Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary.
Hi Mary, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I have been very fortunate to have lived a life dedicated to the Arts. As long as I can remember I loved to sing, dance, act and write. As a child I was mesmerized by my mother’s records. I loved to make up acts to accompany the songs. I would dress up my three younger sisters in costumes made of old clothes, petticoats. aprons, swimming suits, hats and whatever caught my eye. They were my first acting company. We would put on shows for the neighborhood. I charged the kids a penny to sit in our makeshift “theater” in the basement of our house watching us sing and dance to show tunes. Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music, performed in swimming suits, was our show stopper. My older brother, seeing that I was taking in money, offered to be my manager for ten per cent of the box office. I was so honored that my he wanted to be a part of my shows that I gave it to him.
When I was around thirteen and my alma mater Elk Grove High School was being built, I snuck onto the construction site searching for the big concrete slab that would become the stage of the theater. I was ecstatic when I found it! Looking back, how could I have missed it? It was huge! It seemed to stretch out forever. It was marked STAGE with big black painted letters! I was transported into another world. I had found the promised land! As I stood on it in breathless awe, it was no longer just a concrete slab. It had become a vibrating vortex, floating in eternity, imparting all the ecstatic energy of the theater to me, its most devoted supplicant. I snuck back onto the site every chance I got, to sing and dance in secret, for many weeks, enthralled and enthusiastic, dreaming of a life in the arts while I sang and danced to all the Broadway tunes I had committed to memory.
Eventually it was no longer a slab of concrete, but a real stage, upon which I was privileged to perform many times during my high school years. Just walking into that theater made my heart race and my spirit soar. It was mine. I was the first person to perform upon it. On that stage I was awarded medals for singing operatic arias in school competitions, performed in plays and choreographed, sang and danced in Variety and Orchesis Shows. How lucky I was to have been given so many opportunities! Those experiences gave me the strength and confidence to face the world with optimism and joy. I didn’t know then what adventures the future held for me: that I would travel the United States as a dancer living on a show train, become a free spirit hitch-hiking through Mexico, South America, Canada and the USA, that I would travel through Europe and the Middle East on planes, trains, buses, cars and limousines with my husband, or that I would study, performed, direct and teach opera, acting, Shakespeare, dance, yoga and film. And then, in October of 2025 I would win the Best Director Award at the New York Film and Cinematography Festival for the film RPG, and my debut novel, THE RAIN SAID ‘SAMSARA’ would be published by Lexographic Press, on thousands of online platforms in the USA and overseas.
My professional career began when I was a sophomore in High School. I attended The Talented Teens contest, in the suburbs of Chicago, because a boy I had a crush on had a rock band that was part of the competition. My brother Bob had won the year before when his band, The Chosen Few, competed. My girlfriends secretly went to the stage manager and entered my name as a contestant. Much to my surprise I was called up to the stage. I was unprepared but delighted. I sang, acapella, If I Loved You from the musical Carousel. I ended up winning the contest! Brimming with confidence I spent the next few days telephoning agents telling them I had won the contest and was looking for an agent. They all quickly dismissed me except for one. Fortunately, all it takes is one. After an audition in Berwyn, which my mother gamely drove me too, I was hired to go on a “Musical Comedy Tour of the East Coast”. My mother was as excited as I was. I became part of a Rocketts style chorus line of young ladies, most of them beauty contest winners and aspiring actresses, who could dance. We lived in staterooms on a show train that traveled all over the East Coast performing at State and County Fairs. We were the celebrities of the Midway. We had the time of our lives.
After high school I studied opera at Northwestern University with Norman Gulbrenson. Caught up in the zeitgeist of the seventies, I left school to hitch-hike through the USA, Canada, Mexico and South America with my boyfriend. We settled in Boulder Colorado on Sugarloaf Mountain where our friends joined us to form a commune. While in Colorado I performed at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, choreographed and danced in an engagement with renowned comedian Martin Mull at the popular Tulagi’s Nightclub, and studied yoga with, then taught for Swami Satchitananda, becoming one of the founders of the Integral Yoga Institute of Boulder, where I assisted in hosting Swami Satchitananda’s visits to the USA. I performed several roles onstage with the Nomad Players and taught dance at the Free University and Spring School: an alternative high school. I was a candlemaker by trade, as my boyfriend had created a way to sculpt beautiful candles with a blow torch that became so popular we quickly outgrew the craft fairs where we had been selling them, and opened our own candle shop on the ‘Hill” section of Boulder. After a few years I decided to return to Chicago and to music school.
