Seth and Elizabeth




We grew up in houses just a block apart, houses that were built by the same architect even. We went to the same Catholic grade school and we finally met in the Annunciation youth group.



I was born in Cincinnati, OH, but I don't remember it. I had a dream once that the Cat in the Hat took our family hostage. The dream was built on memories of that house in Ohio, but I was sleeping in Minneapolis at the time. I was two when we left.

Annunciation grade school was brutal for me. It was small and I was socially immature. It got so bad for me that I left after sixth grade. The kids at Minnehaha Academy were much more accepting of idiosyncrasies or at least I was boring enough to be left alone. After four years of chasing the popular crowd and remaining relatively friendless, I committed social suicide (so I thought) and started sitting at a lunch table of nerds. They seemed beneath the cool kids and I assumed that if I associated with the lesser crowd I would be forever tainted by their scent.

It was awesome. I remained irrelevant to the cool kids. No change. But I found a group that accepted who I was.

We TPed our classmates' houses. We hacked the computer in the library and hosted our own BBS. We ran an imaginary person for student council. We started (I started) a massive food fight. For two years I was a part of something.

I applied to Notre Dame and didn't get in. My mom made me fill out the application for Iowa State and so that's where I ended up. It was not for me. I transferred to the U of M after two years and lived at home.

Two years after that I went to film school in California. Again I fell in amongst the nerds. It felt like the same pranks, but this time we were getting away with making movies without permits at Huntington Beach and steeling electricity from construction sights to light our sets. The police were called once when we made an action film in the dorms with fake guns.

But I graduated without a plan and headed home again to Minneapolis. I got an apartment in Laguna Beach for six months but moved home home again when the lease was up. I delivered pizza for a couple years and played an entire summer's worth of Starcraft. Finally, for some reason I applied to Carlson School of Business and got in. Two years of entrepreneurship classes and I graduated with an MBA.

I bought a couple of junk bicycles at a garage sale and suddenly I had started a business. I filled up my apartment with bikes. I hired some youth group kids to fix them. I sold the bikes on Craigslist. After a year I rented a small warehouse from the WORST LANDLORDS in Minneapolis and put up a sign that said Re-Cycle. A year after that I had a storefront in Uptown.

I've owned as many as three bike shops at once, but today we (I have a partner) own just one big shop in Northeast Minneapolis. But we own the building (or rather the bank owns the building) and we go to Burning Man every year to fix 2000 bicycles for free.

Elizabeth and I bought a tiny house in North Minneapolis in 2011. My whole family loaned me the money because the banks were all skittish in the midst of the recession. 		Elizabeth's parents have lived in the same South Minneapolis house for her entire life. She chose Southwest high school and fell in love with theater. She directed a spectacular version of Night of the Iguana with real rain and it was enough to get her into Barnard College at Columbia University in New York and the city captured her heart.

While studying abroad in the Dominican Republic Elizabeth made her first short film and the decision to become a filmmaker. In her senior year at Barnard she was awarded a Davis Projects for Peace fellowship which she used to return to the DR and start a theater program for girls at an orphanage in Santo Domingo.

Since returning to Minneapolis she has worked on commercials and a handful of feature films while writing short and feature screenplays. In her spare time she likes to build decks, paint the house, and remodel the basement.

Elizabeth is the lead contractor on the Schoolhouse project.

She also likes dogs. Loves dogs, really. I mean she is certainly an animal lover, but to her dogs fall somewhere between animals and people. LOVES dogs.

Life with Elizabeth is moving from one project to another: film projects, the schoolhouse, our house, traveling in Europe, our Burning Man camp, and so on. Neither of us have traditional jobs and our feast or famine freelance lifestyle gives us the freedom to sleep in and jump on cool opportunities. It also gives us the burden of stress that comes with an uncertain future, but it's hard to imagine cashing it in for a 9 to 5 and two weeks vacation.

As I write this Elizabeth is researching the New York real estate market in case we want to move back there some day.