Friday morning of the day that would wind up with the presentation of the Rome Free Academy Class of '63 Senior Play, I stole a bottle of Valpolicella from my father's cache in the basement, smuggled it on the bus in my bookbag and stashed it in my locker to be retrieved that night before the show, smuggled a second time into the boys' dressing room and finally handed around and swigged down straight out of the bottle, fortifying the male half of the cast for our big night.  It was the first intersection of what would emerge as two prominent themes in my life -- acting and wine.

Although it wasn't on my mind at the time, these happen to be the two principal domains of the Greek god Dionysus.

I'd wanted to be an actor from the time I first learned that there was such a job.  Through high school and college I took every opportunity to act in school and community theatre, and when I found myself in Berkeley at the end of my wandering years, tired of the road and thinking that it was time to start preparing myself for the rest of my life, I decided to take a serious shot at an acting career.  Jean Shelton, one of Strasberg's students from the early days of the Actors' Studio, had an acting school and studio theatre in a converted warehouse in West Berkeley, and I started studying with her.

I didn't have much money, but I did have two and a half years of unused G.I. Bill education benefits and an impending deadline to use them or lose them.  The problem was that I needed to be in a degree program to get the maximum stipend.  Being in Berkeley, it seemed like a reasonable plan to see whether I could get something going at Cal, so I found my way to the dramatic art department office, introduced myself and asked to talk to someone about graduate school.  The department chair had the time and inclination to meet me, and our interview ended with him helping me to get enrolled in an upper division drama class through the university extension as a way to bolster my application.  I also managed to get cast in a couple of student-directed plays, and shortly found myself accepted to start the PhD program in the fall semester.

Looking back, I can see that it was an easy call for the department to admit me.  As a Vietnam vet and an Hispanic-American I was worth double diversity points, and I came with my own funding since my G.I. benefits were matched by a state minority fellowship.  So for the next couple of years I had no responsibilities but to show up in my seminars and directing classes, do my assignments and direct plays.  I kept up my Method classes and acted in as many shows as I could fit into my schedule.  They were the freest and most creative years of my life.

My first year at Cal I took a seminar on Greek and Roman theatre, where I got better acquainted with Dionysus.

Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, was the god of divine madness and poetic inspiration, son of Zeus and a mortal princess, one of the many dying and resurrected gods.  The fruits of the earth were sacred to him, especially the fruit of the vine and the wine fermented from it.  At the height of Athenian civilization, only Athena herself was more important than Dionysus in the civic and religious life of the city-state.

The great spring festival of Dionysia marked the release of the vintage from the previous autumn's harvest.  In addition to contests of drinking and balancing on wine-filled goatskins, the festival culminated in a three day dramatic competition held in the amphitheatre on the side of the Acropolis.  Each day a single poet would present three new verse tragedies with musical accompaniment and dance, followed by a single short satyr play, a farcical travesty of a hero tale loaded with crude sexual and excretory jokes.  The poets not only wrote the plays, but also composed the music, choreographed the dances, and directed the musicians, dancing chorus and actors.  At the end of the festival, each judge would add a lot signifying his choice for the winner of the competition to a vessel already containing one lot for each competitor, then the winner would be drawn from among the lots, thus giving the final vote to the god.  Finally, three poets would be selected to present works at the next year's competition, one of the highest honors that the city-state bestowed.

Dionysus' worshippers believed that to drink wine was to take the god into one's own body, to experience ecstasy -- ek-stasis, standing outside oneself -- and enthusiasm -- en-theos, having god within -- the twin sensations of divine possession.  This is a close analogy to the actor's process -- embodying in oneself a different personality with its own history, motivations and choices of action -- so it makes sense that the Athenians granted sovereignty over dramatic art to their god of intoxication.  As an actor, I was intrigued enough by the connection to make the beliefs and practices of the Dionysian cult in Athens the subject of my major research paper for the seminar.

After two years of seminars in dramatic literature and training in stage directing, I was supposed to come up with a proposal for my dissertation, but that had never been part of my plan.  I exhausted the last of my veterans' benefits preparing for the comprehensive exams to qualify for an MA and advance to doctoral candidacy, passed them and withdrew from the program with my Master's.  I headed for Los Angeles with my degree, three years of professional actor's training from one of the best Method teachers in the country, and a recommendation from one of my directing teachers to his friend who was managing director of the LA Actors' Theatre.

LAAT was a non-profit professional theatre with digs on the funky end of Sunset Blvd east of the Hollywood Freeway.  It was founded and underwritten by Ralph Waite when he was playing Pa Walton on the country's top-rated tv show, as a place where he and other New York stage actors could keep their acting muscles stretched and limber while pursuing film and tv work.  By the time I was hired there at the end of the 70s, it had earned a reputation as a place where serious writers and performers were nurtured.  My job at LAAT was to read through the stacks of new play submissions, looking for works good enough to be considered for the next season's productions.

When I arrived there, Ralph had just started a weekly workshop to study classical theatre with a small group of actors that he respected, and as a member of the theatre staff I was invited to participate.  Coincidentally enough the workshop's first project was Euripides' Bacchae, a dramatization of one of the myths of Dionysus.

In The Bacchae, Dionysus takes the form of a young priest to lead a band of his ecstatic female worshippers to Thebes, the city of his birth, where his mortal cousin Pentheus is now the king.  The royal family have denied his divine parentage, repudiated his mother along with her bastard child and forbidden his worship.  When Pentheus in his pride and self-righteousness refuses his chances to repent, Dionysus exacts a terrible punishment, causing the frenzied Bacchantes, led by Pentheus' own mother, to sacrifice the young king by tearing him to pieces in an echo of the god's Passion, but without the god's resurrection.  The play is a compelling caution against denying the power of the emotive and irrational aspects of human nature.