In Chicago I resumed my operatic training at the American Conservatory of Music. While studying there I was cast in a musical version of Lysistrata, directed by legendary acting coach and voice over artist Ted Liss. When we met, in a small gated elevator on the way to a rehearsal, it was love at first sight. We went out after the rehearsal for coffee and remained a couple for the next fifteen years. After we married I began team teaching Ted’s acting classes with him. Our actor’s workshop was down the street from the iconic comedy club Second City where one of its original founders, “Improv Guru” Del Close, taught. We became friends and he took me under his wing as we team taught improvisation classes together.
It was a time when small burgeoning “black box” theater companies were thriving in Chicago, so I started my own. I became immersed in performing and directing many projects for the stage, film and radio. During this time I was cast in my first professional SAG/AFTRA film role by Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward, who was in Chicago directing Come Along With Me for the PBS series American Playhouse. I produced and directed Christmas specials for CHRIS radio/Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, for which I sought out the collaboration of the Chicago Civic Orchestra to provide the shows soundtrack, which they willingly did. Another favorite collaboration was with Emmy Award winner Elaine Madsen, who approached me to produce and direct her play Dear Murderess.
I also produced and directed documentaries for the local grass roots PBS program, The Earth Network. My projects included spending an afternoon with renowned poet Allen Ginsberg at his Buddhist University, the Naropa Institute, where we discussed art, philosophy, politics and belief systems, sitting down with Governor Jerry Brown to discuss his Presidential candidacy, and interviewing the homeless of Chicago, which entailed going to homeless shelters, accompanying others to Union Station where they washed up and sometimes slept, and going to Maxwell Street, late at night, in 20 below wind chill weather.
To supplement my training in Shakespeare I travelled to London England to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Because of the excellent and extensive training I had received from my husband I ended up becoming friends with faculty members David Parry and Geoffrey Connors. Geoffrey was also coach to the National Theater of Great Britain and vocal coach at Covent Garden Opera House. Upon arriving back in the USA I arranged and hosted trans-Atlantic seminars in Chicago, affording local actors the opportunity to study with them. At the invitation of David Parry and June Kemp I helped to launch the now famous London Shakespeare Studio.
Throughout our marriage my beloved husband had heart trouble. He was a heavy smoker going through five packs of cigarettes a day. He suffered his first heart attack two years into our marriage, and then a second one many years later. The second one resulted in a triple bypass surgery. He had a third attack that was fatal. We had been together for fifteen years.
After Ted’s death I closed our workshop and began teaching and directing at Redtwist Theater and the Chicago Actors Studio. I was very traumatized, and in a state of deep grief but I tried to busy myself with teaching, acting and directing projects. But things would never be the same. It was a very dark time of my life. While teaching a seminar at Redtwist Theater I was delighted to discover that one of my students, Jayson Bernard, was a producer, actor and writer, who cast me in four episodes of his series: Family Values, which streamed on Amazon Studios and other platforms. I played his wacky ex-hippie mother Winnie. Another of my students introduced me to Joe Gandurski, the retired Deputy Chief of Detectives Head of Organized Crime Units for the Chicago Police Department. I discovered that Joe had a second career as an actor, writer and director. He trusted me to direct his beautiful, surrealistic short film RPG. It did extremely well in the film festival circuit being accepted into prestigious festivals all over the world. Joe won two Best Actor Awards and was nominated for several others for his stunning performance. I won two awards as well, one for Best Short Film and then this October I won for Best Director at the New York Film and Cinematography Festival.
