My Life, in Brief... So Far.

If you’re interested, here’s a little bit about me. I was born in Barberton, Ohio, and grew up with two sisters. Things didn’t work out for us to stay with my dad, and so my mom became a single mom. She was an amputee, having lost one leg above the knee in a motorcycle accident one July 4th over a decade before I was born.

I was an odd child—obsessed with the Titanic and other ocean liners, writing mini-musicals starting in fourth grade (including Romeo & Juliet: A Musical Comedy, in which, rather darkly and absurdly, Juliet made her final exit from the story using… a vacuum cleaner to the belly button).

My mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme when I was 12, and she died later that year. I was adopted by a wonderful mother-daughter team, Hazel and Linda Hall, who had been long-time, very close family friends. They brought me into their home as one of their own. Hazel was 82 at the time, and Linda was 48.

I attended Baldwin-Wallace University (then College) for undergrad, then New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

A couple of years in corporate retail helped pay the rent for a while, but I’ve always been a writer and creator at heart. I returned to Ohio to write a novel, which ended up going nowhere for now because another book with a similar premise had just landed with a huge splash… but that got me back into the creative mode.

When I returned to New York, I became the assistant for a well-known Broadway writer and director, which resulted both in a long-term friendship and my accidentally pocket-dialing a legendary star of stage and screen at 4 AM and faking a French accent and female voice.

I became seriously ill for a little while, with a trio of acquired infections that hit simultaneously. When I recovered from those, I ended up co-founding Positive Alliance, building a large, mutually-supportive community of people with shared life experiences around living with HIV or being affected by the epidemic in some important way.

Work, at this time, mostly centered on running events, distributing music royalties, learning to associate produce theatre, house management, company management, and other aspects of theatre, music, and broadcast that had nothing to do with writing.

Along the way, I wrote a music appreciation book with noted Broadway historian Ken Bloom—it’s hopelessly outdated already, but the last report I heard before it went obsolete was that it had sold over 250,000 copies!

Around 2015, my life stopped going the way I’d planned. Over the next decade, an almost comical (in retrospect, if you like dark humor) parade of major challenges required me to take them on and get through them. Perhaps the biggest was a long struggle with accurately diagnosing, then finding a specialist for, Complex PTSD (well-treated now, mercifully). I think it’s important to name it, because I like to let people know that, yes, it can be a tough condition to diagnose and treat (and certainly tough to live through). But if you find yourself up against it—and so many people have approached me to talk about it, after I disclosed it publicly—it is possible to make it through, and you are not as alone as it might sometimes feel on your healing journey.

That series of other, parallel challenges included: a serious injury in 2017 that took years to recover from; the deaths of several of my closest friends; the pandemic we all went through together (but apart); and so many more. I won’t list it all here, but I feel profoundly lucky to be standing, let alone walking, now even able to run again. And I’m extraordinarily grateful to be here to talk about just enough of my story to explain any gaps in my resume—and the stories I’d like to share with the world.

I was offered the chance to resume the leadership role at Positive Alliance in 2023, and we spent late 2023 reorganizing and strategizing a recovery from the impacts of Covid and mpox. In 2024, we had one great year, before that work was disrupted by my need to spend 2025 caring for Linda through her last illness, then planning her funeral and taking a mindful approach to sorting through three lifetimes’ worth of books, blankets, music, photo albums, etc.

I’m a little impatient to see how my creative work can live in the world; I’m rebuilding much of it from failed hard drives (one of the setbacks I didn’t list two paragraphs above, when I said “I won’t list it all here”): polishing things and getting ready to offer some stories to the world. You can get a sneak peek on my “samples” page, and if you’re a producer: let me know if you’re interested in seeing more of one of the excerpted projects I’ve included.

I did try my hand, in 2026, at creating my first online word game, LETTERWARD, which you can play at letterward.com. You can go back and play the archive to the very first day I launched it “globally” … to a total of two friends, at the time.

I am pleased to be able to start putting myself forward as a writer again, after so much life got in the way. I hope you like what you find here, and I hope you get to watch or read the fully-realized versions of a lot of this, not too long from now!

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