Paul Sturtz has single-handedly redefined what it means to be an American in the new millennium, and his biography is too long and diverse to cite, let alone touch with the other hand. By the time he was 30, he had mastered the worlds of journalism, finance, theater, and pet licensing, and been awarded career achievement awards by organizations whose names would appear as a confusing welter of acronyms on the page. This superhighway to unparalleled acclaim was not without a few potholes. His musical satire of one Midwestern women's college, entitled "Kamikaze College" (co-authored with librettist Gabriel Viles) closed after two performances in 2000, and resulted in his being canned as a city editor by the Columbia Missourian, a city daily. This incident mirrored his 1986 firing as the executive editor of the Oregon Daily Emerald in Eugene, Oregon, before he had even started work. In 1975, his supposed instigating of a food fight in the New City Elementary School 6th grade cafeteria resulted in his being yanked from his honorary role as the Memorial Day parade field marshal. After a carefully crafted career that spanned being a bicycle courier in San Francisco, a telephone operator for deaf people in Portland, a winery worker in the Napa Valley, and co-manager of a paper recycling company in Boston, Sturtz arrived in Columbia, Missouri, and immediately set out to single-handedly transform the town and the region. The 1997 publication of his co-authored Hog Wars, about the corporatization of hog farming, is sometimes regarded as the pivotal event in rescuing the family farm from doom. In 1998, he co-founded the Ragtag Film Society, whose film screenings saved downtown Columbia from blowing away with the tumbleweeds. Currently he is the producer of a weekly news hour at community radio station 89.5 FM/KOPN where he likes to antagonize developers and their overpaid mouthpieces. As of Jan. 5, 2004 he has taken a sabbatical from home schooling his son Zola, the former proprietor of Zola's Quesadilla Shack, and is giving himself fully over to the True/False Film Festival and email addiction.

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