I decided to move from Chicago to Los Angeles to pursue my career and to try to get a new start. Shortly afterwards I was cast in the charming holiday film Four Cousins and a Christmas. It had its big screen debut at the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where I walked the Red Carpet and was interviewed just like the old-time movie stars. It was a dream come true! The film was ranked number five on Hulu last Christmas and can also be seen on Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms. I then did an award- winning short film called Patrick, and an episode of the award-winning series Kombucha Cure. I was then cast in an improvised feature film titled All I’ve Got and Then Some, which premiered at the Slamdance Fim Festival and went on to win many awards before finding big screen theatrical distribution. At their request the improvised script has been archived at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
During the Pandemic I decided to take advantage of the time that I was sequestered at home to write! I had so many ideas that had been brewing on the back burner of my mind for many years. But I never had the time to devote to developing them. It isn’t easy to apprehend inspired thoughts on paper. They are fleeting. They are like shadows that dart in and out of the conscious mind. It takes uninterrupted time and focus to coax them into manifestation. And so this otherwise horrible interlude became my now or never time. The desire to tell my stories was greater than the fear of inadequacy and failure. To be able to enter into an atmosphere of life enriching creative inspiration would make it worth the guarantee of frustration and fatigue. And frankly, what else was there to do? For two years I sat in front of my computer and I typed, sometimes for hours, often all night. I saw it through the chasing down of inspired intangibles and the drudge work that comes with working on a computer. I composed draft after draft, script after script, and in addition to completing three screenplays I wrote my novel: THE RAIN SAID ‘SAMSARA’. This mystical, historical romance, about two lovers who reincarnate together into three different centuries, was picked up by an awesome publisher, Lexographic Press, and launched in October of 2025 on thousands of online bookstores: “wherever books are sold”, as the saying goes. I am so thrilled by this. I am once again at the energy vortex, dancing on that concrete slab that stretches out into eternity, feeling as if I have found the promised land. I am excited to see what lies ahead. I am hoping to get into the “rooms” where I can pitch the entirety of my work as films and limited series.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have received many blessings and much kindness in my life, but it has not been free of challenges and obstacles. When I was young I felt like I was invincible. My challenges were welcomed and exciting. My mother was a “single mom” who worked a full-time job and two part time jobs to provide for us five children. I had to get a job to pay for my singing and dancing lessons on my own. I worked as a waitress at fifteen, as soon as I could get a social security card. I poured through the phone book looking for teachers in downtown Chicago that I could study with. I had to literally hit the pavement running after school to catch my bus downtown, which left only five minutes after dismissal from my last class of the day. But these challenges were exhilarating and led to even more exciting situations. I met an older girl in my dance class who was a “Go Go” dancer at the Town and Country discotheque at the glamorous Palmer House. She invited me to stay at her apartment on Friday nights after my dance classes. I would accompany her to the Palmer House to wait while she danced in her “Go Go” cage. I would watch the show at the discotheque and sometimes, if there was room, be allowed into the iconic Empire Room to watch famous performers like Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, the Nickolas Brothers and Carol Channing perform. Once we went out to Miller’s Pub after the show with Milton Berle, and I even got to go backstage to ask Jimmy Durante to go to the prom with me. He replied in his inimitable way, “I’d like to sweetheart but I won’t be in town”. When I met the famous tap dancer Fayard Nickolas after his show, I told him that I was studying tap dancing. He spontaneously jumped up on a coffee table and did a tap dance just for me! Every challenge led to a new and exciting experience and were never hardships to me. They were preparing me for the life I had dreamed of. The real challenges of my life were personal ones, and began with my husband’s death.
