My Journey from There to Here

Imagination has been my friend and companion my entire life and for that I am eternally grateful.

I was a military child and went to many different schools.  I was very shy, chubby with long braids and no front teeth until I was eleven. I fell and knocked them out when I was two at a Halloween party.

This made me extremely solitary and quiet.  But I fell in love with books as soon as I could read. I read everything I could find.  I would hide under the covers with a flashlight so I could continue reading after lights out.  By the time I was twelve I had read all fourteen books in the James Bond series, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and most of Charles Dickens and Nancy Drew. I could imagine myself as all of these characters, having great adventures. I also listened to Broadway show albums in my room. By the time I was thirteen, I could play every part in The King and I, Carousel, The Music Man and South Pacific. I wanted most of all to be Captain Hook in Peter Pan. (I still do.) This all happened only in my room of course. In my imagination I was fierce and strong and capable, like the character, Fanny, I wrote about in An Accidental Pirate. But that happened much later.

My shyness was alleviated when, at age fourteen, I discovered the stage. A teacher pried out of me that I could sing and somehow convinced me to be in the school talent show. I sang Honeybun from South Pacific. When I felt the extreme joy of being someone else, and heard the applause, I was hooked. My path as a performer was set. I did my first professional show at sixteen, (Hello Dolly), and was a working actor in TV, stage and film for over 40 years. I have loved every minute… highs and lows, feast and famine. It isn’t a secure career but it certainly is a fulfilling one. That lack of security led me to a few other paths; make-up artist, pastry chef and teacher. I did this not only to pay the bills, but to further express my creativity by doing things I loved. Which brings me to writing, another thing that I have always loved.

It began in secondary school where I hated to study, but loved to write. I wrote good essays and exam papers. I also wrote songs, poems and stories for myself, but never showed them to anyone and only wrote in fits and starts after my career took off. I subsequently wrote, but did not publish two children’s books, a horror story and a cookbook for people who hate to cook.

I also discovered I have a real passion for teaching. I have had a thirty-year relationship with The American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA), a performing arts university, teaching on both the New York and Los Angeles campuses. I  traveled extensively giving master classes and private coaching in musical theater, audition technique, acting for the camera and career preparation. I didn’t always love the strictures of academia, but I always loved my students. I loved watching them grow and guiding them toward whatever path they chose to take.

While at AMDA, I had the opportunity to direct some of the main stage musicals: Beauty and the Beast, Avenue Q, 9 to 5, just to name a few. Then I created and wrote original shows using different styles of existing music. I would write the book that tied a group of songs together and create mini-musicals. Blues in the Night, Toonsicals, The Silver Screen were some of my favorites. This got my writing muscle that had lain dormant for years working again. In my forties I had a chance encounter with a brilliant writing teacher named Claudette Sutherland. In her classes, my writing muscle got even stronger.

Then one night, strange and wonderful thing occurred. I had a dream about a historical book I had thumbed through in a museum bookshop while I was on tour in San Francisco 30 years before. It was about all the famous women pirates, but one short paragraph stayed in my mind. A girl named Fanny Campbell disguised herself as a man and went to sea to find her lost husband. On the way her ship is attacked by pirates and she joined their crew. There was no other information about her, although the book indicated she might be a real person. I was inspired by the memory and this was the character that began to come to life in Claudette’s workshop.

About a third of the way through this book, life intervened. I re-encountered my Italian soulmate after 30 years apart, got married, recovered from cancer, went through my husbands’ cancer with him. While researching everything I could find about cancer, I found this list, made by children with cancer, about what they thought were the most important things in life:

“Be kind. Read more books. Spend time with your family. Crack jokes. Go to the beach. Hug your dog. Tell that special person you love them and eat ice cream!”

I try to follow their advice and do these every day. Except maybe the ice cream part, which could be dangerous, especially in Italy, where we have gelato, undoubtedly the best ice cream in the world. So, with that in mind, we began spend more and more time in a little hilltop village in Italy. Whenever either of us had time off, that’s where we went.

Twelve wonderful years went by, then COVID hit and we hurried home to our village to weather the storm. Suddenly we were in isolation; no teaching, no traveling, no acting. I had accidentally retired. With all that extra time on my hands, Fanny came roaring back into my life and demanded to be written.  I put pen to paper and finally finished her tale. Now I get to share her with all of you. I hope you love her as much as I do.

Imagination is still my dear friend, and I still grateful for the joy it provides me.

Mark Twain has a great take on life I want to share with you: "Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."

Let’s all do that, shall we? §