Yes, I know it is bizarre, the selfie above taken with my iPad, but it really looks like me, and perfectly reflects the kaleidoscopic nature of my interests. For example:

• I have been a music lover since childhood, and a keen pianist, but was never good enough on the instrument to consider a career as a performer.
• I was accepted to Cambridge University as a science major, but left it with degrees in Literature and Art History.
• While teaching Art History at the University of Glasgow, I was asked to design a Shakespeare production. In quick succession, design got me into acting, lighting, and directing.
• Realizing that these new skills, plus my long study of music, plus various languages I picked up along the way, might together become the "instrument" with which I could enter music professionally, I resigned from Glasgow and looked for work as an opera director.
• By some lucky breaks, that decision took me to the Edinburgh Festival, to the Glyndebourne Festival, and to La Scala among others, all as an assistant, plus a growing number of low-budget productions of my own.
• But I missed teaching, so I came over to this country to work in conservatory settings, including Cincinnati, Curtis, and 35 years at Peabody.
• Along the way, I have also done two years of graduate study in Conducting, worked for a year in Public Television, and written reviews for much of my life (film, fiction, music, and dance).

I like to say that I was fortunate in that Opera enabled me to take all my hobbies and turn them into a profession. But in fact, even without opera, I have spent my life writing, reading, teaching, and creating in whatever medium came my way. There is great satisfaction in being a Jack of All Trades!

Which is why I am grateful to have found Osher. It gives me the chance to offer courses that cut across disciplines, reawaken old interests, and encourage new ones. More importantly, it attracts retired professionals from all areas, each able to contribute in their own way. My picture above may be multi-faceted, but that is nothing to the many personalities and talents in an Osher class, and the joy it brings to be among them.

In my former profession: helping a singer find the drama in opera.

Footnote, 2025: The coming year will be my tenth at Osher. Looking back, I find my spproach has shifted somewhat. At the beginning, like other teachers, I was sharing my expertise in my particular professional field: operas that I had directed over many decades. Recently, however, I have I found myself turning to works that I did not know so well, extrapolating my expertise to explore them with the class. And many of my other classes have been similar explorations: the one on Women, for example, where almost half the artists were unknown to me when I started. So perhaps I am now working from a new expertise: the ability to find out, to connect the dots, to take audiences with me on a journey of shared discovery. If so, this is something I have learned from Osher also, and it has kept me growing.