In Memoriam: Steve Weber

My friend R. Steve Weber passed away unexpectedly a few weeks ago. He was an extraordinary fellow, with more creative accomplishments than most of my friends put together. Trained dancer who worked with the legendary Bob Fossie. Emmy-winning make-up artist for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Master marionette-builder trained under Bil Baird (who created the puppets for The Sound of Music.

I had the privilege of hanging out with him nearly every day for 5 months, during our unemployment and a city-sponsored Photoshop/HTML class we took at Goodwill, in the hopes of getting into better video-editing or 3-D classes at the Bay Area Video Coalition. Despite all that was going on, he was always an optimist. We chatted about puppetry, creativity, and our dreams of "making it", someday.

I miss him dearly.