Naomi began her story by putting on a character mask that she had constructed. In a reversal of roles, she became that character telling me about Naomi’s educational background. It was a wonderful way for her to ease herself into the interview, and to help her reflect while revealing herself to the video camera and me.

Well, well, I think I know you don’t I? Oh now, it all comes back to me. She was a young whipper-snapper and you (referring to me) worked with special children, is that right? What would you call them? Physical challenges and handicaps? And we’re here to find out about Naomi and how she fell into being a mime artist? She is kinda shy about blowing her own horn, so that’s why I am here. She thought it would be easier because we are almost connected. We’ve known each other so well. She said that it would be fine if I spoke for her on her behalf.

Naomi as the mask character, continued on with Naomi’s story about her background as an educator/artist and her current professional status.

She (Naomi) left school very early. She was very bored at school, always daydreaming. She found out herself, her brain wasn’t very good at school. She found the Arts at nineteen. In mime classes, you know she loved the discipline and routine. When she was young, she was a ham, and was always entertaining for the family. She never knew that was her calling until she went to this first mime class.

It was her dear friend, Paul Gaulin who was her first serious mime teacher. He studied with Marcel Marceau and Marceau’s teacher, Etienne Decroux. So she got a good cross-section of pantomime and corporal mime from Paul. She also learned how to teach through his school and went on to travel, to Hong Kong twice, Japan, off-Broadway, and New York! A wonderful career! She performed mostly, but she taught in Shanghai China for a group of actors there and it was just a fascinating experience.

I asked the mask character to tell me if Naomi was a natural teacher. "Oh, yes. She feels very comfortable and loves to teach. She’s always told me that. Something we have in common. I love to teach, too."

Now where were we? Oh, she worked with Paul and then she had this feeling part of her that needed to branch away from the initial tree you grow from. You need to branch up and try your own thing and she did. She formed a few companies and toured around in schools and she found ‘masks’. Her friend made masks and she put them on.

The exciting thing was that up until that time she didn’t have a voice and once she put on a mask, bingo, all of these characters jumped out! So, that was a new and exciting avenue. She started to make masks and meanwhile she took clown classes with a very interesting fellow named Richard Pochinko. In his class, you make a series of six masks with your eyes closed and that seventh is your clown face. It comes through the whole process of doing your six. Each number means something special to you. That really hit home for her!

A fellow named Barry Karp, just a wonderful teacher, introduced her to Italian Sartori Masks. That’s going back fifteen to eighteen years. And then she was really able to branch out into her own thing. Up to that time, Mime was a really a great teaching tool but performing was somehow limited in its own way. She never really grew into her own thing until she met the masks and then she added sign language, and singing (she loves to sing).

I asked the character mask to take me on that little journey and end up where she was presently. The mask continued to speak. "Well, really her influences were Paul Gaulin, Richard Pochinko, and Andy Malcolm who made masks. After touring with Paul Gaulin’s company and her other School touring companies, Theatre in Motion, The Leotards and Nobby Kabota, she branched out on her own and then went solo."

Now she works with her husband on integrated arts, conflict resolution, as well as her own work in commedia dell arte, mime and mask workshops. Although she has just apprenticed in conflict resolution, this year she is going to do her own program using mime, mask, sign language and song. And now she has a wild scheme to create a school that teaches totally through the Arts. It’s a pipe dream but heck…she started a music church and she wants to marry people and perform funerals.

She broke into working with "little kids" because people just kept asking her if she would teach young children and it evolved from there. She has developed a new science show called, "Nurturing Yourself through Nature" for the Primary Grades, which is all about life cycles of butterflies and frogs and insects. In her words: "It’s really fun; I love doing it and I wear my masks and use storytelling, singing, sign language. So, it’s just a beginning and I hope to "link in" more and more with the curriculum."

I don’t know if you know that part of her that loves to sing so much that she hopes it could be a vehicle to put her spiritual work into her shows. Her heart bleeds for those children out there these days; with lots of problems from ADD (attention-deficit disorder) or ADHD (attention-deficit, hyperactivity disorder) to abuse, to suffering from neglect and low self-esteem, and the teachers and parents are having so much trouble containing these children that they resort to drugs. So many children are now on Ritalin. It is very scary. The teachers are so stressed out as some of them have up to eight needy children in one classroom. I don’t know how they cope.

