Music Performance Guest of Honor
Michael Longcor ~First Time Guest~
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-Robert A. Heinlein
Michael Longcor, by his calculation, has skills for 19 of the 21 items on Heinlein's list and has done a lot of them. He's a little evasive on the remaining two, but insiders speculate that, aside from dying gallantly, it involves diapers.
He's done a lot of other even more offbeat things, including riding a bicycle down a ski run, helping General Chuck Yeager park a vintage P-51 Mustang, donning Medieval armor to fight in the bruising tournaments of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and placing third in a cricket-spitting contest. There was also that rumored quelling of a riot at a New York City Star Trek convention while dressed as a Klingon and wearing garish toe socks.
His music is different, too. He writes and sings songs on subjects ranging from space travel to Native Americans, old veterans, vengeful seeing-eye dogs, vampires and pirates. His music has aired on regional radio across the U.S. and Europe and his skewed sense of humor has resulted in spots on the syndicated radio show, Doctor Demento (Michael has also accompanied the Good Doctor in his live stage show). He's appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's "Folksong Festival," hosted by Oscar Brand.
Michael's released over a dozen albums on CD, the most recent being Walking the Wilderness. Songs from Norman & Saxon, a collection of Rudyard Kipling's poetry set to Michael's music, were used in a BBC radio program on Kipling. He's a six-time Pegasus Award winner, including awards for Best Song and Best Performer. He also wrote and sings most of the songs on Owlflight, a companion CD for the fantasy novel by Mercedes Lackey. As a fiction writer, his short stories have appeared in three of Lackey's Valdemar and SERRAted Edge/Bedlam Bard anthologies.
Aside from writing and performing, Michael has been at various times an insurance investigator, employment counselor, fencing instructor, farm hand, security man for a belly-dancing troupe, news reporter, blacksmith, and Dorsai Irregular. He shares a 140-year-old farmhouse outside of West Lafayette, Indiana, with a variable number of pets, guitars, old motorcycles and sometimes even his wife.
