I entered this particular lifetime by the grace of Helen and Ed R of Cincinnati Ohio. Among my childhood friends were ants, bees, and a parakeet. At age 14, I wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper announcing births, celebrations, retirements, marriages and probably not divorces – a topic our middle-class community considered hush-hush. At age 16 I worked part-time at a downtown department store selling women’s lingerie. My earnings went for 45rpm pop records and books beyond Nancy Drew. That summer I attended, all alone and for the first time, an opera – Aida outdoors at the Cincinnati Zoo Pavilion from whence could be heard the hearty sounds of animals responding to arias. I likewise went alone to the Cincinnati Jazz Festival — a minority white person in the bleachers – where Louis Armstrong thrilled the audience by vamping “Hello Dolly” like 100 times. For 4 years, I found a home in the Queen’s Men theatre club at the boys’ Catholic high school, appearing in the plays of Shakespeare and lively American comedies like The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Senior year at the girls’ Catholic school, my English teacher told me I could be a writer.
I went to college on scholarships and studied theatre. My pin money bought LPs of Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and I was taken with The Great Gatsby, most telling of American novels. I went to graduate school in Colorado on a fellowship and in New York City on an assistantship, researching theatre history and the history of acting. Propelled by karma and not my family background, I fell in love with Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett, and Asian theatre. I bought classical music and 19th century Russian novels. I enrolled at the Stella Adler Conservatory and spent 3 years learning the craft of acting from the legendary Ms. Adler, who I met through Harold Clurman, her second husband and my professor. In his role as theatre critic for The Nation, gallant and young at age 64, Harold Clurman took me to opening nights on and off Broadway for the best part of 2 years.
I accepted the job of theatre teacher and stage director at Baruch College, and off Broadway I performed Shaw and Lorca. I listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. I developed luminous appreciation for Japanese theatre – Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku; and laughed out loud reading enigmatic Zen stories. My mind was turning toward the dharma and I didn’t try to wonder why.
I left New York City for Japan where over the course of two years I studied Japanese yoga, married a Japanese man, gave birth to a son named Masashi, and altogether wrote 16 articles for the East West Journal, one of the earliest natural lifestyle periodicals.
After Japan, I joined the theatre faculty of Villanova University and stayed for 60 semesters. There I taught graduate students, performed marvelous roles ranging from ShenTe/Shui Ta to Mary Tyrone, and directed contemporary plays with feminist or absurdist themes. I wrote 6 plays, including All Victorious Ocean: The Tantric Life of Yeshe Tsogyal — all variously produced along the East Coast from Connecticut to Washington, D.C.; authored 3 books (1 on healing and 2 on theatre); published 7 articles in theatre journals; and wrote 28 essays for the quarterly newspaper Soul of the American Actor. Simultaneously, I managed to raise my brilliant son in spite of single-parent anxiety, cigarette smoking, Scotch whiskey drinking, and romance.
With the idea of pacifying an unquiet mind, I embarked upon the practice of meditation. In the late 1990s, during a private interview with Tenzin Palmo, a British born Tibetan Buddhist nun, to my total amazement I spontaneously asked to take refuge as a Buddhist.
After leaving Villanova University I wrote 17 articles on arts and culture for a Philadelphia-based online magazine, Broad Street Review.
Now I reside in the Hudson River Valley where I teach theatre and meditation to men incarcerated in the New York state prison system. Most recently, I finished a non-fiction book featuring the unique character of my father as revealed in letters, stories, phone calls and dreams.
My mother lived compos mentis to the age of 103. I have my mother’s smile. My aspiration is to be of benefit for the years to come.