In third grade Miss Bloemendal kicked me out of class every week. And every Sunday the Dutch Reformed minister warned in church of the dire consequences of disobedience and sin. But still I couldn't help myself. When the class marched around the desks every Friday to "Onward Christian Soldiers", I (listening to that different drummer) would attempt to change the direction of the troops. Out into the hall I would go. Instead of reading my book report on "The Tin Woodsman of Oz", I acted it out complete with costumes and encouraged the rest of the class to leave their desks and follow me to Oz. Out I would go again. I was labeled a "show-off" by some and a "little stinker" by my parents. Today I would probably be pumped with Ritalin, stuck in a corner and left to stare out the window dribbling into my bib.

I arrived in 1948 with a Perfect Storm of DNA. I'm a mix of a grandfather that tried farming twice and twice failed (Yes, Virginia, you can be bad at farming even though you really really want to do it) and a grandfather who never had to work because his father invented the bobby pin and then got caught up in Enron like pyramid schemes in the late 1920's. My restless paternal grandfather who stowed away on a ship to come to America may have failed at farming, but with a smart teacher as a wife, produced educated and successful younguns. A computer pioneer, a psychologist, a pioneer in special education, a homemaker married to a rocket scientist, and a veterinarian, the Dutch couple raised a bumper crop of the American dream.

On my maternal side, the wild and restless manifested itself in a young man who saw a good thing when someone showed him a gizmo that held female hair. He and his brother-in-law went about perfecting the bobby pin, the permanent wave, silk hairnets and, family legend has it, the toilet seat. But it all came to an end when, supposedly, he fell off his 175 foot yacht, caught pneumonia, and died. He probably was soused because he was involved in so many Enron kind of shenanigans. Yes, my mother remembers ice sculptures at her birthday parties, but none of them were pissing vodka like at that Tyco party. So, all the money went pretty much overboard with my great grandfather and so did my mother's college fund. A bright inquisitive girl who wanted to be a journalist, she worked as a telephone operator until she met a handsome Navy lieutenant, one of the many 90 day wonders of World War II. Her older siblings had been party girls in the 1920's and went to Hollywood as actresses in the 1930's. My aunt Dorothy married Dave O'Brien, the original Captain Midnight, and the guy who goes crazy at the end of "Reefer Madness" after killing a girl at a party played by his real wife, my aunt Dorothy.

So you see, I've always been comfortable straddling two worlds. Straddling has been getting a bad rap lately. It takes real talent to have your feet firmly planted in two different worlds with two different world views. I guess that's where I get my penchant for finding similarities between people and cultures and places and things rather than differences. Having always been a round peg in very square holes, I yearned for years to be like everybody else, but came up way short time and again. I deserted my work on my dissertation for my PhD in Theatre and Film because I just couldn't see myself in faculty meetings and ran away to New York and dabbled in performing Shakespeare and Moliere. Then abandoned that for political comedy and finally, after being forced to make a living rather than living the carefree bohemian life, I stumbled upon movie agenting as a career. After finding a young Bruce Willis an agent, I was asked to take my "eye for talent" and join a talent agency. Turned out I had been lousy at tooting my own horn, but a veritable bull horn when it came to trumpeted other people's talents.

After 6 years of that and a transfer to Los Angeles, it was time to march in a different direction once again. So, now I am living on a cattle ranch in Montana with a fifth generation cattle rancher who is the third generation on this particular ranch. I started my own company that supplies dialect coaches for movie productions and hunkered down for a nice stop-and-smell-the-alfalfa kind of life. Just me, Mike and a couple hundred other females…cows, that is.

(To be continued).