The Road Here
Playing in the Wings
I grew up in the theatre on New York’s Upper West Side. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the wings of summer stock stages, leaving Manhattan each year for another summer at another theatre — another town with a new group of people.
For a kid, rehearsals and life backstage were an adventure where artists and artisans worked together to make the stage and story come alive. It often smelled of the paint from scenic artists creating forests and homes, oceans, or grand building façades. Hammers banged here and there as carpenters put together the sets that would become the world the audience would live in for an evening.
What I loved most, though, was opening night and peeking out at the people in the audience from offstage just seconds before the show began. It’s a moment of anticipation, when an audience holds its breath, waiting to be swept away by the story. The house lights dim, the curtain opens, the stage lights rise, and for a couple of good hours, a room full of strangers sets aside its burdens and shares an intimate, communal experience.
From Stage to Page
I was eight the first time I stepped onto a summer stock stage as Jerome, Emile de Becque’s son, in South Pacific. Children’s theatre followed, first in New York and then on tour through the Northeast and into Canada. In my twenties, I studied acting with Robert “Bobby” Lewis and modern dance at STEPS.
Writing and film then pulled me in a new direction. I attended Hunter College and later Columbia University, where I earned a B.A. with Honors from the Writing Program. I spent several years working in film, and my short film, Fall to the Son, won the short-film competition at the inaugural Litchfield Hills Film Festival and was named a Top Ten finalist in the 2007 Amazon/Tribeca short-film competition.
I never stopped telling stories. I just kept finding different ways to do it. Sometimes that meant a camera or a script. Other times, it meant bringing an old building back to life or helping a community see what made it worth visiting.
Twenty Years, One Thread
In 2008, by coincidence or kismet, in Bethel, Connecticut, I found a historic, 2,400-square-foot loft space for rent in an 1848 building listed on the National Register, where Bethel native P.T. Barnum once had a vaudeville stage, and where Mark Twain is said to have played pool downstairs when it was a billiard hall. It had also been a roller skating rink, the Bethel High School gym, and the Post Office, but it hadn’t been seen by the public in nearly 40 years because it had been a private photography studio. My then business partner and I renovated it personally and turned it into the Center for New Media and the Arts, an art gallery, performance space, and arts-education center.
When we opened the Center, I wanted to give the community a local place to enjoy real, grassroots arts, and a place to come learn. But just as importantly — coming from a theatre family and understanding the value of the arts — I wanted the artists themselves to have a place for expression and exploration.
In the Nevada desert, I wrote a 137-page plan to save the Sutro Tunnel site: eleven historic buildings and a nineteenth-century tunnel that runs 3.88 miles underground from just outside Dayton toward Virginia City.
In Colorado, I built a communications department for the Town of Hudson, where I produced festivals and parades and built a calendar of 24 yearly events.
Job titles have changed. The work never did.
The Center for New Media & The Arts
What Matters to Me?
Beyond its value to the community and to artists, the Center for New Media and the Arts held a remarkable history within its walls.
For me, two things matter, and they’re where I’ve focused my work: human history and the arts in all disciplines.
When we opened the Center for New Media and the Arts, I said that “art” is the biggest little word on Earth. In our mission statement, I wrote, in part:
“The arts celebrate all aspects of our lives. They serve to enlighten us and broaden our horizons. The arts inform our perspective, cultivate cultural and personal expression, and expand our capacity for empathy and compassion. In short, they teach us about life.”
I’ve spent much of my career in the arts, helping preserve and restore historic places, and telling the stories of why they matter. Along the way, I’ve come to believe that many of our best stories aren’t stored behind museum walls.
They’re created every day by ordinary people living ordinary lives. They’re found in the bones of old buildings, on back roads and front porches — places where the noise falls away, and you can slow down long enough to remember a time when your life felt… just a little less complicated. A small detail gets noticed, and for some reason, this time it matters: the name on a stone, initials scratched into a door frame, an old broken cabin that Earth and gravity claim as time passes.
And Then I Found Buddy
In 2024, I drove twenty-five hundred miles, from Colorado to California and back, to bring Buddy home. Since then, we’ve driven more than 50,000 miles together through twenty-six states.
We’ve crossed deserts and mountains, wandered towns we’d never heard of, and followed roads simply because we wondered where they went. We’ve stopped more times than I could count because something outside the window made one of us curious.
SixLegs: One Man, One Dog, and the Stories Underfoot
Somewhere in all those miles, the idea for SixLegs began to take shape.
In 2026, I returned to Colorado and settled in Georgetown, a Victorian mining town tucked into the Rocky Mountains. Here, history isn’t confined to museums. It’s in the buildings, the streets, the old mining roads, and the mountains themselves.
It’s a good place for Buddy. There are stories all around us, and plenty of roads left to explore. What keeps us moving is the belief that somewhere down a road we haven’t taken yet, there’s a story worth sharing with you.
