LINKS
STEVE LEMME
I was born in NYC to an immigrant father and a local NYC gal. In high school I became a professional break dancer, making my small screen debut in a tv commercial for a Colombian clothing company that aired only in Colombia. After that, I was politely asked to leave my high school in NYC and went out to a boarding school in Colorado for two years.
I went to Colgate University where I met the guys that I would eventually form Broken Lizard with. When I dropped out of Colgate my senior year, my immigrant father told me his own life story. He’d been a professor of chemical engineering in Argentina. He came to America at age 30 and was told he couldn’t get a job as a chemical engineer unless he got an American degree. He didn’t speak English so he had to go to school to learn it and simultaneously went to a polytechnic institute to get his chemical engineering degree. While he was doing this, he earned money by being a dishwasher and selling hot dogs in Times Square. So, to say he wasn’t happy that his only son had dropped out of college is an understatement. We weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye in those days.
It all changed when he came to see the first Broken Lizard show at a cabaret club in the village. He was happy that I was finally putting an effort into something. When he first saw Super Troopers at the premiere in NYC, he cried when the 20th Century Fox fanfare played. He used to go to Best Buy and make sure the row of DVD’s was properly stocked. When Club Dread came out he cried again, first at the 20th Century Fox fanfare, but then also when he realized that my character, Juan Castillo, was based on him. He cried at Beerfest but when he saw the WB logo, he turned to me and said, through his tears, in his thick Argentinian accent, “That’s All Folks.”
Anyway, my dad is ready for a good cry. It’s time for Super Troopers 2.