Paul's Call

Despite an unusual life experience I remain absolutely fascinated by the inner lives of the unnoticed, dismissed and forgotten. The creative work of "giving voice" to these folks is not a retelling of their real life experiences but mord of a stepping into their world as I imagine it based on close observation as viewed through my own lived day-to-day reality. I often ask myself, "What is your lived reality." My experience of life is varied and, to some degree, broad. Childhood memories are powerful and very real to me even to this day. My first memory was of Momma rinsing red ants off me after I had spent time playing on top of a red ant hill. She dunked me in her sink dish water. I watched those poor red ants swim away for their lives. As a son of a WWII Navy veteran and a Saint of a Mom, my early years were filled with images and sounds of "indians" as they were called them. Daddy brought home the bacon as an elementary school teacher for the Bureau of Indian Affairs first at Fort Thomas South Dakota living with the Blackfoot Sioux and later at Bylas Arizona where we lived with the Apaches. When my sister needed operations after contracting Polio our family moved to Moore Oklahoma renounced in later years for hosting the first ever F5 tornado. I was a joyful life-long academic. I loved teaching. I studied theatrical design with notable Broadway designer, Howard Bay, designer of "The Music Man", Man Of Lamcha, to name a few. I've been fortunate to teach abroad at Chernivtis University, Chernivtis, Ukraine (robbed by Gypsies in Odessa)!!! I also taught at The Beijing Institute of Business, (ate Beijing Duck on my forty eighth birthday just steps from Tiananmen Square. My greatest pride is taken in my most successful two grown daughters, their husbands and a total of four remarkable grandkids. Life hasn't always been rainbows and moonbeams. As my sister-in-law so aptly put it some years back, "Sometimes life is just a bucket of shit with the handles on the inside." I have picked up that bucket many-a-time, emptied it and moved forward. My folks taught me how to do that very thing.