About Me
Actually I didn’t start out to be a writer or a storyteller – never even considered it. I was going to be an astrophysicist. Problem was I wasn’t good at math or physics. And the astro thing…so-so. But I could find the moon if someone pointed it out to me.
Growing up, people always said I was funny. I never intended to be funny, but sometimes I just opened my mouth and things came out. This usually it got me in trouble… or beaten up.
I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. In grade four or five my teacher stood me in front of the class.
“Groberman, look at you IQ score. You’re at the top of the chart. So how come your grades are mostly D’s?
“Poor teaching?” I offered.
That got me dragged to the principal’s office.
When he asked me to explain my outrageous behaviour I responded, “Well she asked the question.”
After that I spent so much time in the principal’s office there was talk of them providing me my own coffee cup.
The brightest spot in my school years was when my parents trundled me off to camp each summer. Trouble was I wasn’t a model camper, far from it. I was considered a troublemaker – go figure. But I excelled at writing and performing skits for evening programs.
In university I joined a fraternity. That required more skit writing which was an effective excuse for skipping classes. After failing the same math course three times I finally came to the realization a career in science was highly unlikely. I enrolled in the English Literature Master’s program in at Simon Fraser University where I met a bunch of other budding comedy writers. We’d all been on the path to other careers and even though none of us had considered becoming comedy writers we sort of fell into it.
I started clowning around with a guy named Colin Yardley who eventually became my writing partner. At lunch, and between classes, (and occasionally while we were teaching assistants, we wrote sketches for fun.
It dawned on me we might be able to make a few bucks selling comedy sketches to radio stations. One of our professors got us an introduction to the head of CBC radio in Vancouver. Luckily for us the guy had a soft spot for comedy and he agreed to give us a try out. This led to us creating a wildly successful comedy series called the Dr. Bundolo Show. And my career in writing and producing was launched.
As I was heading into my fourth decade writing, my daughter got a job with an airline, Suddenly I had an opportunity to skip work and go traveling. And that’s where Grobetrotting began.
FIVE BITS OF TRIVIA ABOUT ME:
1. I was a torch runner for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Games and only dropped the torch once.2. National Inquirer featured me in an article
3. To my surprise I was inducted into the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame.
4. To no one’s surprise I was told if he returned to Costa Rica he would be killed
5. I have absolutely no sense of direction