My Mission, or How I'm Like a Marsupial Fetus

I love and practice many art forms, yet I don't fit into any one traditional mold.

I've been paid to sing, dance, act, write, produce, direct, teach, guide tours, photograph, to create graphic designs and websites, to engineer and hand-craft original aerial dance equipment, as well as less glamorous things like cleaning toilets and digging roaches out of salads, but we won't get into that.

For much of my life I squelched many of my creative impulses in order to muscle up a career in just one primary thing at any given time, which would eventually result in the creative juices strangled under a straight-jacket of work-a-holism and pressure to fit all of myself into a sane uni-hyphenate box.

Let's be honest. I've never impersonated a buttoned up "adult" all that well, except maybe on stage or screen. As anyone who has seen me at a Hollywood club can atest to, I never could get the nack of menacingly staring down a stranger across the room while moving to the music. The goofy, full-toothed grin gets me every time.

As far as my "real" life goes, shrinking down to expectations was an interesting experiment. One that gave me insight, but doesn't bear repeating.

I've decided to unveil my true self to the world. I am a multi-talented, multi-passionate artist who believes in the transformative power of genuine creativity in all its forms.

The more honestly we are able to see and experience ourselves, and each other, the richer our lives are. We see color in bold saturation. We hear the melody in passing sounds. With the awareness that comes from a practice of confronting realness in every day life (and in our art), we are free to live vividly, consciously, rather than scraping by like pre-programmed robots, running the same scripts over and over ("Be perfect," "Work harder," "Don't let them see you sweat.").

My job, having burst out of my automaton shell like a newly born soft-fleshed marsupial fetus, is to touch, taste, smell the world around me, to have unfiltered, untamed encounters with creative bliss, that state of luscious, expansive limitlessness, the sweet wild infinitude contained in a single breath, a pin-shaft of moonlight, a whisper.

This, my lovely friends, is what I'm made for.

Well, that and spontaneously bursting into song during all hours of the night. Seriously, I've woken myself up singing on more than one occasion. Then I laugh, snort, laugh maniacally, and promptly fall back to sleep.