Bob's Story, Spring 2025

My passion, I discovered in high school that I loved, two things I loved the most was education and the Arts. Especially much more the performance arts, you know, once I had this transitional moment in high school where I came out of my very shy shell, I was involved in all the plays and all that kind of performance and things that were available in high school, I continued that on later. But interestingly in my life, even though those were clearly my passions, I took a very, very long detour. I found myself hating the work that I was doing, so I found myself at 45 years old, without a job, and I said it's time for me to do something really different, and my passion didn’t come to mind. I don’t know why. But I had decided that I was gonna train myself for three months doing rooms and then get a job in construction, as far away as what I had been doing with my life and as far away from my passion as it could possibly be.

And that summer, my youngest child, my son, was in a nature summer camp, and we had the family cookout the last night, and we were sitting around the fire, and this person I knew from my mental health life that I knew from the Department of Mental Health, came over and was talking to me. And he said, ‘I heard you don’t have a job, you’re not working,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I’m thinking about doing something really different.’ And he said, ‘You know, you should call this person. Someone I had worked with previously said she has all these creative ideas, you gotta get together with her.’ So she called me the next morning, and I said, ‘Sure, I would love to get together and listen to your ideas, that would be really fun, I’d love to support them.’

Thank goodness the universe had something different for me in mind, and in the end of all this, the lesson that I learned is that sometimes you have to listen when the universe tells you something, you have to be open. I was really positive and supportive of many ideas she had told me, but said I wasn’t really interested. And then, we were getting up about to pay the bill, and she said, ‘You know what, I have one more idea,’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ and she said, ‘Well!’ She said, ‘You may not even know this about me, but I went to a performing arts school. I was a visual artist, but I went to that school, and I always wanted to create a school for the arts.’ And it was just this amazing moment for me that something I have always dreamed about, running an arts school, and she said to me, ‘But no, that’s what I have always dreamed about!’ And it turned out we had the exact same dream.

It was meant to be, and I fell into this passion that I had my whole life, and for the next 15 years, I built that school and led that school, and God, I enjoyed it; it was just the most fun to have my actual passion be part of my everyday life. I got to be on stage, I got to watch performance artists and visual artists doing work all the time. I got to feel like we had created an educational institution that would last. It’s now 27 years old, the school. It still graduates a class of 60 or 70 kids a year, a lot of them who are very successful in the arts. So I was very lucky, the way I got there was the universe kicked me in the butt and said, ‘You’re gonna do this whether you want to or not,’ and again, with the help of this friend to create this school, I learned the lesson about listening.