I did it my way. I was a semi blind tap dancer and singer and actress and song writer and play write. It was all I knew how to do or wanted to do. My life was show bidness. I started singing in church when I was 4 and have not stopped since. I was legally blind at the tender age of seven. I passed as sighted most of my life until I couldn’t anymore. Most people who have some sight do that as long as they can. It’s something about not giving in or up. In the 70’s and 80’s it was about survival in an unforgiving business. “What? You are not perfect. Get out.” So I lied, I conned, I played sighted for a long time. I got quite good at it, I must say.

I was usually always poor because when you’re in the arts you are most often doing it for love not money-not real money anyway. Ah, the bohemian lifestyle which means you and all your friends have no money. But who needed it! We were happy in our misery. I lived in New York City for nine years in my twenties and thirties in the glorious 70’s and early 80’s. What a time. Learning how to tap dance from the old black hoofers like Honi Coles, Sandman Sims and Chuck Green. There were about 10 of us white girl-tappers and we brought them out of retirement and made them teach us what they knew. Steps from the 30’s and 40’s before tap dancing died. I couldn’t see their steps without hunching down by their feet and saying “Could you do that one again slower?” and they did. I learned. We all learned these wonderful hoofers passed down their rich store of tap dance vocabulary to us and we reveled in it. Bill “Beau Jangles” Robinson steps too. What a time! My good friend Jackie and I did a Sisteract where we would tap dance on Columbus Avenue Friday and Saturday nights with our own portable tap floor and a great accordion player. We were good. We would dance for hours for the pedestrians and strollers passing by. They stopped watched our precise crisp routines down on a 4x8 piece of plywood. They threw us dollar bills not quarters. Hey, it paid for the piña coladas after the gig.

I sang in gay night clubs with my manic-depressive gay wanting to be straight crazy as a loon husband, Gaylen. In one of those clubs I met and became casual friends with Tennessee Williams who held my hand while I sang Evitta and Danny Boy especially for him. Andy Warhol would come in with his entourage. Vladimir Horrowitz would watch Gaylen as he played the piano which made Gaylen very nervous. Calvin Klein and Steve Rubell would ogle the very young princes standing at the bar waiting to be taken home. We would sing from 9 to 3 half-hour on half-hour off. It was grueling work but the tips were good.