One of the grandest questions a person can ask in life is, “How different would things have been if I’d just made different decisions?“  Well, filmmaker/author Rick Schmidt has bravely tackled his own “WHAT-IF’S” in this amazing new memoir-novel, “Other Lives, Bends in the ROAD, and What-Ifs.” Included are stories from age 11 onward, through his college and adulthood.  Reaching back, he’s bravely dug into a past in which there seemed to have been build-in dangers on all sides, threatening the man he’d later become.  For instance, when he won a gigantic panda worth hundreds in today’s currency at an amusement park in Chicago and attempted to sell it at a profit, his future as a businesman/entrepeneur could have been assured by the smallest nudge from his parents (it wasn’t).   In his college days (1968), he regrettably declined to take up a life-changing offer to join an Oregon commune he visited while hitchhiking.  He could have remained there, built his own free log cabin and eaten for free at their vegetable garden. Schmidt explains in this first “Alternate Universe” story how that hasty decision would probably have cost him contact with his young children.  And it would have interrupted his ongoing art career, which led to writing his classic, Viking Penguin how-to, “FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES. Schmidt signs off with the hope that one’s real-life can be as fruitful and dynamic as it’s supposed to be.  Some wise women have said (he adds);  “There are no mistakes.  Life is life, and everything is placed in front of us for the good of our soul’s growth and enlightenment.”   Let’s hope so.