June 18 - Alex Hirsch

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On this day, in 1985, Alexander Robert Hirsch was born in Piedmont, California. As a junior at Piedmont High School, Alex had his first brush with fame when he won the school's infamous Bird Calling Contest and got to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman. After graduation, he went to CalArts. He spent the summer after that junior year working on a stop motion animation film for Laika (of Coraline fame) ended up in the dust bin. Alex's first job after graduating in 2007 was with the Cartoon Network as a storyboard artist and writer for The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. His writing partner on that gig was Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time.

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Following the end of Flapjack's run, Alex teamed up with Maxwell Atoms and Justin Rolland (the creator of Rick and Morty) to develop Fish Hooks, an animated series that aired on the Disney Channel for three seasons. He also served as the modest hit's creative director during its run. It was his next project, also for the Disney Channel, that struck gold.

While at CalArts, Alex started developing a series about twin kids who get sent to spend the summer with their great-uncle in a mysterious town in the American Northwest. It was semi-autobiographical, based on vacations with his own twin sister to visit his grandfather. He even created a low budget, low quality 11 pilot of sorts. Somehow he knew that the property was just right for Disney. He even turned down an offer from Dreamworks. When he showed his film to executives at the Disney Channel, as Fish Hooks was winding down, they loved it, bought it and put it into production. On June 15, 2012, Gravity Falls made its debut, pulling in rave reviews and better than average Disney Channel ratings. The quirky, endearing show, bolstered by the performance of Kristen Schaal as Mabel Pines (the female twin), became a cult classic almost right out of the gate. Alex not only oversaw its production but provided several voices for the show as well, including Gruncle Stan, Soos and Bill Cipher.

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Gravity Falls slowly aired it's first season of shows over a couple of years on the Disney Channel before moving to Disney XD for its second season. After just 40 episodes, Alex announced that the series would be wrapping up in order to do right by the characters by not overstaying their welcome. Over the course of its run, Gravity Falls was nominated for numerous awards, including a Peabody Award, and won several Annie Awards. A few months after the final episode aired in February 2016, Alex announced a world wide treasure hunt based on the series. The goal was to find a statue of Alex's character, Bill Cipher. It was discovered in Reedsport, Oregon and the celebration of the end of the hunt mysteriously coincided with a release party of a Gravity Falls book. The book was a hit and spent almost a year on the best seller list.

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Since the end of Gravity Falls, Alex has kept busy. He lent his voice to the Disney Channel series Phineas and Ferb. He co-wrote Detective Pikachu, the Pokemon movie starring Ryan Reynolds. He contributed story bits to the Academy Award winning Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. In February 2018, he released a Gravity Falls graphic novel that was considered a continuation of the recurring plot threads from the series. Since August of last year, he has been under a multi-year contract with Netflix to develop content for the streaming giant. There hasn't been any word yet on what he's cooking up, but we can assume it will be delightfully weird and look forward to binge watching all of it. Happy birthday, Alex!

June 2 - Wayne Brady

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On this day, in 1972, Wayne Alphonso Brady was born in Columbus, Georgia. The son of West Indian immigrants, Wayne moved to Orlando, Florida as a young child to be raised by his grandmother. In his mid-teens, he started performing in local community theaters and became part of the improv troupe at the SAK Comedy Lab in downtown Orlando. He graduated from Dr. Phillips High School, an arts magnet school, in 1989 and began attending classes at the University of Miami. A degree wasn’t in the cards for young Wayne, however, and by 1996, he’d moved to Los Angeles, California to see what fate had in store for him.

Fate has blessed Wayne with at least a constant flow of employment opportunities if not many that could be considered long-term. His first television appearances came on a late-night syndicated show called Kwik Wit. It pretended to be an improv show but in reality, while based on popular improv games and original material, was pretty rehearsed. It did, however, lead to regular appearances on the British improv show Who’s Line Is It Anyway? during its final season, which was taped in Hollywood. That rolled into the American version of the show and real nationwide exposure for Wayne. In 2003,  Wayne’s work on Who’s Line won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding  Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program (try saying that with a mouthful of pretzels), making him one of only a handful of people to win that particular award for a regular series as opposed to a one-off special.

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In 2001, Wayne had his own short-lived variety show. The show only lasted a partial season but the name, The Wayne Brady Show, lived on for two more years as a daytime talk show, which earned its namesake two consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Over the next several years, Wayne enjoyed a whole slew of guest appearances.  He guest starred on both of The Drew Carey Show’s live episodes. He starred as Neil Patrick Harris’ brother on How I Met Your Mother. He appeared on a Canadian sitcom, Getting Along Famously, with former Who’s Line costar Colin Mochrie. He spent two seasons as the host of Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, a game show on Fox. And those are just the highlights.

Wayne finally got a real long-term gig in 2009 when he was asked to be the host of a new version of the classic game show, Let’s Make a Deal. Updating the format a bit with a liberal dash of (what else?) improv (the show's announcer, Jonathan Magnum, is also quite adept at it and was also part of the first Wayne Brady Show), Wayne has been making deals with guests for a decade now, every weekday on CBS. Incidentally, CBS's two daytime game shows owe quite a bit of their continued success to Who's Line Is It Anyway? Their other one, The Price Is Right, has been hosted by Drew Carey since 2007.

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Wayne is no stranger to stages around the country either. In 2004, he made his Broadway debut when he joined the revival of Chicago as the smooth talking lawyer, Billy Flynn. In 2015, he returned to the Great White Way, taking on the role of Lola in Kinky Boots for six months. The following year, he was in Los Angeles playing Charley Kringas in a production of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Then Wayne wowed audiences in Chicago (the city, not the show this time) when he spent four months portraying Aaron Burr in Hamilton.

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Wayne's connection to Disney goes way back. One of his first jobs as a teen was in the entertainment department at Walt Disney World (rumor has it he was good friends with Goofy). Since then, both versions of the Wayne Brady Show aired on ABC, he wrote and sang the theme song for The Weekenders and he sang "Beautiful" along with Jim Brickman on Jim's Disney album. Sharp eared listeners will recognize Wayne's voice behind Don on an episode of Phineas and Ferb called "Where's Pinky?" and he was a regular cast member on the short lived ABC improv show Trust Us With Your Life in 2012. He's also made an appearance on Dancing With the Stars, not as a contestant but as a performer in a tribute to James Brown. Wayne sang a version of The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room for the 2008 album Disney Music Block Party and produced an album of children's songs he helped write called Radio Wayne (inspired by the Radio Disney network) in 2011.

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Currently, Wayne is busy taping episodes of the next season of Let's Make a Deal (for which he finally won an Emmy last year after being nominated seven times) while simultaneously making appearances on the CBS soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful as Reese Buckingham. Will there be more improv shows in his future? Probably and when they pop up, you can be sure they'll be funny and look effortless (which really describe's Wayne's basic mode of operation). Happy 47th birthday, Wayne and here's to many, many more!