At the age of eight, he watched Kermit sing Rainbow Connection in The Muppet Movie and decided right then and there to learn that song and sing it in the Third Grade talent show. That led to lots of attention by adoring little girls, as well as music lessons. First there was violin, but auditioning with it so forcefully that the bridge popped out led the Dean to suggest "You should study percussion." Brian eventually learned to enjoy it. He had really wanted something melodic and portable. Drums were neither, but they did allow him to get involved with bands and theatre.

Then his family moved to San Antonio, Texas and experienced the cultural equivalent of throwing an octopus into the Sahara desert. Whereas Massachusetts public school assumed that children were basically good and gave them respect, freedom, and lots of artistic stimulation, this new public school believed that children were trouble-makers needing arbitrary discipline, rudimentary education, and that anything beyond that was simply not worth the trouble. Not surprisingly, the teachers were burnt out, and the kids suspicious of newcomers. History class involved books claiming Columbus proved that the Earth was round. Math class was just a big stack of problem sheets to be completed.

A year of Hell, until he courageously signed up for the talent show to sing "Pacman Fever." It was a huge success. (He had even built a full-size mock up of a Pacman machine out of a refrigerator box). Suddenly, all the cliqué-ey kids wanted to be his friends. Funny how that works.

Too late though, Brian was whisked away to a mostly-girls' school called Saint Mary's Hall. There he thrived with excellent Latin and Grammar teachers, plus exposure to computers, singing, acting, drumming, and other fun-filled hobbies. During the summer he joined a Summer Arts camp and met a fellow named Eric, playing his father in a musical about young videogame designers. These two would meet again decades later.

Junior High was great, but High School was back with the same 5th graders who taunted him before (they had since forgotten about his talent show star status). Although he tried band, lugging a bass drum turned out to be unexciting (not to mention hazardous to nearby flute players). So he joined the Latin club and found that for minimal studying effort, he could get rewarded with trips to Disneyworld and Chicago where they had competitions.

Being the first born, the strategy for getting into college was a work in progress. The advice given to his parents: "Go visit the places Brian gets into." He got into 5 and wait-listed on 1. Hmm. Ultimately it came down to a coin-toss between U. Penn and UT Austin Plan II. Penn won 6 tosses in a row.

But Penn was not quite the social playland he'd hoped of -- ironically, he ended up on a floor full of Texans after swapping roommates. It took a while to get a footing, but by Junior year he knew Communications was the ideal dual-degree with Computer Science (although many faculty and peers did not get the connection). He discovered Virtual Reality, both through Graduate classes in Computer Graphics (with classmate Nick Foster), and the proto-chat rooms of the day. During Senior year, a chance New York Times ad led him to see a Jim Henson tribute put on by his Muppet heroes. During Q & A, someone asked the question "How can we become Muppeteers?" Jerry Nelson (the Count on Sesame Street) belted out "COMPUTERS!" Jane Henson (more quietly) said "Cable Access." A major epiphany overtook Brian -- he was involved both in the computer graphics lab and also the Penn UTV station. He went back and within a week had his own puppet group, "Lifeformz."

Two years later, the show "Lifeformz" had won a Student Emmy award for Best Comedy. The group had performed live at the Small Computers and the Arts Network annual show. Brian had won a Youth Scholarship to attend the Puppeteers of America festival and had met Steve "Spaz" Williams, CG animator for Jurassic Park. That had led to going to Siggraph and applying for all the big animation firms (as well as a game company called Akklaim Entertainment), but getting job interviews with one over a meeting at a bar, and another from sitting next to a VP from Alias on the flight back. So while his puppetry continued, it seemed his immediate future was in computer graphics. Motion capture seemed like the perfect compromise, and he chose to work at Lamb & Company in Minneapolis.

Just before moving there, he attended the 1994 Henson Festival of Puppetry in NYC with his girlfriend. By some bizarre twist of fate, while waiting for the Jane Henson talk, Brian heard his name called out by a familiar voice. It was Eric! He was holding his acceptance letter for CTW (creators of Sesame Street). We were just entering the Jane Henson talk, and afterwards they couldn't find each other.

Years went by. Brian moved to Minneapolis, but after 8 months, he was laid off. But right around that time, he received an email from Emre Yilmaz, a Harvard grad student he had met via the alt.tv.muppets newsgroup who had a mutual interest in both computer graphics and puppetry. (Incidentally, another guy named Michael Dougherty on alt.tv.muppets wrote to him out of mutual interest in Muppets. At the time he'd just graduated from NYU Film School) In the email, Emre said he was now working at Brad deGraf's company, Protozoa, doing performance animation. He mentioned that both he and a guy from Akklaim working there remembered Brian's name, and wondered if he'd like a job! Perfect timing.

This ought to have been a dream job. They flew him out before the interview to attend a company party, where he met a guest named Trey Stokes and his future co-worker Bay Raitt. Everyone was friendly and cheerful, except for one person -- his soon-to-be supervisor, who looked at him suspiciously and barely spoke. That was just the first sign of trouble ahead.

After leaving Protozoa, Brian got sucked into the world of Dot.com's. A very exciting ride, full of insane employee turnover, poor management, lots of free meals, sessions of foozball, pool and Sega Dreamcast. But this did improve his IT scripting and process skills.

He had met a woman named Anita at the Puppets On the Pier store, and joined the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild. Here he made many friends including some of his heroes from the Muppets, Pixar, and animators from Sesame Street. In 1999, he and eight other Guild members went down to L.A. for Muppet auditions. All made it (plus 10 others, out of 300 who auditioned), getting to work with Elmo puppeteer, Kevin Clash, for a week.

Eventually, he worked for an enterprise software company for a year-and-a-half before getting laid off. The following year was full of travel, taking classes, meeting heroes, bonding with friends, and soul-searching as the economy turned sour. And he finally got to visit his long lost buddy Eric, who now performs Frank Oz's major Muppet characters. Eric invited him to visit a taping of Sesame Street.

In August 2003, Brian took an impromptu trip to Siggraph (his first since 1996). Since then, he's been working at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Epilogue

Eric Jacobson continues to perform Bert, Ernie, Grover, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy with the Muppets and Sesame Street.

Trey Stokes is now making independent films, and puppeteering on various movie, TV, and motion-ride projects. A while back, he was the animation director at Tippett Studio for the movie Starship Troopers.

Bay Raitt was the Lead Facial Animation guy for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings over at WETA Digital in New Zealand.

Karen Prell is best known for performing Red Fraggle in the 80's kids show, Fraggle Rock. But she joined Pixar to work as animator on Bug's Life, Toy Story II and shorts Geri's Game and For the Birds. Then she worked on those Blockbuster "Carl and Ray" rabbit & hamster animations over at Tippett Studio. Most recently, she performed with Henson puppeteers again on their live Improv show, "Puppet Up!"

Anita Coulter was a receptionist at the up-and-coming FX animation house, The Orphanage. Now she's one of the founders and stars of Swazzle. She and her husband Jeff Pidgeon (story maestro at Pixar) produce their own art and comic works.

Emre Yilmaz stayed on at Protozoa until its demise in 2000. He provided performance animation for Elmo's World and interstitials for the cable station Noggin. Now he works as a Character Technical Director at PDI.

Michael Dougherty co-wrote the screenplays for blockbuster movies X-Men 2 and Superman Returns.

Nick Foster won a Technical Achievement Oscar™ for his work on the water sequence in PDI's CG feature Antz. For a while he was in charge of all of their technology teams. He got Brian into the exclusive PDI party at Siggraph 2003, only to have him join Sony Imageworks... Ooops. Now he's helping to run a game company.