At this point, Naomi was ready to continue her narrative without wearing the Mask. Over the years as a performer and teacher in the schools, she had found that Arts-in-Education was her niche in life. "I really love the challenge of linking the curriculum and important issues like conflict resolution with the Arts to teach and entertain young people." Every show she has written is aimed at Arts Education.

Naomi has not always worked with young people. She first worked with adults. She taught adults for about five years at a year-round school; they would get her jokes and things quickly moved along. Also, when she worked with teenagers who are really serious, in an Arts school, she found that it was just another world.

When she worked with tough teenagers, she could find the way in and crack the ice. "It can be potentially the class from hell and they just break open and they are fantastic and the teacher comes up after and says, ’I can’t believe that! I’ve never seen my students respond so positively to any kind of theatre workshop before’."

When Naomi taught conflict resolution, she was an apprentice for a year and a half and that was the time when she really started getting "spooked". She said that, "she would usually do one - shot deals or two weeks in an Arts school but then she was in a school for a few months that bordered on a really rough area. She started to see the major problems and would leave quite depressed every day and part of the reason why she would leave in such a state was that her son also was in trouble and she didn’t know how to help him." She felt like a hypocrite. "You know, having a troubled child at home and not being able to help those kinds of kids at school was a very trying time for me."

Naomi writes about her philosophy in her artist’s statement for the Ontario Arts Council:

In these scary times, when Arts are so threatened by budget cuts, I feel even more motivated to keep them alive, especially for our young people. Children seem to be surrounded by more and more entertainment and education coming from a screen. I feel that the lure of technological advancement is creating a subtle atrophy of the human body, mind and spirit. It is our role as Artists to find ways to inspire the imaginations of young people and to keep them in touch with their creative selves.

There are days when I feel like a dinosaur on the verge of extinction, but I have decided to become like a cockroach, the world’s most adaptable creature. I am finding ways to adapt my artistic approach to meet the needs of the school curriculum. If the Arts die out it would be like opening the window and not haring the birds singing. I don’t want to live in a world like that. I love what I do and I feel my expertise in mime, mask, and theatre has brought joy to thousands of young people, and it is through them that we keep the Arts alive.

I wondered if her personal philosophy regarding Drama-in-Education had ever changed during her career? "You know when you first start something, you are inexperienced and you are young and I was scared to death the first time that I taught a workshop." But, she became more confident. She learned how to impart information as a teacher and, eventually really became concerned about children. "I guess that was because my own child was experiencing difficulty. He’s one of the problem children, who can drive you crazy in the classroom." She was curious about why those kinds of children behaved like that in the classroom and how one could help them through Drama. "I know always when I go into classes, the teachers would say afterwards, ‘So and so, and so and so were incredible and it’s funny because they are such troubled kids. They have trouble with the English and Math and blah, blah, blah’." So, she began to realize that those were the ones she was really reaching.

You reach the other kids too. They are challenging, interesting, full of fire. Those are the kids we want to reach as well as the other ones like the quiet ones too on the side who don’t say anything and the teacher will say that this child has never talked before or hardly ever talked. And all of a sudden they are sitting there behind one of my masks and it’s all coming out.

So, she began to really become interested in the individual and how she could teach them and how she could go into the classroom with teenagers who had a giant attitude and get through to them. They treated her as an equal. "Like they respect me as a teacher but yet I try and have a playful attitude and so they see that I am not trying to be above them; I have a similar sense of humor to them; in a way I never grew up; there’s a side of me that ‘s still a kid and a teenager." She was proud of the fact that "she could go in and break the ice in any group and have a great time."

She thinks that there’s a problem with these kids these days in that there is something they are not getting. "

They are not getting the spiritual connection from their parents. They are not going to Church; not that Church is the answer necessarily but it provides something that the kids seem to be lacking. And parents are so busy, nobody is sitting and talking to them. All educators know this. We have mega problems.

She had seen a child have a seizure, which she thought was an epileptic attack. It was in a public school and the child was between 10 and 12 years old. "I thought this kid was having a fit and I grabbed this teacher that I knew and I held onto her because it was such a frightening thing to see and I asked ‘What’s wrong with this kid?’ and she said, ‘It’s just anger’." The child who was having the attack would often have to be dragged into the office in that state. In her opinion, there’s a lot of anger in children, a lot of broken homes and transience. So, they don’t have a center and she, personally, wanted to help them. This incident, for Naomi was the change in her career direction.

