After graduation, I spent the summer of ’69 working at the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research. I’d been playing in rock bands for money during my senior year and I think I needed a break, though I did play a couple of gigs to keep my hand in. I had no idea what I wanted to do, only that I was out of school and anything was possible. That fall, I moved back to Brooklyn and lived with my parents and younger brother for several months, then took over a friend’s apartment on 85th Street and Central Park West. Around the same time, I joined the stage band of Salvation, an off-Broadway musical playing at the Jan Hus Theater on the Upper East Side. Members of the cast included such unknowns as Bette Midler, fresh from Fiddler On the Roof, Barry Bostwick, Joe Morton, and a few others. After more than 200 consecutive performances, the show closed. We were told to report to the unemployment office. I took this to mean we had to register our status, and I was dumbfounded when I started receiving checks. This is too good to be true, I thought, but soon the calm demeanor of those other musicians and actors I saw each week at the unemployment office, somewhere in the lower 90s near a Schraft’s, reassured me that this was show business as usual.

A month or two later, I ran into Herbie Harris, who was an icon on campus, a West End regular, and a Sammy Davis, Jr. lookalike. I forget Herbie’s affiliation with Columbia, only that at one time he affected a cape and went around with a tall blonde waitress from the Gold Rail named Fiji. When he told me he had a gig at the Apollo Theater and needed to put a band together, I demurred. Sure, I said, why not. One thing led to another, and there we were, a few weeks later, doing four shows a day, five on weekends. I cannot begin to describe the backstage scene at the Apollo, but I’m working on a personal essay about it.

Several months later, I moved in with the woman who was to become my first wife, and took a job at the Harlem School of the Arts, a nonprofit run by Dorothy Maynor, who in her time rivalled Marian Anderson as a classical singer. I discovered the aptitude for numbers that to this day provides me with employment, parlaying a bookkeeper’s position into a budget analyst job at Model Cities in downtown Manhattan. In early 1973, I managed to network my way into the management training program at Citibank, a segue too bizarre to explain except to say it seemed like a good idea at the time. Convinced that “Woody” was too racy, I used my middle name. Ted Lewis became my banking persona, though I later learned that Woody was a perfectly acceptable nickname.

After finishing the training program, I took an assignment at the Wall Street headquarters in a commodities lending unit. The thrill of lending millions to companies speculating in cocoa and silver will always be with me. I saw the Hunt brothers in Texas personally corner the market. I saw the successors to Tino deAngelis (of Salad Oil Swindle fame) try to euchre the bank out of good money. At some point, I decided that I needed to be an investment banker, so I took a leave of absence and went back to Morningside to attend Columbia Business School. Somehow, I made the Dean’s List, the right one this time. I went straight through in a calendar year (aided by a few advanced standing courses from NYU taken at night while working) and received multiple offers from investment banking firms. I was even featured in a Fortune magazine article about the so-called new breed of MBAs. I accepted an offer from Salomon Brothers, where I arrived in the summer of 1977.

This was at the beginning of the firm’s ascent from its bond house roots. Salomon became a powerhouse in corporate finance, and I was fortunate enough to work on major deals such as Hong Kong Shanghai’s acquisition of Marine Midland, but I missed the entertainment world. I had done such a good job constructing Ted the banker that I’d ignored Woody the musician. I wanted to be closer to the media business. After a California vacation at the end of ’78, I asked for a transfer to the Salomon office in San Francisco, but my godfather, Jim Wolfensohn (later president of the World Bank) said I had to wait. I quit instead and took a position with Crocker Bank in San Francisco, a huge step down in the eyes of my Wall Street acquaintances, but I made it to the west coast. The Crocker job lasted a year. I was completely bored, despite my now-single status in the Bay Area. I took a job in LA as vice president of a subsidiary of MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios. Show business at last, I thought.

I lasted a year in that job as well. Hollywood, it turns out, was not the business for me and I was happy to leave. I took my last banking job at a small commercial bank in downtown LA, and after two years quit to attend a jazz conservatory, where I studied composing and arranging. It was a grueling year of writing orchestral pieces and conducting them under deadline in front of seasoned studio musicians who would refuse to play a poorly written part. To support myself, I worked nights as a security guard. Once, I was assigned to a post at Universal, to watch a building under construction. Early one morning, as I was about to leave my post, I saw Lew Wasserman, head of the studio, strolling the construction site. I prayed he wouldn’t recognize me because I had met with him in his office the year before. I don’t think he did.

When I graduated from the conservatory, I played music and wrote songs while I waited for what I was certain would be quick success as a film composer or songwriter. When this success was not forthcoming, I took a job as a consultant to Yamaha, writing sounds for their digital synthesizers.

This was the beginning of the career in technology I still have today. I taught myself how to program and wrote software that sold thousands of copies. After a brief second marriage, I left LA for New York. My father had died in ’89 and I went back to live with my mother and write a novel. During that time, I met my current wife and we moved out to the Bay Area, where I worked for several digital media companies writing music software. Our son, Woody III, was born shortly before we moved down to LA. I took a job with a digital video company, which folded around the time of the Northridge earthquake. We moved back to New York and I consulted for AT&T and Viacom, writing digital video applications and producing video game prototypes. At this point, late ’94, I had my first look at the Web. Here is real show business, I thought, and started one of the first Web sites in New York in early ’95. I opened an office on Broad Street, a block from the Stock Exchange, well before Silicon Alley became a buzzword. I had a catalogue of books on my site and met with Barnes & Noble. Web, schmeb, they said and threw me out of their office. I have many stories like that.

I wound up consulting for IBM, and then came on full-time to build some of their early Web services. In early ’96 I felt something was about to happen in Silicon Valley so I managed to transfer out to the Mountain View office of what was to become IBM Global Services. We put several large banks online, and Cisco recruited me away to help start their Internet Solutions group. I stayed there two years, then left in late ’99 to join the first of three digital media startups, commuting weekly to LA and enjoying a brief run of fabulous meetings and heady dreams. I also had my own company, and sensed in early 2000 that things had peaked. I wrote a few chapters of a memoir about my time at Cisco. Through a connection, I put it in front of one major agent in NYC, who said she almost took it and encouraged me to shop it around. I didn’t realize this was a positive development, so I shelved the book and went to work as a part-time consultant for a nonprofit. I started writing fiction again (after intermittent efforts during my banking days) and took courses at Stanford Continuing Studies. One of my teachers suggested I look into an MFA, and I applied to the Bennington low-residency program. I received the MFA in January ’07 and I’m at work on a novel. Currently, I work at Stanford as a technical product manager for interactive services. I live in San Carlos, about 5 miles from Palo Alto, with my wife and son. I’m sure I’ve left stuff out, but in the words of a better performer than me, that’s all, folks!