Profile

Self portrait

I live in beautiful Bucks County, Pennsylvania, situated nicely between Philadelphia and New York City. Last year I moved back to the family farm to take care of my aging parents. I’m enjoying living in a 200-year-old converted barn. It’s a great open space with cathedral ceilings and original wooden beams everywhere. I share the space with my husband, two dogs, five cats, four snakes, and a Hermann’s tortoise named Tortellini.

On a snowy day

I work near Princeton, New Jersey, at a Montessori school as a visual and performing arts teacher with pre-kindergarten- through 5th-grade-aged students. I am a sometimes upright bass player, and I have two grown daughters who make me proud.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here’s a video of me playing the upright bass with my husband, Patsy, on the ukulele. This was recorded during the Frank Schaefer Memorial Concert in Provincetown, MA.

A person who was an early influence on my life was my first-grade classroom and art teacher, Mrs Leutweiler. She always made a big fuss over my art, taking drawings home to her husband to brag about me. I remember seeing the contents of her desk drawers—pencils, erasers, rubber bands, supplies all organized in neat compartments, and this made me realize that I wanted to be a teacher just like her.

Some thirty years after my first-grade experiences, I happened to bump into Mrs Leutweiler in a store. I proudly told her that she had influenced me to become a teacher, but she looked slightly disappointed at that, saying that she thought I should be doing my own art work. I wanted to be the same sort of positive role-model for young artists that she was to me, so I became a teacher, but her continuing example has led me to revisit my own artistic interests, as shown in this blog.