I was a teacher and I was doing it because that’s what I did. And then all of a sudden, I started to look at what was going on in society and in the schools. Because the schools are just a reflection of what’s going on in society to a large extent. So, it filters down and we see it in our kids. And what’s going to happen when these kids grow and try and parent other kids? It’s a bit scary.

She knows that there is the other side of the picture: "pockets of schools that were ‘just perfect’ where the teachers were great and the children seemed very well-balanced. I mean, I am sure that they have their problems too but I really thank God when I go into those schools and it kind of confirms that there is still a lot of good stuff and balanced people in this world." I agreed that we have to work in both milieux. We can’t just work in the trouble spots.

She had started to do Integrated Arts with Artists, and Musicians. Specifically, she started to work for Murray Shaeffer, a Canadian composer and things started to broaden. She found that everybody she worked with added more spice to the stew. "You know you start with a bit of Mulligan stew and then it becomes a salsa and it keeps growing and turning into wonderful things and then your repertoire becomes huge. You know what it’s like as a teacher; it feels really good; you have something there for everybody."

And, her son finally turned around. "It was his wilderness experience. He went on an outward - bound journey and for three weeks he experienced a lot of hardships, especially during a two - day solo in the woods. And he came home just a wonderful human being who was thankful to be alive."

Naomi’s initial experience with Drama as Therapy was the time we first met, and doing Drama as Therapy had not been her intention.

She had been invited by Michael Seary, one of her first Art teachers to come to Bloorview Hospital in Toronto to do white face mime activities with severely handicapped children, and she was accompanied by her first husband, Andy. The children came in to the room, all misshapen, and had no communication skills.

They were wheeled in with their Bliss boards; one kid had sunglasses on. We had never dealt with any people like this before in our lives and it was really early morning and we hadn’t had our coffee yet and we were really blown away by this situation. And then an hour and a half later, when everybody had their whiteface on, these kids were smiling and laughing and making sounds and talking to us on their Bliss Boards; it was such a rewarding experience; it was incredible. She beamed as she recollected the kids making beautiful pictures for her that day. ’I even remember the girl’s name with the sunglasses. Darlene!’

I concurred that these too were some of my best memories and agreed that I had not been trying to do this as therapy either, but merely had hoped to give the children Drama experiences because they had none previously. Naomi was surprised that I had found the same thing. She wanted to know if I had really been ‘fed’ through that. I told her that I definitely had.

From that day on, Naomi always enjoyed working with special needs people. "I’ve worked with deaf people and when you work mime with deaf people, you realize what a novice you are because these people are so natural; I mean that’s their whole world and their way of communicating so, I take my hat off to them. I just love watching them; they are absolutely phenomenal." Those experiences have helped her develop her skills in sign language that she uses in all her teaching with adults and children. " It’s so closely related to mime and it’s such a beautiful language and it makes kids think on a whole other level and it makes them empathize with people who are different from themselves and not as fortunate and it reminds them not to make fun of other people."

She told me about a special Mask character with defective vocal chords. "He can hear really well but he speaks through sign language. He’s a beautiful character that she loves and has named, Beau. And I call him Beau because I figure that he’s a gift because he allows people to experience a person with a huge handicap. Because they love him, he breaks through ego barriers." She thinks that’s the best way to get through to children with a "big attitude".

There was something important to her about Drama and Therapy that she wanted to express. It involved her experiences with clowning and explains why she doesn’t teach that mode.

It was Therapy, basically, but Richard (her clown teacher) never called it that. So it was really an amazing experience. We did masks where we didn’t look; we were blindfolded and we worked in clay and for example we did six masks and you close your eyes and say number one, in your head. This is your mantra. And when you know that you are finished, you take your hands away, open your eyes, and number one is looking at you. And it’s just incredible because you have a vision in your head and you know what number one looks like and when you look at it, it looks nothing like that at all. So, you do number one which is how you perceive the world and number two is how the world perceives you and number three and so on.

