After a long and happy professional career home-based close to Lincoln Center in New York City I re-located to Dallas in the summer of 1997 to teach at Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts. At SMU I coached voice majors and Opera Workshop singers, taught classes in Techniques of Vocal Accompanying, and taught Italian and German diction for singers. At the end of May 2004 I resigned my fulltime SMU position to return to a free-lance lifestyle.

Though I'll remain forever a "re-located New Yorker" (rather than a "Texan"), and a Yankees fan, I have a nice life here in Dallas, and I really love the weather (despite occasional 110+ summer temperatures, given air conditioning everywhere) - no more cold, wet Januaries for these aging bones!

Looking back to when I arrived in Texas, I can now laugh at the things I learned (and am still learning) about the lifestyle here, which is more different from that in New York City than I could have ever imagined. A few examples: at first I couldn't find a baking potato less than seven inches long (everything in Texas is "BIG") in the supermarkets (which all seem to be about a quarter of a mile in square feet - good for walking exercise, at least!), cars are the only way to get anywhere, even for a loaf of bread (and there's no such thing as "meeting for a coffee or a drink around the corner"!) - car culture in Texas is second only, perhaps, to that in California.  And, now I know that "barbeque" here is a noun meaning a mixture of shredded meat and seasonings - when I first heard that we were having "barbeque" for supper, I wondered "barbequed what? chicken? ribs?"

Among the things I'm currently enjoying are coaching privately, accompanying vocal auditions, preparing Vol.II of Italian Song Texts from the 17th through the 20th Centuries (including translations and International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, to be published soon by Leyerle Publications), and creating Newsletters (as Secretary of the Homeowners' Association) for my Condo.