25 Years in NYC!

From a performance at
The Lamb's Church, circa 1994.

I've now lived in New York City for 25 years. In 1993 I went from a 70 acre farm in Oregon to an 8.5' x 11' room in the Lamb's Church, which had two Off-Broadway theatres (though one was later registered as Off-Off-Broadway). It was close enough to Times Square that from the roof we could see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons float by.

For my first New Year's Eve I stood for hours on Times Square during one of the coldest NYC days on record, and then I discovered the next day I could have walked through a parking garage next to the Lamb's Church at 11:55 PM and seen the ball drop! Later, a building was demolished that allowed us a view of the ball from the roof of the Lamb's Church. The first time I remember that happening was when we rang in the New Millennium. As soon as the ball dropped we all ran to our computers to see if they had crashed! Thankfully Y2K was greatly overrated.

I kept a journal in those days called "Farm Boy on Times Square." You can read the first two entries by clicking here.

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A Clear Leading was the first feature-length play I wrote, and I performed it for the first time in 1994. It tells the story of Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, who spoke against slavery a century before our Civil War. We've changed the title to I Dreamed I Was Free, but the basic play is (after many adjustments) still basically the same.