During the Great Depression in the United States, my parents lost everything. My father ended up selling apples in the streets of a small city in New Hampshire and one of the ways Mom and Dad kept warm on the weekends was to go to the Opera House, where for 10 cents they could both sit in the warm theatre and see a vaudeville show, a matinee, a vaudeville show and the evening film.

When I was born in 1941, we didn’t have pre-schools, kindergartens, day-care centers, so as a babe-in-arms, I went to the theatre. I saw people in color doing wonderful things, dancing, singing, telling jokes, doing acrobatics, then they’d get big in black and white on the screen and they’d go on remarkable adventures, get involved in dramatic relationships, in intrigue, battles, love affairs. It was a stunning way to grow up.

So, when I was five, my father asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, “An actor!” He said, “A lawyer?”, and I said, “No, an actor!” By this time, he had taught me to count using the American flag, counting the stars and stripes and my alphabet, and my parents read to me every night before bedtime. Both of them only had an eighth-grade education and were bound and determined I would go to college. His answer to me was a gift. He said, “How do we do it?” And, I remember I said, “Well, an actor sings and dances and talks.” My parents got me dance lessons with the only dance teacher in our small town of Etna, New Hampshire, a ballroom teacher, who remained a friend for life, and singing lessons with a retired opera singer who was the pianist for a local church. And so began my life in the arts.

I got involved in community theatre, church theatre, singing on a local radio station and in churches by the time I was six, on the 4th of July in the Dartmouth Stadium, in school theatre, college and university theatre, after graduate school, I went to New York City, did five shows, got involved in repertory theatre, got jobs chairing Acting-Directing Programs at the University of Oklahoma and Calgary. And in all that time, I was drawing, painting, designing, writing poetry, creating characters on stage, radio, television. Then, in 1977, I founded Sun.Ergos, A Company of Theatre and Dance, with my partner, Dana Luebke from Minnesota Dance Theatre and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Since then, the company, whose mandate is ‘to celebrate the differences and recognize the similarities among peoples and cultures through timeless stories expressed in the arts of theatre, dance and visual arts in order to expose, confront and challenge our human foibles and prejudices. As Sun.Ergos, Dana and I have taught, performed and done research in twentysix countries on five continents and created sixty-two shows of indigenous, classical, original stories, folk-tales, legends and myths. Our goal has always been to bring as much authenticity of the visual images of each production as possible to enrich and enhance the audiences’ reactions to the stories that illuminate our common humanity.