Hey Math, this is OT but I wanted to make an interesting addition to Tsu's comments.
Jeff [not Gordon

] was an older student who returned to school after a career in music. I had known Jeff for about a year but I didn't know anything about this until I went to his house to provide some tutoring. When I walked into his house, the first things that I noticed were the five gold albums hanging on the living room wall! Not only did he write much of the stuff the made the 5th Dimension popular, way back when, you may also remember the song "We'll Never Have to Say Goodbye again"? Jeff wrote that as well and it was his biggest hit.
Throughout this career, he figures that he blew about a million $ on drugs, hotels, limos, planes, and parties. Even so, about thirteen years after that song hit the market he was still making 3-4000$ per month from the royalties. As for Tsu's comment, Jeff also did some stand-up comedy [we still have one of his routines on a 45]. In fact, in the 70's he was doing fairly well when this nutjob friend of his name Lorne Michaels called with this stupid idea for a new comedy show - later called Saturday Night Live. Jeff turned down the offer to be an original cast member.
Edit: one other strange twist in this story of wannabe celebrity friends. Tsu used to work with a Radiation Physicist who wrote the song Lady; done by Kenny Rogers. Who would of thought...?