Ralph brought in a young Polish director, Yurek Bogajewicz, to work with the group.  Yurek was a graduate of the Warsaw Theatre Academy, trained and experienced in the innovative techniques that had placed Eastern European theatre on the cutting edge of contemporary dramatic art in the 60s and 70s.  After the LAAT Bacchae project was done, Yurek invited me to participate in his masters' class for actors, and I continued to work with him during my years in Hollywood, extending my Method training with exercises and techniques for making full use of the actor's physical and emotional resources, ekstasis and entheosiasmos in action.

I had moderate success as a professional actor in LA.  I landed my first tv job, a small speaking part on an episode of a short-lived sit-com, within a few weeks of arriving in town, and half a year later got my first SAG role as an undercover cop on a movie-of-the-week.  I averaged five to eight days' work a year on cop shows, a beer commercial, day work on a soap opera, enough to rank in the top ten percent of card-carrying film actors, not nearly enough to live on.  Regular stage acting with small theatre companies kept the creative juices flowing, but that was for showcase, never for pay.  When Bryn volunteered to make parents out of Risa and me, art and dreams of stardom came up against hard reality and hard reality won.

Seven years after making the move to LA, we relocated back to Northern California, landing this time in Sonoma, heart of the wine country in Jack London's Valley of the Moon.  Dionysus country.

I'd gotten interested in personal computing as a hobbyist in our last couple of years in LA and had taken some programming classes at the local junior college, so after giving up professional acting I was determined to get into IT work.  I was lucky enough to land a job right in Sonoma with a small company headed by a guy who'd written some of the earliest business automation systems for wineries.  Living in wine country and serving people who made fine wine seemed to me like right livelihood, dedicated to another aspect of my favorite Greek god.  And the job came with a significant perk -- free supplies of some of the best hand-crafted premium wines to be had anywhere.

Still, giving up acting as a profession felt to me like failure and I took it pretty hard, harder even than I allowed myself to realize.  For five years, I couldn't bring myself to go to a play, let alone take advantage of the opportunities presented by the local theatre companies.  But when Bryn was seven, I took her to an audition to play a fairy in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to be presented on weekends over the summer at the Buena Vista winery.  Once there and hearing others read that beautiful verse, I couldn't help myself, I had to participate.  I ended up playing Bottom to Bryn's Moth in the winery courtyard that whole summer, and by the time another year was out, I'd acted in three plays and directed two more.

From then on I stayed involved with local theatre companies, acting and directing, teaching acting classes at the community center.  Two summers later, I joined the board of the Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival, which was starting a partnership with the Gundlach-Bundschu Winery, the oldest family owned and operated winery in America.  The winery already had a long-standing association with the Dionysian arts -- in the late nineteenth century the Gundlach family sponsored an annual Bacchanalia with plays, music and a costumed pageant celebrating Bacchus and the joys of wine.  Antique photos of the celebration are displayed in their tasting room, and they still bottle wines under the "Bacchus" label.  We built an outdoor stage on a hillside overlooking the vineyards, where we presented three plays in repertory every summer.

By now I was the product manager for all my company's winery software running on personal computers, which meant that I wrote and maintained the programs and provided customer support, since there wasn't anyone else for me to manage.  The system ran under DOS, but when Windows 3.0 was released, it was apparent to me that the future of small business computing would be on networked pcs running Windows.  My boss didn't see it that way, he was married to the model of centralized heavy iron serving dumb terminals, so we parted ways.  One of his salesmen joined me in starting our own company to build a suite of Windows-based winery management applications.  The gamble paid off, and for the next sixteen years I continued to serve Dionysus professionally as an IT vendor and consultant to wineries and artistically as a theatre artist and teacher.

The circle closed neatly two years ago when an independent film company came to Sonoma to make Bottle Shock, a movie loosely based on events that established California as a serious rival to France in producing world-class wines.  They were looking for local actors to fill out the small roles, and I landed a two-line part as a wine merchant.  It was both exciting and unnerving to think about working in front of a camera for the first time in twenty-five years, I didn't want to come across as an amateur and leave the crew shaking their heads, wondering how a bozo like me got in the door.  As it turned out, for the couple of hours it took to shoot what would end up as about seven seconds of screen time, I felt right at home, a pro among pros.  Not too significant in the grand scheme of things, but I got a feeling of closure that I didn't know I'd missed, a wound healed that I'd forgotten was still open.

Last year a software company from Canada came into town with dollars made fat from a favorable exchange rate and made my partner and me an offer that we couldn't turn down.  And last semester the community college where I'd been on the part-time faculty for three years, teaching acting and directing plays, ran afoul of the California budget crisis and restuctured their curriculum without a place for me.  So now I'm retired from the wine business, and for the last six months I've been without an artistic venue.  But I still find occasions to honor my patron Greek god with the mindful appreciation of his greatest gift, holding it to the light, swirling it lightly in the glass to release the bouquet before bringing it to my nose, sipping enough to wash over my teeth and the tip of my tongue, then to the back of the throat to savor its complex blend of subtle tastes on each area of the tongue and palate, and finally the lingering aftertaste.

And next week we start rehearsals for Born Yesterday with a newly formed non-profit theatre company here in Sonoma.  I'll be playing the Broderick Crawford part.

Thanks, Dionysus, for a good ride so far.