I am the fourth generation of theatre folk in my family, that anyone will tell me about. My great aunt, Dorothy Fields wrote “On the Sunny Side of the Street”. Her father, Lou Fields, was one of the originators of Vaudeville. My maternal grandmother was an actress, before her marriage to a Republican….Booooo!.... My paternal grandmother owned a vaudeville theatre and was a very successful little ‘ol lady card hustler. My father produced plays on Broadway. And I have a brother and step-mother who are writers with over a dozen books between them.

I announced my intentions to be a performer at the age of seven. Nobody noticed. My first paying jobs were in Summer Stock and Off-Broadway in 1960-62. I started at UC Berkeley in the fall of ’63 as a theatre arts major. I was arrested in the Free Speech Movement in the fall of ’64 following in the footsteps of my older brother who was a Freedom Rider in Mississippi in ’61. In the spring of ’65, I took a leave of absence from Berkeley to work in NYC, and I’m still on leave.

I worked for Doyle, Dane & Bernbach (creators of “soft” ads like VW) as an assistant TV producer. Spring of ’66, I started working as an on-line producer for Sagittarius Productions, a subsidiary of MGM, that made films outside the US. I worked in Paris, Rome and Mexico City. I also worked in Miami, but I consider neither Florida (Remember 2000!), nor Texas for that matter, to be part of the US. After the deaths of MLK and Bobby Kennedy in ‘68, I took a leave of absence from work, I’m still on leave.

I bought the proverbial VW van and started my trek across the US in DC at MLK’s Poor People’s March or Resurrection City as we called it. I was a staff photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, MLK’s organization. Then did some welfare rights photography in Harlan Co., Kentucky (my home state) and soon found my way back to SF. Moved into 67 Harriet Alley, scene of Kesey’s acid tests, and joined the Berkeley based theatre group, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company. We performed with The Living Theatre during the California leg of their infamous ’68 US tour. Each of the above sentences have a few stories that go with them, if I could only remember.

Around this time I joined the “back to the woods” movement and purchased 50 acres ($200 down) in what I called the “poor man’s Big Sur”,  now known as the Lost Coast in Northern Mendocino/Southern Humboldt’s (NoMenSoHum) remote coastal region where I still reside. I took up digital therapy in the form of hippie house construction. My house and several I worked on were part of the coffee table book “Handmade Houses, A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art”. Then I put some pot seeds in the ground by a stream in ’69 and well....... the rest is history as they say.

In early ’78 I joined The Family Dog as Chet Helm’s partner and we produced the “Tribal Stomps” of ’78 &’79. I returned to Humboldt to build French’s Camp into a concert venue where I produced the “Garberville Music Festivals” in ‘80 & ’82. As a founding board member of the Mateel Community Center, I was approached by one of it’s members to produce a benefit festival on my site when our community center was burnt down by an arson. We started “Reggae on the River” in ’84. I remained co-producer and MC of “Reggae on the River” for 12 years. I have designed venues (Reggae on the River and Blues by the Bay) and done operations consulting for the past 30 years and remain a “MC at large” to this day.