribbean International as a cruise director. When I became a cruise director at age 27 (and looking 16), I became one of the youngest cruise directors in the history of the industry.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always remembered what David Paich told me. In 1998, getting bored with spending my long vacations in Ohio, I semi-moved to NYC and began doing cabaret shows directed by my friend from Cedar Point, Lisa Asher, and musical directed by her husband, Jeff Waxman. I did two in 1998 called "The House is Rockin'" and "White Boy Sings the Blues!" Lisa had just released her first CD, the fabulous Let the Mystery Be, produced by Jeff in their in house studio and I figured, "I have $15,000 lying around, I wanna do one too!" So random white boy was born, and released in May 1999.

Five years in the works, I released my second CD, shades of wrong in March 2005. If I sell 3,500, I can record another one. Buy several!

Kirk will be on the Radiance of the Seas until June 20th in Hawaii and Alaska and hopes to be performing in "42nd Street" at the Palace Theater in Marion, Ohio in July.