And you paint them. You’ve done color research (how does pink feel to you?). Some people love pink; some hate pink. So, you know all the colors internally. You know the rhythms of the colors and how you feel about the colors and you put your hands over the masks and you say, ‘oh, there’s pink there; there’s a little bit of green on the ears; there’s black’ and you learn how to paint them all. Then you play all the characters. What you are playing is different aspects of your personality. So, you get to see your whole range of characters and then number seven is your clown face. So, you define the colors on your own face and you get to know how to play through that pink on your chin; you know why it’s there; there’s a patch of green on your forehead; so, that’s how you figure out your clown. Then, you start doing clown turns. But, I never ever found my clown, which is interesting to me.

I wanted to know if her teacher, Richard Pochinko, had ever explained why? She thought that it was "neat. He lets you find it all." She had no idea why she hadn’t found her clown. She believed that she "could do buffoon, which is the clown of the underworld, a kind of a grotesque clown." Her mask characters have helped her find all kinds of character clowns but she hopes that her ‘real clown’ might come later in life. "Maybe that’s the last part of the journey, being the clown? I don’t know but it’s an interesting thing to strive towards and I will never be crushed if I never find my clown but it would be neat."

She felt that she couldn’t really teach clown until she had really found her real clown. This explained why she teaches everything else but clown. So, I asked her if she thinks that finding her clown is finding her true self. "She makes fun of herself in her masks all the time. She has played the old, wise woman, the little kid, who is manipulative but charming and other aspects. I think it’s playing me that’s hard. So, maybe one day?

In her classes with Richard Pochinko, she had picked up certain exercises that she found were really profound for unleashing ‘internal stuff’ a little of which she started teaching in her private workshops.

I added my own observation about students’ diminishing demand for classical mime in the schools. "Apparently it’s referred to as, Physical Theatre now in the schools because students don’t want to take mime." Naomi doesn’t blame the students for this attitude because "personally she too is becoming tired of it although it is a great teaching tool. Once you get beyond the label and the walls and balls (illusions) which turn everybody off, it’s wonderful stuff but it’s that stuff that they have commercialized which makes you want to gag, right? It’s the shopping mall mimes that turn me off."

I commented that the students really like to do certain illusions like the "wall" and "walking in through a door but I couldn’t teach it like she can. Naomi likes seeing them do it; so she still feels torn. "Because let’s face it, physically it works all kinds of muscle groups and I try and break the traditions of mime so that we can really have fun. If kids have fun and are learning, I think you really have it made." I pointed out that this was her philosophy right there! "Everybody deserves to have fun."

Naomi had started to incorporate a bit of Richard’s work in her work with adults and she also worked with, Leah Shadesell who developed the "who breath" and a few other exercises that Naomi could do with her students. "These really had a profound effect! Her students started to reach major, personal issues through the ‘processing’."

A fellow named Ted, an incredibly talented actor who was a stand-up comedian was up there performing and I started to question him because I could see people’s blocks so I wanted to get him through one; he was trying to be angry, and I said, ‘’c’mon Ted, I don’t believe you, give it to me!’ So, he broke through and got really angry and started yelling and screaming which is what I was asking him to do but he left totally pissed off because he just couldn’t handle it. He had never dealt with his anger and he came back the next day really upset about the whole thing and his voice was raw. And I said that I was really proud of him and that was great work but he was really feeling unresolved, upset and asked why was I doing that to him? So, I had to figure it out. I hadn’t had any traditional theatre training experience in my life. I’ve just done the "fringe" stuff. So, I figured that Ted was incredibly talented but he was holding a lot of stuff down and squashing it by not letting the anger go and recognizing the anger and dealing with the anger. So, I wanted him to let the lid off and deal with it and then he would grow as an artist.

So, I asked all of them to do some dream work and I asked them to ask for things in their dreams and then they might possibly receive those things in their dreams. Sometimes it works. Well, it worked for good ole Ted! He had quite an amazing dream about his parents and his relationship with them and I talked to him about it. And good ‘ole Ted made incredible leaps and bounds and he was finally able to deal with his anger. And he gave me a beautiful present at the end of the year and wrote some very lovely things for me. It had been a profound experience for him.

Naomi’s therapeutic technique was spiritual. She believes that we are all connected to a higher Self, so we can just ask for guidance. She has always felt that she wanted to have the same approach as Richard Pochinko, but ultimately, she really believes that she needs to have more training and that is why she has stopped doing it.