The emotional pain that comes with the loss of a loved one cannot be anticipated. It is beyond anything imaginable. You only know it once you have experienced it. I experienced a trauma so profound that I forgot who I was. I forgot that I liked to sing and dance. I forgot that I could teach and perform. Listening to music was so painful to me that I had to turn it off. I would dream that my husband was still alive and we would spend ordinary days together. When I would awaken I would momentarily think that he was still alive and that his death had been the dream. Seeing my distress, a friend gave me a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. It was truly a blessing to receive that book. In it Gibran writes that the depth of grief one experiences is also the revelation of the depth of love that one feels for the departed, and that grief is a sacred state. With this wisdom came the realization that the bottomless grief I felt for my husband was also the unadulterated experience of my bottomless love for him, free from the restraint of ego and all earthly filters. This turned my experience into one of gratitude for having been able to love so deeply. The trauma of loss was not overcome, but I was learning to live with it by embracing the depth of love that I was capable of. Even with this renewed sense of purpose my life was shattered. I had lost my identity. I couldn’t sing or dance anymore – it was too emotionally painful. My mental focus, clarity, and ability to think on my feet was impaired so that I couldn’t stand in front of students and teach. I had good skills with make-up from my years in the theater, so a friend helped me to get a job as a make-up artist in department stores. I persevered. I didn’t know what else to do. I was fortunate in that I was hired by high end stores where there were luncheons, trips to conferences and other perks including discounted shopping! Although a highly competitive environment with pressure to meet sales goals, it was not without its good moments, memorable experiences and acts of kindness. But it wasn’t my path. I didn’t belong. I was fragmented but gathering the strength to reconcile my broken pieces in wholeness. The first sign of recovery came in my desire to teach again. The obstacle was that there were thousands of actors and directors in the big city of Chicago who were competing to teach acting classes, and I had closed the successful workshop that my husband and I had once run. So where could I go? I had to rely on my niche skills, as a vocal coach and conducting Shakespeare seminars, as my calling card. I was blessed to have a friend who was running The Chicago Actor’s Workshop who welcomed me to conduct a Shakespeare Seminar for his students. The students were talented, open hearted and eager to learn. Their enthusiasm returned me to the immediacy of the moment that comes with being in the creative space with pure intention. While there I was free from rumination and despair. The first few weeks were tough, but working with them renewed my spirit and soon I found my footing again. After a while I became a company member of the Redtwist Theater where I taught acting classes on a regular basis, was the vocal coach to the company, and directed. Eventually I began to direct at other venues. I was blessed to begin to act again as I was cast in four episodes of the hilarious streaming comedy series, Family Values. And then came the opportunity to direct film again with the wonderful and acclaimed film RPG. I returned to the Chicago Actors Workshop to teach Voice and Diction and Directing seminars and then ongoing classes. With time, perseverance, and the grace of God, along with the invaluable help of my friends I was able to get back out into the world, return to my path, and build a new life. I began to be able to listen to music again. I wanted to sing and dance but I still couldn’t and that troubled me. It was as if I had once had wings that enabled me to soar, but they had been taken away. Even when I tried to sing I couldn’t. It was as if I had forgotten how. I sought medical help and discovered that one of my vocal chords had been paralyzed, possibly as a result of the emotional trauma from my husband’s death. I am not sure if I will ever be able to sing again. A paralyzed vocal chord is indeed an obstacle. Even so, I am counting my blessings. I was so very fortunate to have friends who reached out to me when I was down and out. Without friends I don’t know what would have become of me. I cherish each and every one of them. Other deaths followed, my mother and my brother, my father and my cousin, but I had learned how to cope with the grief. My heart is so filled with gratitude at the love we shared. Through them I have experienced a love so deep and everlasting that it takes my breath away, startles me, and is a blessing beyond compare.
Professionally I have faced challenges and obstacles as well. I had been in LA less than a year when the Pandemic broke out. Due to the imposed, mandatory quarantine there were very few auditions or opportunities as an actress. So I challenged myself to turn this set back into an opportunity by using the time and the isolation to write. The obstacle was that I did not know how to type or work on a computer. At first I wrote things out long hand on a yellow tablet. I was afraid of my computer! Eventually I had to download the Word app and learn how to use it to transfer my work. It was slow going at first. I had to look for the letters on the keyboard to type each word, learn how to delete words and passages, and then save my overall work. Sometimes I would hit the wrong button and delete all my work or think I had saved the changes, that resulted from hours of work, only to find that I hadn’t. But I learned to be patient and not give up. I decided to forgive myself for misspelled words and bazaar phrases that made no sense in favor of typing my ideas quickly before they slipped away. I could always go back to decipher them once I had captured them, even in a primitive form. My first drafts were a mess. The balance of creativity and skill on the computer was not easy to achieve, but slowly I got better at it. I would feel such elation at having gotten my thoughts down on paper to the point where I could go back to refine them. Draft after draft I would improve my work. One insight would open the door to another, leading to a deeper, richer understanding of what I was writing about. I was able to lose myself for many hours, often all day or all night, in