Only sixteen dancers were chosen when it was over. This is the opening line of a recently finished short story I’ve written titled The Audition. It is about my experiences auditioning for, and working on, The Jackie Gleason Television Show in the early 1960s in New York City. How fortunate I was to have survived the ordeal of what was an arduous audition process, as my years as a principal dancer on this now historical national television show paid for my studies at The Actor’s Studio, which was the primary reason I had come to New York.
My ‘calling’ as an artist began with a performing arts career at the age of five, which was thrust on me as a remedy for having polio as a child. I attended the Cleveland Playhouse for acting studies as well as various dance and voice academies, created a dance school at the age of ten for the little children, hosted a weekly teen television show, and at sixteen created what was then referred to as an “opening act” for leading nightclub headliners such as Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Steve and Edie Gormé among many others. For this twenty-minute dancing and singing performance, I developed my music score, created original choreography, designed my costumes, and wrote some original music.
I traveled North America extensively from the ages of sixteen to eighteen. Rather than go away to college, I coerced my parents into allowing me to study in New York City (eventually as an adult I was to attend Adelphi College). What I wanted and needed most was to perform and study. I was among the fortunate aspiring artists, for I was always able to earn a livelihood at my craft.
In the 1960s in New York, I evolved from performing arts into an advertising career, eventually becoming a senior executive at several major advertising agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, DFS (Saatchi), Lord Geller (J. Walter Thompson), and Ketchum Communications. I then spent thirty years in New York evaluating creative work (graphics, photography, film, copy writing, type fonts, use of colors, textures, spatial relationships, music, voices, talent) in both print and broadcast communications. In the later years of that part of my business career, I co-founded a marketing communications management-consulting firm in New York which made its business helping major advertisers evaluate their body of creative work from agencies.
I am self-taught as a photographer and painter, and I turned my full attention to these areas in the mid-1990s.
As a dancer, movement has always been important to me. As a spiritual being, nature is my ethos. Thus, one will see fluidity, sensuality, and a deep bow to the inner landscape of nature and its unique ‘patterned language’ in all of my visual images and in my writing as well.
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