As far as further training goes, Naomi "doesn’t want to go back to school because she doesn’t learn well through traditional methods. I don’t learn through books; I learn through people; it all has to be hands-on. She developed all of her own systems of teaching and everything that she teaches is unique, except for the mime technique which is more traditional. Naomi has, however, gone on to teach blindfold masks."

I go that far. I teach that technique which actually teaches it itself. It’s a mask from intuition; totally non-judgmental. As a student cannot see he is forced to create from his inner eye and that evokes a totally intuitive experience. And the result is so thrilling as the clay image is always so different from the inner imagination.

She also has used clay in her work with name masks and described how this activity can have a profound effect on the students.

I had a dream about my name mask. The eyes were incredible so it was like the eyes were me viewing the world and then it became the reverse where people were staring at me with these huge eyes. Some of the students loved their masks while some of them hated them. It can be a challenge to get them to play through the things they love about themselves and the things they hate about themselves. She would like to do the whole process with teenagers because she believes that "it is really a wonderful thing and in two weeks we could ‘really do it up’."

So, Naomi sees tremendous value in doing mask work with students.

She has a friend who is a teacher and he has had experiences where light has come through the room and everybody feels energies; he has actually seen people’s energies. "The work goes into La Beyonda." Her friend, however, has had to stop this work because he was getting burnt out." I specified that’s not Drama-in-Education; it is on the other hand, adults taking Theatre or Drama classes. And I asked if he calls it Drama and Healing? Her friend also teaches clown every year at a certain High school in Toronto. He starts the kids out and he moves through their blocks; and, the teacher says that it sets the students up for the whole year. If they don’t go through the process, their work is on one level and if they go through the process, they are just sailing the whole year.

At this point in her career, Naomi wanted to end her work in Drama and Therapy but still wanted to work with special needs children.

She went to a place at the Art Center in the Region of York to work with a friend of hers, "who has a beautiful Art center that deals with everybody in her Board there." So, they created a beautiful project for three different groups of special needs kids who came in to do mask work and they had a wonderful time. The principal doubted that the students would be able to do that. But "the kids just shone from the first day they came in to me and blew my friend away. She didn’t know where they came from."

Naomi had been warned that she was going to have trouble with the students. Instead, to Naomi, they were all wonderful. Her philosophy is implicit in the following excerpt from her project proposal:

To expose these special needs children to a new art form, to allow them to create pieces of art that they can wear and explore through movement, sound and voice. Through my set of character masks, they can become a range of personalities and develop a deeper understanding of human nature; how different people react to various situations; thereby, they can reflect on their own reactions to the world around them and review who they are and what causes their behaviour patterns and to learn that they have choices and they can change their mode of operation if they wish to. To develop communication skills through class discussion and have a positive, creative growth experience. To bolster self-esteem and recognize that we are all unique, important individuals.

Some pre-conceptions are lifted when the children are given new challenges and often, special needs children excel in a theatrical medium. Any chance I get to work with special needs children is very exciting for me. Their acute sense of shyness some of them had to work through just to look at you and ask you a question was a very moving experience for me that will remain with me the rest of my life. I have always found these workshops to be extremely profound learning experiences. They enrich my life, not just as an artist but as a human being as well. I am really looking forward to this project.

That brought to Naomi’s mind another "really neat project" that she did with gifted children through the center, in which they did a lot of self-evaluation through theatrical exercises.

Some incredible things happened. For example, one girl who was brought up as a really strict Muslim and her father wanted her to go in a certain direction and she was just freaking out and she just wanted to be herself and the teacher told me that she was delivering a speech in class that she’d written and she got herself in such a whirl that she hyperventilated and collapsed. She was just going through such inner turmoil.

We had a wonderful time together. We did paper bag masks. They stick on stuff that reflects who they are in society and, on the back, their own perceptions. Oh we did wonderful plaster masks! We also did the gypsona masks where you stick your interests on the outside and then we did an inner discovery through a meditation of the mask (e.g. a computer chip, a butterfly, etc.) and we painted them to represent what’s really going on inside. That was incredible and really thrilling.

I concluded that the young, Muslim girl had a positive and "therapeutic experience".

Another activity, Naomi used, that dealt with words, movement, sound effects and free verse poetry and affected a young boy in a similar way.

