For over 40 years, I have been a musician and composer, specializing in Renaissance and folk music, as well as modern compositions. I sing semi-professionally, play all flutes and recorders, and some guitar and viola da gamba. I’ve performed in concerts, weddings, funerals, church services, malls, parties, dances, street corners, Fort Nisqually Living History Museum, and even up a tree.
I have enough education to wallpaper my bathroom with certificates.
For 20 years, I worked in the software and e-commerce industry, doing technical writing, editing, indexing, online assistance, taxonomies, and usability.
From 2003 to 2024 when I retired, I earned my living as a professional librarian in public and academic libraries. Along with the traditional librarian jobs of literary recommendations and research on all subjects, for all ages, I love planning, producing, and promoting lots of programs and events, both in the library and as a community activist.
Activism runs in my family: my grandmother smuggled Jews to safety in the Danish Resistance, and remained a community activist for most of her 106 years. My mother was a feminist writer and documentary filmmaker.
My avocation is theatrical sound design and composition, especially for Shakespeare plays and cultural productions. For a decade, my work was performed at professional and fringe theatres in Seattle and Utah, including the Tony-award-winning 1999 season at Utah Shakespeare Festival. In 2022, for Gibsons & District Public Library, I directed, selected and played music for an outdoor reading of Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2024, I co-founded the Sunshine Coast Community Shakespeare Project, and co-directed a smash hit fully-staged production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a community cast of 24 ages 10-77.
In the ’90s, I created my own domain of Transcenturyradio. My favourite productions are set in multiple centuries, like my first show at Annex Theatre, Aphra Behn’s “Agnes de Castro” of 1688, which we designed with music and costumes from the 17th Century and the 1990s. Plus,Y2K was looming. I have a fancy that, every New Year’s Eve and especially at the end of the millennium, the strands of time wear thin and you can hear music of other eras bleeding through, like radio stations overlapping. That’s why I dreamed up my domain name. And that’s why, every New Year’s Eve, I like to dance to big band swing, or greatest dance hits of the past century.
Born in the States, I grew up in Canada and am a Canadian citizen. I returned to the States for college and grad school, intending to move home to BC afterwards – which took longer than I expected, with a 20-year stay in Seattle first, where my daughter was born. In 2007, my family returned to the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada. In 2019, we moved to the Sunshine Coast of BC, where I have been volunteering on the Sunshine Coast, and started a folk band called “Red Currant Jam.” I am an aspiring memoir writer.
Read my blog for my favourite soapbox topics.
My father, a physicist and actuary, used to joke,
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” (Dad humour, in the grand old tradition going back to Stephen Leacock.) If you’re the kind of person who thinks there are 12 kinds of people and finds astrology interesting, I am Double Cancer Sun and Rising, with Libra Moon. If you think there are 16 kinds of people, I am INFP.
You can pronounce my first name to rhyme with “please,” or with “bees,” I’ll answer to either. Contact me to say hello!
I am fortunate and grateful to live with my wife Juliet and my daughter Sarah in Halfmoon Bay, BC, on the the unceded ancestral lands of the Shishalh Nations.