One of the grandest questions a person can ask in life is, "How different would things have been if I'd just made different decisions?" Well, filmmaker/author Rick Schmidt has bravely tackled his own "WHAT-IF'S" in this amazing new memoir-novel, "Other Lives, Bends in the ROAD, and Wha-Ifs." Included are stories from age 11 onward, through his college and adulthood. Reaching back, he's bravely dug into a past in which there seemed to have been build-in dangers on all sides, threatening the man he'd later become. For instance, when he won a gigantic panda worth hundreds in today's currency at an amusement park in Chicago and attempted to sell it at a profit, his future as a businesman/entrepeneur could have been assured by the smallest nudge from his parents (it wasn't). His scholarly father and Smith College mother were actually aghast at the idea. In his college days (1968), he regrettably declined to take up a life-changing offer to join an Oregon commune he visited while hitchhiking. He could have remained there, they offered, built his own free log cabin--no more Oakland, California rent/bills--eaten for free while helping at their expansive vegetable garden, working only "when his spirit moved him to do so." Schmidt explains in this first "Alternate Universe" story how that hasty decision would probably have cost him contact with his young children. And it certainly would have interrupted his ongoing art career. Without attending a video class at the California College of the Arts, he probably would not have gone on to write/direct/shoot/produce independent feature films, along with the urge to write his classic, Viking Penguin how-to, "FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES, which kicked off the Hollywood careers of Kevin Smith (CLERKS), Eduardo Sanchez (THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT), and superstar Vin Diesel.