First the students write a poem. They figure out how to choreograph it, add sounds, etc. Sometimes I give the students the theme of growth, challenge, change, spirituality, and harmony. These reveal all the various phases of mask work from the paper bag to plaster masks. They look at themselves, at how they are perceived by society and decorate their masks accordingly. One kid taped a computer chip on his forehead and he said, ‘this class is really hard on me, because I can’t get to my computer’. It was really a struggle for this kid to stay with me. But he was a wonderful kid who added so much to the class and he really benefited as it took him out of his head and into the work of Art through gesture, masks and poetry.

His teacher had told her that one of his great challenges was that before he was going on a ski trip, he had said, "Sir, I don’t want to go. I usually don’t enjoy myself on these things. You know I’m just a computer brain, you know I’m a geek." So, the teacher said, "You’ll just enjoy yourself and become a party animal." And the boy actually did it.

The teacher was absolutely wonderful. He opened up a lot of his students. He was teaching the gifted program and they wear blinders and the parents love that. Naomi felt that these students, in particular, need the Drama component to find out that they have bodies, an imagination, and feelings.

Naomi purposely doesn’t use the language of Therapy in her work and emphasized that, "she actually stays away from it." She recollected an earlier event about a woman who had started to process and wanted to bring up some personal issues for discussion.

So Naomi tried to make that a creative experience. And actually from that aspect, she loves what she does because she doesn’t really sit there and chew over their problems, or regenerate them. But, instead, "You make them magic. You kind of see what the problem is and then you do something theatrical and magical with it and you make it a jewel and you blow it into the universe and hopefully it won’t sit on your back anymore.

I thought that was a magical metaphor for Dramatherapy!

Another story that she related to her work with Therapy occurred when "she was teaching movement leading up to mask work, and the students were lying on the floor processing some ‘heavy stuff’." Just as she was questioning in her mind if she was ready to handle this therapeutic kind of work, the phone began to ring in the studio. So, she answered it.

It was a line where I heard people from different countries. I heard people from India. Like it was a conference call from across the world. I heard all different kinds of people and, you know when you get all spooked and your hair starts to stand on end well that was what it felt like. It felt like, my friend, Richard Pochinko (my clown mask teacher who did this kind of work and who had recently passed away), was calling me and giving me the go ahead. It was so wild. That felt like a sign to her to go ahead do the work.

She doesn’t put total credence in "any of these spiritual, other-worldly experiences that have happened to her", although she finds them interesting. I asked her what would be the worst thing that could happen? She responded that the worst thing "would be somebody getting into trouble."

That’s why I don’t do it. Somebody could go into seizures and if you are not trained you could have a medical situation on your hands. People could go into shock. When you are dealing with childhood memories and incest and traumatic situations, you could put the person into a state that you can’t get them out of and I won’t do that because I don’t know how to do that. So, we make it Theatre instead."

This must be her safety net. I told her that I, too, have had some concerns about this topic. Whose fault is it if something like that happens? The answer is connected to the strength of an individual’s "ego". I said, "For example, if you and I were sitting here talking about a subject that could "trigger" a reaction in either of us. But, we can only prepare for that possibility."

But Naomi does feel responsible in any case. "I take it upon myself, if they are processing something in my class. I should have a St. John’s ambulance course so that I could revive the students if they should have breathing problems. To do the therapeutic work I would like to have someone trained from the clinical field, like a psychiatrist with me and we would be able to do it together. Have someone qualified with me; that would work for me."

Naomi believes that students need to experience the processes of Drama in their educational lives. She had read about people in the Educational Drama field, also researchers, who have really thought about the question of the need for Drama in Life/Learning.

It’s amazing what Drama can do for kids. I’ve seen it first-hand. If you cut off Drama and Theatre to the world, I liken it to, if you open the door and you don’t hear the birds singing anymore. I mean that’s what a big loss it would be. It’s such a part of our lives. And now that there is television and all that one and two-dimensional stuff, kids are not having real experiences. I think it’s ever more important that we put these kids in Drama. Their imaginations are dying. You know that if we cut off the TV’s or limit the hours they are watched, things are going to start re-developing and re-growing in their minds and that’s all to do with Drama. If you take The Arts away it’s going to be a sad world. I don’t want to be here if that happens.

Naomi hopes that Artists like herself, will be the resource people for implementation of the new curriculum. She feels sorry for those teachers who have no additional training in the Arts, and all of a sudden, the curriculum lands on their desk.

