In May of this year, Stephen Torrence and cohorts wound up performing his sign language interpretation of the song “First of May” onstage with Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm. (It’s a song about springtime, and, in case you missed yesterday’s post and aren’t a JoCo fan, it’s not safe for work.) Stephen describes the performance as “one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had.”

Stephen didn’t start out making videos with the idea of becoming e-famous, though. His first ASL video, for “Still Alive,” was the result of a project for an ASL class at Texas Tech. He decided to put the song on YouTube and, in his words, “It snowballed from there.”

When I got in touch with Stephen, he suggested a video interview, since sign language is such a visual medium. I recorded the interview using iChat and a MacBook Pro, and our intrepid video team has scissored out the best parts into two videos.

This summer, a broken knee prompted me to spend a whole lot of time on the couch with my laptop. That’s how, one weekend morning while trying to alleviate my boredom with some Jonathan Coulton-inspired machinima, I stumbled across something delightful on YouTube. It was a sign language video of “First of May,” the NS-est of all potentially NSFW Jonathan Coulton songs.

But that wasn’t the most delightful part — the most delightful part was that there were more.

I caught up with Stephen Torrence, who created these videos, last week for a FanStuff interview. He reminds me of Charlie Ross of One Man Star Wars fame — both of them are smart, creative and funny, and they have more interesting things to say than I have room to print. So, I’m splitting my interview with Stephen up into two posts. Today’s post is the “why” part of my talk with Stephen, and tomorrow’s is the “how.”