INTRODUCTION

Hallelujah, I have finished writing my book! Wow, that was a lot of work. But finally, after all these months of toiling away at my computer, I am ready to begin. I am writing this introduction as an afterthought because when I started writing this tome, I had no idea what I was going to say, so I had no idea what I would be introducing. But now that I have completed this epic odyssey, I feel, at long last, prepared to write the first page. Isn’t that the way it always is, in everything you do in life? In life itself? Just when you finally figure it out, it’s over. Intelligent design, my ass. First of all, thank you for buying or stealing my book. It has been quite a challenge writing it, and knowing that you care what I have to say enough to spend your hard-earned money on it, or even more impressively, risk jail time to read it, means the world to me. Despite the fact that the protagonist of this story leaves something to be desired, I hope you find a connection with this magnificent journey I have been on.

I have had a job since I was eight years old and if I don’t have work to do, I go out of my mind. I need to be productive, and so I couldn’t have chosen a worse profession than acting, where the average annual work schedule is on par with that of a shopping mall Santa. I have learned to make my own work. I wake up every morning with the same question—“What am I going to make today?” Some days it’s money. I had a family very young and have been driven most of my life to make money and provide for them. But my need to create is something else and borders on psychotic. It really doesn’t matter whether I am making a new TV show, a new sculpture, or a new chicken coop; as long as I feel like I’ve made something that day, I sleep well at night.

I hit sixty-five this year. That was a kick in the balls. My oldest child is forty-one, and I am a grandpa five times over. What the fuck? I’ve always been “the kid,” the precocious teenager who moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old, at least ten years younger than all of my friends, the youngest dad at all my kids’ school events. But you can’t hide from sixty-five. No matter how I look at it, that circle-of-life conveyor belt keeps moving me along and there are fewer and fewer people in front of me every day, and so many more behind. I started hearing a voice in my head saying, “Whoa! Stop! Maybe it is time to stop making things for a minute and take a look at the crazy journey you have been on. It really could end at any time, and it would be a shame not to have taken the opportunity to try to gain some meaning and understanding of it all.” So I started a list (which is one of my favorite things to do) of my life—What is the first thing I remember? What is the second? It was revelatory to lay it all out in front of myself and see how A led to B and B led to C. Of course, being me, I had to make a job out of it, so I decided to shape it into a book for me and my family, turning that list into chapter headings and doing a deep dive into each one. It settled my soul to put a little order in to my chaotic history and remember not only this journey of jobs, people, and events, but the feelings and emotions and thoughts that went with them. Being an admirer of good storytelling, I tried my best to be entertaining and funny, to find a moral to the story and share a little bit of knowledge or dare I say, wisdom, with the reader.

When Start Publishing said they wanted to put it into print, I jumped at the chance to do the work and try to actually write a book. I have been sitting Home and Alone for months now, and frankly, I am sick of myself. I hope you enjoy getting to know me, but I would recommend not reading this book more than twice because after that, I really start to get on your nerves. There has been no ghostwriter. I have zero typing skills, minimal computer skills, and a well-below-average knowledge of grammar, so it has been quite an English lesson for this high school drop-out as well (although I think I finally get where the punctuation goes when using a parenthesis.). I didn’t want to pander to the reader by including too much stuff about celebrities, but my wife pointed out that I have been acting in the movies since I was twenty, so these people are not really celebrities, just my friends and work-mates, and a large part of my life. Besides, none of these people think of themselves as celebrities. They are living inside their own heads just like the rest of us. Managing the power and ridiculousness of celebrity is something no one is trained for, and I have found it will reveal who you truly are, in a unique and distorted way. (And it sure does help when it comes to getting your book published.)

My personal mission of “Empowering Young People” has also been the message in some of my biggest family films, like the Home Alone movies, Rookie of the Year, and Bushwhacked, a message I believe in because I was an empowered kid myself, finding my own unique path to a well-lived life. There is so much potential in each child—even artistic, dyslexic, little hippies like me—and our goal as parents and mentors is to help each kid discover who they are and how to make a life for themselves doing something they love and are good at. I am the living embodiment of that successful strategy, and my hope is that by sharing my story, I can inspire the feeling in the reader that, “Hell, if this guy can build a successful life, anyone can.”

I have found myself in extraordinary places I had no place being in, working with extraordinary people who I had no business working with. I became a father when I was still a kid. I spent years making a salary of forty-five dollars a week and years making a salary of forty-five thousand dollars a week. I have found spectacular artistic satisfaction in my life in the movies, theater, and television, but have also found deep artistic satisfaction in my life as a bronze sculptor, cattle rancher, and lemon farmer, and mostly, in the creation of my family. I have tried to serve my community to the best of my abilities—coached my kids’ sports teams, taught Media Literacy at the high school, and started a Boys & Girls Club which continues to serve thousands of kids to this day. I visited our troops in Baghdad, Iraq, during the chaos at the beginning of that horrible war. President Obama awarded me our nation’s highest honor for volunteerism, one of the greatest honors of my life. My forty-five-year-long marriage, the incredible success of my children and now five magnificent grandchildren—I have packed a lot into my sixty-five years.

I am hoping the book gives people some laughs and they have fun going backstage with me on some of the movies, TV shows, and plays I have worked on. I try to convey my evolution from an actor into a writer and director. I share my development as a sculptor and why it is so important to me, as well as the importance of the work I have done with Boys & Girls Clubs, to whom I am giving all of the royalties from this book. I track my family and the amazing journey of parenting, as well as the peace and meaning I have discovered by becoming a real city slicker living on our farm and ranch. And I show off my skills at using a thesaurus, finding incredible alternatives to the word “incredible.”

So no more dawdling. Let’s get to it. It is time for you to see what Daniel Stern is really like when he is Home and Alone.