Atypical Transit

Several years ago, a writer for ESPN dubbed that special place in the American pop culture landscape where seemingly anything can happen, “The Tyson Zone,” a reference to the unpredictable and unexplainable nature of the one and only Mike Tyson. The writer argued that if one could make up almost any story about a certain athlete, or more generally a famous person, and have it be believed by most audiences - “Athlete X owns 400 unicorns!” or “Celebrity Y carries uncooked ground beef wherever she goes!” - that person inhabits “The Tyson Zone.” For most of her life, Kimberly Dawn Neumann may just have been the Tyson Zone’s proudest citizen but now she’s moving on and moving out.

In her professional life, Neumann boasts an impressive hat collection: her first love is dancing and she’s been featured in Broadway and off-Broadway shows like Annie Get Your Gun and Finian’s Rainbow. But she’s also a respected journalist, offering dating and relationship advice through her “Dating Diva Daily” site and other sites, like Match.com, and racking up over sixteen million hits in the past two years. And she’s also a fitness instructor. And a fortune teller. And a model. And a trapeze artist. And, on one fateful occasion, a boxer.

Our interview begins with a joke about Richard Nixon’s infamous “lost” eighteen and a half minutes of audio tape, an odd start to be sure, but it’s here that we get our first - and definitely not our last - of Neumann’s expansive, infectious and totally uncontrived laughter, laughter that is at once full-blooded and effortless. Packed into a tiny frame, Neumann’s personality escapes from every pore. Now in her early forties... ish, Neumann was raised the daughter of an aerospace engineer and a teacher and attended the University of Maryland, where she studied journalism. What first appears to be a fairly typical upbringing, in fact sowed the seeds for Neumann’s future “atypical transit.”

“The discipline that I learned at a very early age [through dance] is why I think I’m able to succeed as a multi-freelancer. I learned how to manage my time as a very little girl.” When asked about her aspirations growing up, she quips, “my first dream when I was a little girl was to be a paleontologist, but that didn’t happen, but dancer and journalist did happen. I had my first journal at six-years-old and I still have it. ’Today, Shannon gave me twelve cents for no reason,’ was the first entry.”

Two knee surgeries, a broken hand and countless other confounding events have pushed and pulled and diverted and rerouted Neumann’s path but each setback has provided her with even more tools to do what she does best: communicate. The knee injuries and subsequent recoveries that temporarily robbed her of her ability to dance eventually yielded two books. “Dance was my soul and suddenly I didn’t have that outlet and my release had been taken away from me.” She also broke her hand delivering a (scripted) uppercut a little too close to her co-star’s jaw, causing her to miss opening night. “I clobbered the hell out of him. Took. Him. Down,” she states proudly.

In describing her recent change in approach, Neumann notes that “in the last few years, I’ve kind of reached my goals in a lot of places. I don’t feel the same overwhelming need to do another Broadway show.” She describes how, early in her career, that she was totally overwhelmed with emotion at the end of a show’s run. But now, when it’s finished, she’s done. “Great show, peace out.”

It’s also clear that she has been left jaded by the seemingly uncontrollable influx of reality TV stars into jobs traditionally filled by trained professionals like Neumann. Where Broadway’s great female roles were formerly played by the industry’s preeminent and most talented performers, now, those roles are increasingly and unsettlingly filled by ‘crossover stars,’ like Christie Brinkley. Neumann recalls Brinkley’s Roxie in Chicago as “the most tragic performance I’ve ever seen. She can’t sing, she can’t act, she can’t dance. I wanted to kill myself.”

So, what’s next? “I wish I’d been an Olympic gold medalist. Did I miss out on that?” Neumann asks with only a hint of sarcasm. Compared to most of us, she actually got pretty close. In the final minutes of our interview Neumann reveals that, as a dancer, she “was the first person to walk into the stadium [at the Opening Ceremonies for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta],” a moment that still moves her. “I have no idea how that happened.” Well, in a way, it happened because Neumann puts herself everywhere and throws herself into everything she does. “It never stops,” Neumann exclaims when describing the doubt and frustration she has felt throughout her life and career. And, even in this new phase of her life, neither does she.

