When I was in kindergarten, my teacher wanted the class to dance around the room pretending to be flowers. We were to sing while twirling colorful scarves. Extremely shy, very serious, and somewhat repressed, I refused. It seemed silly, and I didn’t intend to make a spectacle of myself, not even when the teacher threatened me by saying that if I wouldn’t dance with the others (I was the only refusenik), I wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the visit to the pet snake kept by the kids in the next classroom. I was adamant, and so I ended up sitting stubbornly alone while everybody else got to play with that snake.

Flash forward a decade or two, and my personality was quite different. I spontaneously hurled myself at Steve Gerber’s feet in Times Square in a kind of improvised guerilla theater, begging him, while tourists watched wide-eyed, to return to the family he’d supposedly abandoned. I’ve acted in plays, done hundreds of panels and readings, was toastmaster at a Nebula Awards banquet, and will pretty much do anything in public, as long as it is good and kind, that seems as if it would be entertaining to me or to others.

How did the kid who wouldn’t dance become the adult who doesn’t worry much about what other people think?

A happy accident. And a very special teacher.

I attended Brooklyn’s Isaac Bildersee Junior High School—Junior High School 68—and one day when I was in the 8th grade, as I was eating lunch in the crowded cafeteria, a signup sheet came around for anyone who wanted to be part of the school’s drama class the following year. My friend Scott Friedman and I made a big joke of it … and then both signed our names, thinking we were being funny.

And promptly forgot about it.

Until the following year, when I showed up to begin the 9th grade and was distressed to discover I was now enrolled in that class. But not my friend, however, because strangely, in order for the school to make the scheduling work, only students who’d been enrolled in Spanish class made it through, and my friend was taking French.

I was horrified. Here I was, the kind of person who did not want to be noticed, who would never do anything to deliberately bring attention to himself, and I was suddenly trapped in a class where the whole point seemed to be, “Hey, look at me!” But the very weakness that made it seem so horrible to me is the same one that kept me there. I wasn’t the sort to make waves. I did what was expected of me.

The earliest memory I have from the first of two terms is of being on stage alone while the entire drama class looked at me and I had to pretend to be a chicken hatching from an egg. I hated every moment of it. And yet, without it, I would have grown up to be invisible. I was the kind of person who would probably have ended up like John C. Reilly’s character in Chicago, who sang “Mister Cellophane”—”You can look right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there.”

How shy and withdrawn was I? So much so that when the class got ready to put on the play “Oliver” at the end of the year, I was never considered for the role of Bill Sykes, the evil villain of that play, even though I was the tallest kid in the class and by far the most physically suited for the role. I ended up as one of the many chorus people milling around in crowd scenes. I didn’t even have a line, which was just as well, because if I’d had one, you probably wouldn’t have even been able to hear my voice anyway.

And then a miracle happened—the actor who was playing that role had to drop out for some reason, and a new Bill Sykes needed to be found. The two teachers went around the room and asked all the other boys to audition—except me. One by one, they had everyone try out singing Sykes’ menacing solo number in which he is an imposing, threatening figure, and when they were done, without me having been called upon to sing, I sheepishly raised my hand, not quite sure what made me do it, and said, “Excuse me, could I please give that song a try?” And when I sang, the teachers saw something in me that I didn’t really see in myself, and gave me the part.

They spent months encouraging me to climb out of my shell and into the persona of this character who would walk around filled with confidence and not mind at all that he was being looked at, that he was being noticed. In teaching me how to walk, how to sing, how to project, how to move fearlessly through a world, I was transformed.

The two teachers who did this were Frank Cama and Freda Slavin. I’ve long lost track of Ms. Slavin, but when I was a freshman decades ago at SUNY Buffalo, I was able to write Mr. Cama a letter thanking him for my transformation. And since I was going to be on Long Island last weekend for HWA’s Stoker Awards banquet, and I knew he now practiced law there, I decided to track him down. I took him out to lunch to thank him once more … and was touched that he brought along that old letter of mine, which I reread, almost brought to tears by that token of my earlier gratitude. Gratitude which remains unchanged.

I’ve always believed that the most important things that happen in our lives happen by accident, without our planning for them. That’s what led to my working at Marvel Comics, that’s what led to meeting my wife, and that’s what led to me being the person who some of you out there have come to know, someone who can live a joyous, unbounded life.

And the person I most have to thank for that is Frank Cama.

Thanks again, Mr. Cama.