I would be scared too if I was one of them. It’s a valid fear. How could you go from teaching one way and overnight to teaching another way when you do not have a clue how to do it. So, I pray that it will be kept alive as my first love is Arts Education.

However, the government cutbacks could destroy her career because all of her funding comes through the schools and grants. So, she is going to try and integrate it into the curriculum more and more and her first one will be science. "Then I can get the spiritual aspect of all the animals and how nobody is better than anybody else, yet we are all wonderful and unique."

Naomi thinks that "some teachers are amazing and that people should go into the classrooms to see exactly what teachers really have to deal with."

Like some classes are called classes from hell and it’s really true. How can the poor teachers deal with kids that can’t sit still and focus? I’ve seen them. Some of them find the balance and get these kids on track. I tell you I could not do it! And would not want to do it. You have to be an exemplary teacher. You have to be a psychologist, a psychiatrist; you have to be everything. And that’s why I think that everyone who bitches about education should go in and spend a week in the classroom and see what some teachers have to deal with.

Naomi, feels if children are learning and having fun, you’ve got it made! This is how she defines Dramatherapy. "You go into classes and you see kids who are having trouble for various reasons and you just try and help them; you don’t put them down. " Seeing the good in everybody is one of her faults. To her, it is important to remain open to everybody and let each know that everybody has their path in life to walk and some are more difficult or more challenging and if somebody is having a lot of trouble, it is not necessarily his fault.

She feels very fortunate because she doesn’t think that she would have come as far in her career if she didn’t have a son who had experienced major problems. She thinks that he was sent to her in order for her to learn how to help other kids like him. " It’s hell and it actually made me physically sick sometimes when I saw my kid having trouble and I couldn’t help him. So, she can sympathize with, the kids, their teachers and their parents too."

Naomi feels that she has been lucky with the kind of response she has had to her work. People who she has never met have said, "I’ve heard about you. Everyone says really great things about your work!" And she also feels happy that she chose the career she did.

I feel blessed that my good ‘ole mom steered me into it originally because I was like my son. I too did not have any interest in academics once I hit fourteen. My brain was out the window and the only thing that held me was ‘hands-on’ activity. Mr. Seary’s Art class was just about ‘it’ when I was in high school and when I was a kid, it was science and animals.

And I guess my big goal now (in a way it’s like a pipe dream) is to have a school for kids that are like I was, like my son was, where kids in grades nine or ten and kids even younger who can’t cope or concentrate in the regular classroom; have everything taught through the Arts and see how that goes. She thinks that you should have three quarters of things taught through the Arts and one quarter should be regular to ease them into a regular learning situation. If you do it all through the Arts they may never be able to make that transition on their own.

Naomi ‘s future plans are to keep spreading the messages of Peace, Love, Caring, Sharing through her Conflict Resolution Workshops. These will highlight anger management, empathy and acts of kindness through ‘Chill Power’, a program originally developed by Bruce Miles. Her show, ‘Chill Power: Hot Issues-Cool Solutions’ is with Paul Gaulin, and Rita di Ghent and helps children make good decisions in dangerous or morally compromising situations re: drugs, gangs, crime, violence, etc. to become creative problem-solvers.

I really care about kids. They have provided me with a mirror to the world. Everything society does filters down and to some degree affects our children. There are many disturbed kids out there and the teachers are having a tough time. It is my goal to help these children through my work. I believe they need to be heard, to feel respected and thereby learn respect for others. They need to feel that they are special, unique individuals with something important to contribute. I feel our role, as Artists is to help them get through their blocks and find the joy in life through their unlimited well- spring of creativity. Artists are like doctors; we relieve stress and write prescriptions of well-being through color, sound, movement and self-expression.

She is also hopes to develop a new show with her own children and her extended family "since they all love to sing and dance and do mime to help her spread the Good Message." Also, this show will feature a Blues, Soul, Gospel singer, Elaine Kilpatrick who is "indescribably fabulous, very spiritual and totally committed to helping the world and especially, the children."

Finally, she sees The Music Church making a revival. She believes that her ceremonies are ‘a calling’ which she loves and sees this kind of work slowly growing. It seems that her spiritual goals and her career goals are merging. It is the ‘helping’ nature of Naomi’s work, her philosophy, and especially her unique use of the mask medium that connects her to the foundation of this thesis.