I was born on an Air Force base in Tokyo, Japan; but I am not with a Japanese ancestry. I am the second son of an officer in the United States Air Force, Lt. Col. William M. Lackey. We were a military family and we moved often. This is why I was only in Tokyo for my first year on Earth and have yet to return there. Perhaps some day I will.

After pre school in Maryland we moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, Heidelberg AFB specifically. The year was 1971 and I was in first grade. In 1972 I was in second grade, and so on. As a family we traveled throughout many countries in Europe. I remember wandering through castles and hiking with my parents and siblings through forests and learning to ski in the Austrian and Swiss Alps.

My first creative collaboration was a progressive rock band that I joined and played bass in just after graduating High School in Redlands, Calif., in 1982. It lasted until 1984 and we disbanded to pursue college educations.

Once I acquired my Associate Arts degree from Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California, I then transferred to Long Beach State and completing my undergraduate education in Radio, Television and Film but my only interest was Film. I graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film only a year after compact discs began to replace vinyl records and cassette tapes as the format to listen to music with and technology changed completely. DVD’s were something anticipated and discussed in our film courses as the next amazing way to see and experience cinema, poised to sweep aside VHS tapes bought or rented in commercial stores such as Blockbuster Video, and other such lesser known or privately owned stores.

By this time, around 1990, the World Wide Web was the next new technological phenomenon. Now called
“The internet”, it has changed global interaction and communication and exceeded anything anyone at that time could have possible imagined, exponentially.

After years of working in Hollywood at a desk job for a reputable entertainment industry information research company, Celebrity Service International Inc. (what IMDB is today only we used a card catalogue system and phone calls to retrieve information), I left Hollywood and relocated to San Luis Obispo, California, where I lived a surreal, beatnik existence, eventually taking the relocation further north to Cambria, California. I learned much about art expression  and multiple, various mediums from bohemian friends and many local galleries. I expanded my experience of art internally and externally. I worked service jobs to support myself and with extra money I paid a local recording engineer at Painted Sky Studios to record an original jazz blues demo.

Eventually I moved to Lompoc, California and it is here that, after struggling financially and in other ways, I finally landed the job I have now with the Lompoc Unified School District as a full time custodian and can finally begin to grow and develop in the field of Art Therapy. Scholistico is my first step toward helping others to embrace healing through self expression and exploration by experimenting with ideas and emotions to reach the community, and possibly the entire world, around them.