another world, typing now as if being dictated to by a higher power. After writing three screenplays and my novel I thought that my work was done. I then found out that my manuscripts had to be formatted in a certain way in order for a publisher or producer to even look at them. I had to learn the correct fonts and spacing. I checked grammar, capitalization and punctuation. I went over them each hundreds of times until they became of professional quality. Then I had to copyright them with the Library of Congress and register them with The Writer’s Guild of America! The cost of this was around three hundred dollars, so I had to budget myself. It was all done online and so I, who was remedial at best at navigating the online world, had to learn how to do all of those things! I persevered. I did it. The result was worth the effort. By the end of the shut sown I had written three screenplays and a novel that were ready submit to the professional marketplace. I found an awesome publisher who published my novel, THE RAIN SAID ‘SAMSARA’, on thousands of online platforms both in the USA and overseas. As a published writer I am now moving on to the next challenge: getting into the “rooms” to pitch my novel and my screenplays as films and limited series. Because the film industry has changed so much, I know I will be facing many obstacles and learning new lessons. But I know from experience that it is always impossible, until you find a way.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My work has been a great blessing and a privilege. It is where I have belonged, in the midst of hundreds of people as well as in solitude. Without my work I have been lost, as was shown to me during the years after my husband’s death. I have heard it said by philosophers that successful relationships include a “transcendent third”. For my husband and I that transcendent third was our work in the theater. When I had to go on without him the wisdom of the great mystic poet Kahlil Gibran, as documented in his writing, showed me the way until I could once again access the healing power of my own work. This was an inspiring and clarifying experience for me: it became clear that the intoxicating act of creation belongs to the artist, but the artifact of that creative process belongs to the world. Its worthiness is not for the artist to evaluate. With generosity of spirit and primal courage it must be released out into the world, come what may. The pure intention to create is akin to a prayer. And that prayer of pure intention is also our work.
The theater, and all creative pursuits, are a self-realization process which provides us with a way in which to integrate all the aspects of the human experience, positive and negative, joyful and painful, sentient and spiritual into the wholeness of our beings and our lives. It is liberation from the experience of socialization, which demands that we function through secondary impulse rather than connection to and expression of our true selves. It is an act of peaceful, yet radical rebellion. We have all heard the phrase “Think outside of the box”. The creative arts are a way out of “the box”. It is with gratitude I say that having found my path at an early age, I have never been inside the box. I don’t even know where the box is. If I unknowingly found myself anywhere near the box I am sure I was promptly driven away by the gatekeepers of the status quo. Some people might find this isolating, but it is in isolation that we create. Not everyone is born to embrace this way of life, but for those who are, there is no other way.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Risk means different things to different people at different times of their lives. There are those who are willing to risk their lives to protect and serve humanity. Those people are true heroes and stand apart from the rest of us. I have never wanted to parachute from an airplane, speed down ski jumps or drive a race car. I don’t even want to skateboard. That kind of risk is only exhilarating to me as a spectator. But within the parameters of my chosen profession I have been a risk taker. Risk is integral to the creative process. When any creative artist, including myself, stands before an audience we are facing expectations, judgement and rejection. Even so we dare to seek connection to our audience in the entirety of their being. They, who are strangers to us sitting in the dark, are expecting to be taken on an extended flight of the imagination that is illuminating, informative and transformational. To do this we must dare to attempt to connect to them in such an intimate way that their hearts begin to beat with ours, causing them to breathe along with us, to think along with us, to spiritually ascend to become us in the guise of the character we are portraying, to the music we are performing, the song we are singing or the characters we are writing about. We aspire to succeed and yet we must risk failing. We choose, over and over again, to use the totality of ourselves, in the most honest way possible to bring authenticity, purpose and transcendence to our work, because the desire for communication and connection is greater than the fear of failure. We accept that ultimately we have only ourselves and our unshakable commitment to our endeavor to offer: that being grounded in our own, unique, natural resources, of body mind, emotions and soul are what fuels our creative process, and we have to trust that it will be enough. That isn’t easy. It can be terrifying. We are willing to take this risk because we are seeking the joyful privilege of soaring on an extended flight of the imagination with our audiences, on a communal journey into an atmosphere of pure intention, to the center of the paradox, where clarity and intoxication coexist, and there are no barriers. Once you have breathed that air, risk becomes your daily bread.
There is considerable practical and financial risk to choosing a life dedicated to the arts as well. It is episodic. You often don’t know where your next job will come from or if it will come at all. When you are young this is to be expected as you find your way. It is easy to roll with the punches. But as you grow older you realize that very few artists become wealthy and famous. That cannot be the goal. The creative process itself has to be its own reward. It has to be the well spring of your existence that connects you to a pure source of sustenance that you cannot live without.
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