About Charlie

For me, to live a life without compromise is one of the greatest accomplishments.

I think we become an accumulation of our experiences, they evolve and define us. We make our choices- where we live, what we do, what we read, our friends or who we don’t want to associate with. Who we love and who we stop loving. What we believe and what we reject. The pressure of money that comes and goes. It all internalizes into who we are.

For five months during the ‘70’s I slowly camped my way across our spectacular country, so often getting caring support for this pitiful kid in a tent in the snow. I’ve lived in New York, Buffalo, Colorado, Seattle, New Hampshire, the village of Didsbury England, the primitive mud town of Niono in Mali W. Africa, now in South Carolina. Teaching myself Italian, I became conversational so I could spend time with their remarkably warm and caring people, becoming very close with an Italian family that I now call my own. These weren’t visits, they were learning experiences. As I soaked in the cultures and places, I was changing. For better or worse, into who I am.

My two years in Africa was another reality. I spent much of my time just trying to process what I was seeing, hearing and feeling. But that gritty, sensual and confusing reality was more real to me than my cellphone computer life.

I’m Jewish. I walk twice a week with a wonderful German friend. He was born into the shadow of Hitler, his father helped build the Junter engines for the Nazi trains. Compassion and peace. I work for that to become an integral part of me.

I have been in corporate management, later for 35 years I owned a plumbing company, and now for the last fifteen I have been writing plays. Lots of plays. But you know, in the end I don’t think or call myself a manager, a plumber or even a playwright. I’m just Charlie being Charlie.

What makes me tick is a driving need to question and learn. The countless books I read and the crazy google tangents are not so much for pleasurable relaxation. They are feeding my curiosity. I had long been curious about the hard life of the soiled doves in the old western saloons. Those books resulted in a short ten minute play with two prostitutes unsuccessfully trying to support each other. But one paragraph I read in my research was about a quiet Scottish missionary, Donaldina Cameron. She saved over 3000 beaten Chinese sex slaves in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the turn of the century, finding trap doors in seedy cribs, jumping rooftops and fire escapes. It gave me my illustrated play DONALDINA. Her compassion and peace.

I want to take you for a ride. A wild and crazy ride, escape for about an hour and a half. Please join my overactive imagination. And I hope in the end it will leave you spinning with questions and lingering answers.