Where Everybody Knows Your Name the perfect theme song for their upcoming NBC sitcom, "Cheers". Upon learning that "People Like Us" was legally bound to the musical Preppies, the Charles Brothers asked Portnoy and Hart Angelo to take a shot at composing a theme specifically for "Cheers". The song that resulted, "My Kind of People", was somewhat of a reworked version of "People Like Us". It was subsequently rejected. Portnoy and Hart Angelo then wrote and submitted two more potential themes for "Cheers". One of them, entitled "Another Day", contained a lyric line "There are times when it's fun to take the long way home"
Michael Portnoy for the New York choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang, and as an actor. He also sang and performed his own operatic, electro-progressive-rock music as XAR, and with the band The Liquid Tapedeck. For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by Dylan's production company to stand in the background with other dancers and groove to the music to "give Bob a good vibe". Instead, halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran next to Dylan, and started dancing and contorting spastically with the two-word poem "Soy Bomb" written across his chest. When questioned