Born in December of 1973 to a pair of self-employed potters living off the land in the north coast town of Mendocino, California, I was raised in a world built from rugged ocean cliffs, sandbars and rivers, huckleberries, borscht and piroshky, hand-made stoneware, pygmy trees, well water, a chicken coup, an outhouse, kerosene lamps, ballet and Swan Lake's Odette, Katherine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Mozart, Chopin, jazz standards, made-up ga... more