From 1982 to 2004 he worked for the weekly newspaper The Riverfront Times, producing three columns, with the best known being Street Talk, where over the years he photographed and interviewed more than 8,500 random individuals about miscellaneous topics.

In 2001, Stage, who had been adopted as an infant, tracked down his biological family, a search which led to a Canadian television documentary and formed the basis for his 2009 memoir Fool for Life.

For three months he lived under the care of Catholic sisters in the St. Agnes Foundling Home, also in Kalamazoo, until he was adopted and taken to Grand Rapids, becoming the only child of Bill and Virginia Stage.

In 1969, he graduated from Catholic Central High School, and two weeks after his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Germany as a medical corpsman, working in hospitals and driving an ambulance.

In 1982, when his medical supervisors wanted to transfer Stage to work at a federal penitentiary, he left his position with the CDC to devote himself to journalism and photography.

Have A Weird Day: Reflections and Ruminations on the St. Louis Experience, is a collection of expository writings that appeared in The Riverfront Times in a column entitled "Mississippi Mud".

His lifelong identity as an only child was suddenly altered; he now had a "new family," a second set of relatives including a mother, seven half-brothers and sisters as well as numerous aunts and cousins scattered throughout the eastern United States and Nova Scotia.

These events were humorously chronicled in a December 2003 cover story in The Riverfront Times and formed the core of Stage's comic memoir Fool For Life.

The first, Creatures on Display, is a comic noir look at an in-the-trenches band of investigators trying to get a handle on a mysterious malady plaguing the St. Louis social scene in the early 1980s.

The second novel, A Friend of King Neptune, took first prize in 2023 in the adult fiction category of the Indie Author Project, and was featured in the Library Journal December 2023 Issue, “Best Books”.

While doing a popular column for The Riverfront Times, "Street Talk," Stage posed quirky or philosophical man-on-the-street questions to unwitting subjects, of whom he also obtained a photo.

Overall, he captured more than 8,500 faces on film,[5] featuring people from every walk of life, including celebrities and notables such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Dick Gregory, Jimmy Carter, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Queen Ida, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Jerry Seinfeld.

[14][15] In 2014, a major exposition of his 36 years of work in photography, Pictures of People, was presented at the Sheldon Concert Hall & Art Galleries in St. Louis.