Hey guys!

I wanted you all to join me in wishing our very own Vlad Baranovsky, my brother and co-writer/co-creator of Break a Leg a very happy 30th birthday.

A little background of our brotherly relationship. Vlad is roughly 5 years older than me and was the kind of older brother that, for some reason or other, took his little brother everywhere with him (are there a lot of older brothers like that? I'm thinking no). He was the reason I started writing because when I was around 3 or 4 he'd write me stories (while he was 8-9) about a chicklet living on a farm. I forget the exact plot, but I'm guessing it for sure had something to do with chicklet zombies (Vlad's the one that writes all the zombie references, by the way.)

He always wrote and I always tried to be like him and also write, except I did it a whole lot worse, something I realized around high school, where I stopped trying to write prose. I came back to writing in college and saw I had a knack for script writing. In the meantime, Vlad was still writing but had gotten a job as a programmer (now a senior programmer? Or something higher, I think. Elder Statesman Programmer? Grand Wizard Programmer? I'm not sure -- but he works at a company called Genesys) and was fulfilling what he lovingly calls the 7-year program at State for creative writing.

Break a Leg was the first thing that we ever wrote together and was, coincidentally, the most successful thing that either of us have done, creatively. We've gotten to the point where our style is so similar that we don't remember who wrote which line and I think that's pretty damn cool.

Simply put, he's a great brother, he's my best friend and aside from my parents, he's one of the main reasons that I'm where I am in my career.

And now that I got the gross, touchy-feely stuff out of the way, I'd like to add that I'm the better looking brother.

Happy Birthday, bro (we call each other bro, by the way. It started off as a mockery of two guys who did that... and that was around 14 years ago, so.. now it's bro and probably will be forever -- you can call him bro too, if you'd like) -- let's have this year be the year that we burst to the big screen like a fiery, zombie chicklet.

Happy Birthday!

-Yuri