I Have A Drone In My Apartment…

Ben  Smith, 36, is set to star in a new reality TV show but he's not allowed to talk about it, yet. Or so he tells me. Ben is a designer, an innovator, a tinkerer, an engineer and a crazy person, in no particular order. Today, he’s sick as a dog, agitated and interesting. As always.

Tell the people a little about yourself.

I’m Ben. I was born in Detroit but have lived all over. I was a bad kid and was sent to military school when I was 14. I thrived in certain areas but I was all about mischief. I only wanted to do the things that people said I couldn’t do. There was a course on booby traps and immediately after that course, I went and set a bunch of booby traps all over the school.

My dad is a neurophysiologist, which led to us moving around a lot. I was in the army for a while and served in the DMZ in Korea. I was injured out there and left the service shortly after. I can’t really talk about that for another 12 years.

What is this project that you’re working on?

Which one?

The TV project.

Oh, that? It falls into the reality genre. Not so much a “Get-Me-Off-This-Island!” deal. It’s not really like anything that’s been done before. I guess it’s going to be a little scripted to pump up the drama with scenarios and tasks and then they’ll edit it to make it appear interesting. I get the feeling some of it might be kind of dangerous. I was part of some groups when I started building the drones that I’ve been working on and I think the qualifications that sold them on me are that I’m not morbidly obese, I can speak in complete sentences and I’m not a total political radical. I have strong opinions but I’m also aware of reality. But I can’t really go into [the details of the show]. There’s a contract. I’m not looking to get sued. Can we talk about my mucous instead?

Nope.

I’m a very curious person and that often gets me into trouble but it also apparently opens doors.

Trouble is good.

Yeah, sometimes.

How long have you been getting in trouble/engineering?

I don’t know if this story is true or not - I can only take my mother’s word for it – but, when I was a baby, she had a fence set up so, when I was crawling around, I wouldn’t fall down the stairs. And my mother showed up at the top of the stairs after leaving me alone for a couple of minutes and found that I was sitting there with a screwdriver and had taken the whole thing apart. I can only take that with a grain of salt but that seems to be her impression of me anyway. I was a constant concern. I suppose it’s really difficult trying to raise a kid who tries to circumvent everything you do to protect them.

So, it doesn’t sound like you’ve had a great deal of formal training in… whatever it is that you do…

Oh, no, not at all. Well, when I start off with a project, I usually know nothing about it. Like with the drones that I’m working on. I’d never even flown a remote control airplane before. And not only did I need to design something beyond radio control - something that could fly on its own - I also had to make it do things that had never been done before and employ stealth technology and all these other things and so there was a lot of learning to do. And I just jumped right in. Someone once told me that I go through life ass-backwards and at full speed. And that seems to be the general approach I take for everything.

Are there other drone enthusiasts?

Yeah, but our group has since dissolved. The closest we came to a "name" was calling our lab, "The Dick Cheney Center for Humanitarian Studies.”

What other projects have you worked on recently?

I fought robots. My robot was evil and won a pretty big competition. It had thread mines, a hammer drill, fork-lift skewers and Kevlar/welded steel/fiberglass armor coated with aluminum powder and suspended in beeswax. I wrote a symphony. A bad one. I was in a band but we broke up before our first gig. The combination of ego, Adderall and Jameson made me impossible for the others to be around.

My biggest problem when I’m writing is figuring out when to stop. It sounds like sometimes you don’t even know when you’ve started a project so how do you know that you’re done?

I can definitely understand that. I hate finishing a project because it says, “this is all I can do.” Also, it’s the process that I enjoy more than the result, so I have to set myself deadlines, I collaborate with others, try to manage my own expectations, because I always want more than I can do. I have a drone in my apartment right now. All it needs is a battery but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Because then it’s done. And then I’ll have to do something else.  I’m a big fan of [Serbian-American polymath] Nikola Tesla and he has this great quote: “We build but to tear down. Most of our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation. Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life.”

So what’s next?

There’s some stuff that I’ve got signed off for this TV show. Basically, anything that you see in a Bond movie or Batman movie is something that I’m interested in. Mostly toys for my nephew, to be very honest. Maybe the FBI.

If you could describe yourself in a word, what would it be?

Lost.