About

I am told that when I was four years old and performing onstage for the very first time in a community production, I mooned the audience during the curtain call. I have no memory of this, but I believe the myth. I figure the excitement must have been so overwhelming, I was left with no proper way to address it. Impropriety it was!

I have dynamic recollections of a life lived on the stage. I have always known the alchemy and the quantum nature of standing in two worlds at once. Creativity in theater continued to blossom for me at a very young age as I began working in my hometown with a teacher who understood the necessity of listening as the primary skill of an actor. I studied with Broadway/Radio actress Lillian Green Caran for my entire childhood up until the age of 20. She had a gift of reaching children, opening them up and engaging them in improvisation and scene work in a way I’ve never seen anyone have since. There was a fearlessness I felt when working with her in that space, a transcendent ability to be present and alive, and it never produced a high I had to come down from (something I often see in the actors I work with in my professional career.) This abandon of concern allowed me a freedom of expression on the stage that has informed my life in every way possible.

There is a distinct courage that comes from real play, which easily parlays magic into the seemingly commonplace. I feel truly blessed to have experienced this for so many years of my life, and I am still awake to this alchemy from minute to minute, as often as I can be. The art of theater is the basis for which I rest many of my choices in life: my choice to see past and through any idea of limitation; my choice to look for joy in what our culture calls mundane; and my choice to follow intuition as a primary source of wisdom.

As for standard educational learning, it was only after I left school that I started to learn. I suddenly had this insatiable craving for knowledge or, should I say, wisdom. I read all I could on biology, poetry and, yes, geometry. I couldn’t grasp the full math of it, but I appreciated the language geometry and algebra spoke. I studied philosophers, physicists and the big bang! I reveled in the paradoxes and parallels of science and art. Oh, and the night sky. Nothing really moved me so much as astronomy and the stars. I couldn’t get enough of ancient myths and what metaphors they held for us as a species. And the transcendentalists! Emerson, Thoreau! Such good friends and teachers. And then came Rilke, Buckminster Fuller, Jackie Robinson and a contemporary scientist named Chet Raymo.

In essence, what I’ve come to understand from all of this is that we must be the primary educators of our own experience. The school system does not typically teach the student how or why to inspire themselves, and this underestimated skill is the precipice from where all life starts anew in each moment. In my experience, I wasn’t just learning what I didn’t mentally know, as is so often found in today’s classrooms—the passing on of facts and figures for mental regurgitation—rather, I was teaching myself to remember who I was, truths about myself in relation to these wonderful figures, compelling dialogues and earth-altering events. I was discovering a sense of self by connecting to the interlocking nature of these subjects we tend to separate. I had deeply realized that Math, Literature, Oceanography and Art History are all different colors in the same tapestry, and to feel that warm fabric placed over the past ideas I held of my own education changed me forever.

I now understand, for myself, what being an artist truly is, and that it’s not just practicing and mastering a craft. It is choosing to be the innovator in one’s own life while using the tool of that chosen craft to help sculpt oneself and in turn create what we simply call art, the external version of that internal sculpture. I now understand the sovereignty and the responsibility that comes with such a role.

Over time, I’ve worked with actors and other creative artists courageously diving into the human and alchemical aspects of what it means to generate art. I have spent years watching innovative persons around me suffer from a lack of understanding as to why they were so unhappy in their profession despite being on Broadway or on a studio back lot. I began to realize that the collegiate educational system does not regularly prepare these individuals to come out into the world as confident creators readily capable of living a completely different life than that of the typical American adult. These people I speak of were trying to fit their worth into a “success” and “failure” paradigm that was, and is, the complete antithesis of making inspirational work for themselves and others. The striking duality of this model leaves little room for a good “mooning” when needed.

The storyteller is an essential catalyst for growth in any society, as is proven throughout the ages. In some ways now, it seems we have lost sense of what the craft itself is for. When actors are on stage, they are often more concerned with who is in the audience, if an agent left a voicemail, or what is coming down the career pipe next. This is not a fault, it is mostly due to cultural and community influences. Getting ahead is a primary focus of American culture, and as an actor if you are going to get ahead you have to look far off into future prospects, not into the moment at hand. At least, that is what we have been taught. How can we feel safe in the moment we are most vulnerable and have no quantifiable reasoning for such safety? A great question for the performer, for the storyteller. Is there safety to be had at all, at least in the way we think of safety from a societal standpoint, and if not, how do we as artists reckon with the acceptance of that, of looking such a creature in the face? Only by encouraging creators of all kinds to come into alignment with who they genuinely are as artists (rather than manufacturing upon them ideas of what an artist might, will or should be) can any educational process guide any kind of artist to step into the role of community participant availed to and expressing freely their own bold individual vision.

So, I stepped forward, or up to the plate if you will, to address all that I was seeing and feeling around me in the sub-culture lifestyle of that sensitive human we call the actor of which I am one and will always be. What an honor and privilege. I am so grateful. It is a wild and constructive joy brought to life by a four-year-old girl who boldly bared her bum to a local audience of strangers.