Biographical sketch submitted 01/10/2001 for the Park Ridge Community Church, as part of their ‘Meet the Musicians’ series. I felt doubly awkward writing this – both as a Jew singing as a soloist in a Christian Church, and as man in the middle of, at that time, a floundering marriage.

For most of my life, I managed to evade a central tenant of the Sermon on the Mount, and successfully hid my light under a bushel. I did manage to please the right people with my selflessness, but I left my soul empty, and was ultimately faced with confronting the only person truly responsible for my poor choices– myself. To say I love to sing is an understatement of epic proportion. It is more true to say that singing loves me, that it is my true vocation – and like many callings, one bitterly resisted by the person so blessed, until a combination of gradual hard work and sudden epiphany broke through my decades of inertia and fear.

I was born in 1952, the second of two sons, into a Jewish family on the north side of Chicago. My father was trained as a commercial artist, and was a refugee from Hitler, choosing, with his mother’s blessing, to leave her, flee Austria and live. Although he served with honor in U.S. Army during WW II, he was gradually consumed by his own survivor guilt and left me quite a psychological legacy - a sharp wit, a deep love of music, and a doomed sense of obligation to family. I have lived almost 50 years trying to outrun the sins of the father. He died almost 30 years ago. I was never Bar Mitzvah-ed, owing mostly to my father’s anger with all institutions – I hope to catch up someday; being a leap year baby, I’m not technically 13 for three more years, so I guess I have plenty of time. My mother was a daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants; her father was a newspaper typesetter, and although I never met him, I always carry his pocket watch for good luck. My grandfather also hand wrote an extensive Hebrew-Russian dictionary to fill the long years as a conscript in the Czar’s army, and is the other priceless legacy of his that I cherish. My mother was a schoolteacher. Because my father was a poor breadwinner, she was forced to go back to work, and bootstrapped herself from being a secretary to a master’s degree prepared educator. After my father died, when I married seven years later, she essentially ran away, marrying a man she didn’t love and moved to Bridgeport Connecticut. She died almost 20 years ago, and also left me quite a psychological legacy - a deep work ethic, a love of poetry, and enough existential angst to power the greater Chicagoland area until the next Ice Age. I have one older brother, who I haven’t seen in over a decade; he is a brilliant physicist, with many U.S. patents to his credit in laser disk technology. I learned arrogance through his tutelage, and though it is difficult to unlearn, I’m trying.

My musical talents were apparent at an early age – when I was 10, the popular black folk singer Ella Jenkins picked me out of a crowd of summer campers at the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center, and I appeared on WTTW’s Soundstage program, singing "San Francisco Bay Blues". My parents were too poor to follow up on this success of mine with any sort of formal musical training, and my 15 minutes of fame were over. This is the deep stuff of extended psychoanalysis, but somehow nearly 40 years later, I couldn’t get mad enough at my analyst to create the requisite transference, and mine the gold of fruitful regression. I love my parents and forgive them their debts, as, I pray, my daughter forgives mine. I figure if I take my daughter to enough Limp Bizkit concerts (her wish, not mine) I can cancel a lot of debts.

As I mentioned above, I have one daughter. Jessi is 15 and is the most wonderful person I have been privileged to know on this earth. She has not had an especially easy life – she had febrile seizures as an infant, which she had grown out of. She has moderate to severe asthma, for which she has been hospitalized, but, in spite of which, has not held her back from a vigorous athletic career in basketball, softball and soccer. She is the holy terror of her High School indoor soccer league, and to watch her play is an inspiration and a profile in courage. Jessi’s current career aspiration is to be a Navy SEAL, and failing that a master chef! When she isn’t deep into PlayStation addiction, she manages to find sufficient time to do just enough homework to be on the high honor role at Niles West. She is also an excellent writer in the gothic horror vein, and I can’t imagine where she picked that up from.

I have been married for 22 years, but have been separated for over a year, and filed for divorce six months ago. This is not a happy chapter in my life; the true sadness being that coming into my own as my own person and a singer precipitated the crisis that is ending my marriage. I have yet to convince the ladies and gentleman of the jury that being less selfless does not mean I have become selfish. My wife is an extraordinarily brave person in her own right, having battled rheumatoid arthritis for 35 years, and having undergone dozens of operations. Not only is her spirit unbowed, but she works full time as a psychiatric nurse, and was recently awarded a compassionate nurse of the year award at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she works. Unfortunately we failed as husband and wife to be compassionate to each other.

My musical renaissance began very gradually about 13 years ago, when Jessi was two, and I joined a community chorus over my wife’s objections. After about five years in that chorus, one of the singers suggested I take an opera workshop class at Northeastern Illinois University. I was terrified, but I gathered my courage and went. My knees shook so hard during the audition, I nearly fell over, but I managed to survive. Adding to my fears was watching the other students perform, some not so good, other magnificent, including one Ms. Sasha Gerritson (the current music director of the PRCC), who was so good, that I almost fled the audition in terror before my turn. As I gradually improved over the years singing at NEIU, I got my first big break singing Colline in ‘La Boheme’ at Sasha’s request for the inaugural performances of the then fledgling l’opera piccola company. Since then, I have gone on to perform many operas, and along the way, discovered a love of Broadway musicals, and even more recently, Operetta. It is strangely gratifying when I receive compliments on material I’ve barely learnt a few weeks ago from people who assume I’ve been singing this material for decades; the process of reinventing myself continues. I am now enjoying my second year as bass soloist at Park Ridge Community Church – and quickly filling in the gaps in my musical education with private sight singing lessons. I neglected to mention that I am professionally trained as a computer programmer, having earned my BA in Mathematics from NEIU in 1973 and an MS in Computer Science in 1982 from DePaul. The artist in me slept for decades until I could deny the calling no longer, even at the cost of my marriage, and the pain it has caused my daughter. The only "weapon" I had in my arsenal when I started singing seriously not all that many years ago was my love of music, and a measure of God given talent, and that passionate yet spiritual love kept me afloat long enough to catch up with the aid of good voice teachers, hard work, and supportive colleagues who could see the undeveloped potential. I still program computers full time to earn most of my daily bread, but spend almost every free moment not spent with my daughter practicing music. I have plans to branch into radio and TV announcing and commercial voice-over work as a way out of the 8-5 office tyranny so I may eventually be the artist my dad should have been, and I want to be. I want to thank my extended family at PRCC for welcoming me and sharing the joy of song with me. I love being with you and singing with you.