Daisey is the oldest of four children. When he was in middle school, his parents--his father is a counselor for the Veterans Administration, and his mother is a meat-cutter at a deli--moved the family to the town of Etna, outside of Bangor. Etna is half the size of Fort Kent. Under "Things To Do In Etna" on the town's Web page, every single attraction is located at least 14 miles outside the town limits.

Daisey attended the regional Nokomis High School, in Newport, where he competed feverishly on the debate team and environmental science team and did a lot of drama; every two weeks he traveled with his younger sister Mary to a nearby high school for a regional program for gifted students. "I think they were pretty bored out at Nokomis," said Dennis Gilbert '72, who taught the program. "Mike and his sister had wild imaginations, and a lot of energy, and they just ate up these sorts of extracurricular activities. Mike would write long poems that were fantastical in the true sense of the word--broad-ranging and unconventional. And he had a really sharp sense of humor, a good ear for sardonic observations. And he was amazingly prolific. He could write a whole short story in an hour."

Under Gilbert's tutelage, Daisey thrived, and when he was ready to move on to college he sent out only one application--to Colby, Gilbert's alma mater. Daisey arrived at Colby in 1991, already an ambitious talent on the make. "If one was involved in the arts--even if one wasn't, actually--he was nearly impossible to miss. His talent was, even then, already well formed," remembered Professor of English Jenny Boylan.

Daisey's first year, he acted. His second year, he wrote poetry, serving as poetry editor of the Pequod and winning (with Meadow Dibble '96) the Katherine Rogers Murphy Prize for Original Poetry. He was no retiring scribe, however, holed up in his garret. After describing Daisey as "insane. Okay--ungrounded," friend Kathleen Wood '96 went on to recall the time he staged a series of short plays by David Ives in Foss Dining Hall and included the instruction "please throw food" in the program. "Actors were up on stage, doing a great job, but getting pummeled by finger sandwiches and grapes. We were all angry, but Mike had honestly assumed people would take it as a joke." And so Daisey plowed through his junior year and into his senior year, accumulating directing and acting credits, immersing himself in the Colby theater scene, and generally confounding and/or astounding everyone he came into contact with.

And then his world caved in. His long-distance girlfriend, whom he'd been dating since high school, became pregnant, and decided to keep the baby. "I, on the other hand," Daisey said, "was not ready to be a father." Scheduled to graduate in the spring of 1995, he instead barely skidded through that semester, failing a few classes and sinking into a deep depression, as, paralyzed, he watched his relationship disintegrate and his daughter slip beyond his reach. By summer, degree-less, despondent and sick with self-loathing, he took the only job he could find--working in a slaughterhouse. His work lugging carcasses and cutting meat, he says, was every bit as horrible as it sounds.

It was theater that turned him back around. That November Lawrence High School in Fairfield, next door to Waterville, offered Daisey a job as a drama teacher, and he loved it. It didn't hurt that his students loved him in return. "Mike was perhaps the best director I've ever worked with," said Luke Shorty, a senior at the University of Maine at Farmington and a Lawrence High School graduate. "He was very talented at making people feel comfortable with themselves on stage. He could transform a group of friends not only into an acting troupe but into a family."

Invigorated, Daisey returned to Colby that spring, made up his lost credits and, after "begging and pleading with Dean Earl Smith and generally making an ass of myself," graduated with the Class of 1996. That week, he packed his car and moved to the West Coast.

Daisey's arrival in Seattle marked both the start of a new chapter in his life and the dénouement of "Wasting Your Breath," his one-man show about separation from a child that opens with the news of his girlfriend's pregnancy--in other words, a sort of fleshed out, far more gripping version of the above three paragraphs. Though this show, the first of three, is what brought Daisey in touch with what he considers his true calling, it took a while for the idea to click and for him to consider himself "a storyteller."

"When I first moved to Seattle, people kept asking me how I'd gotten there, and as I found myself telling bits and pieces of the story, it began to cohere in my mind," he explained. After a while, he decided to write down his story and perform it. "But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't want to write it down. I felt terribly guilty--writing was what I'd been trained to do, and to not write felt antithetical to everything I'd learned." In the end he decided to simply tell his story--on a stage, in front of an audience, without a script. It was a daring risk, with remarkable effect.

The show ran from October 1997 to January 1998 in little playhouses across the city. Each night Daisey would tell his story anew, drawing from a loose outline in his head. And each night, after the performance, fathers would wait behind the darkened theater to talk to Daisey about losing their own daughters. Between the energy and connection he felt on stage and the sensation during these post-show conversations of having achieved emotional resonance, Daisey understood he'd found his vocation.

"I realized that amazing discoveries can be made in front of an audience that just can't be made in the vacuum of fiction. Personally, I think writing in a vacuum is perverse. Writing can feel like a negation--like fixing it in amber--and there's something painful about that for me. But I really appreciate the idea of the living revision process, how an audience subconsciously vets your work in the way that they respond. It's the opposite of a normal author's world," he said.

Immediately he put together another show, "I Miss the Cold War," based on stories he'd grown up hearing from the Vietnam veterans his father treated for a living. "Let's just say it was my sophomore effort," Daisey said. "The material was great, but there was no backbone. I just wasn't ready yet to talk about someone other than myself."

The show ran from February 1998 to May 1998. "And then the hammer came down. I started working for Amazon."

Which, of course, was only the beginning of everything else. The story of Daisey's two years toiling first in customer service and then in business development at one of the Internet's most famous companies is best told by Daisey himself in his third--and most recent--solo show, "21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com." Suffice it to say, the show--directed by his wife, Jean-Michele, whom he met when they were both acting in one of those "catastrophically bad avant garde plays" in 1997 and married in July 2000--was a runaway success. "Seattle's tech-savvy population responded especially well," said friend and co-conspirator John Tynes, a self-employed writer, editor and graphic designer. "We had sellout crowds for months, and their reaction was laughter and empathy."