Countdown #5: Who is Shea Weaver? (Spoiler: we’re not related)
There are Seven Things I’d like you to know about “String Theory”, so I’m going to address one per day on this, the last week of fundraising on the indiegogo project.
NUMBER FIVE: WHO IS SHEA WEAVER?
I had someone ask me at a show last week “so, your …wife? is making a documentary? or??”
I forget sometimes that despite my best efforts to overshare every detail of my life, not everyone knows everything about me. So here goes: 1. My wife, Heather, is an awesome (wayyyyy hot) mom of one who lives with me in Nashville, TN. She tends to be a bit more private about her personal life than I am (her last twitter update was in March), so I don’t post a whole lot about her other than the occasional public admission that she is way out of my league and I have no idea how I managed to trick her into loving me.
2. Shea is also a mom. She and her husband (and co-producer) Jon live in Austin, Texas. As for how I know her, well – that’s actually a pretty interesting story of its own…
Many of you know that when I was 17, my youngest brother passed away in a car accident. His name was Shea. Shea Weaver.
People do a lot of weird stuff in that first year of grief, and not all of it can be explained, but I’m going to try…
I was a freshman at Texas Wesleyan University, and I worked in the Student Rec office. This might sound like a fun job, but I can assure you that it was, in fact, a terrible job. I only worked 15 hours a week, and I still, after making enemies of all my classmates by putting flyers in their windshield wipers, managed to be bored for approximately 13.5 of those hours per week.
The internet was a brand-new fascination for me that year. When I say “new” I mean new. I mean I-just-got-my-first-email-address New. So I spent most of those hours of boredom looking up sports scores and pictures of *Sarah Michelle Gellar and *Katie Holmes. One day, however, I discovered that *hotmail had a feature where you could search by users’ names.
I don’t even remember what I e-mailed to the half-dozen Shea Weavers. I think I just missed my brother that day, and the novelty of having an e-mail address provided a somewhat bizarre way for that to manifest itself.
This particular Shea, as it turns out, was the same age as me; also a freshman at another school in Texas. She was the only one that ever wrote back. (I imagine the others had no idea how to respond. I can’t imagine how I would have.) We struck up a friendship that found us occasionally touching base, regularly at first, and then as time went on, sometimes going a year or two without any contact at all. Now that I think about it, Shea has to be the first person I ever “met online” (not counting the endless supply of people that I trolled in AOL chatrooms on my uncle’s computer).
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that we actually met in person, while Heather and I were at South by Southwest.
And now here we are: a girl with the same name as my late little brother is making a documentary about me.
The world will never run out of surprises.
-Levi
*(Which is these three is the most embarrassing reference of this paragraph?)
Thats a really interesting story. Pretty cool how small the world is sometimes..