Fresh out of graduate school, I worked as a children's theater performer. After that, I decided to move to Philly because I had come through it on tour and thought it was a cool city - not too far from New York, with a good theatre scene if I was gonna do the starving actor thing.

I packed up a car with everything that would fit in it. No job, no apartment. I knew five people. I had $1,000 in the bank, the kind of thing that you can only do when you're 23 years old. And I was too dumb to know any better.

A position opened up for a really unique theater program for adults with Down syndrome, called Melmark PA Players. I just happened to have the right skill set and be in the right place at the right time at the age of 26 to take on this pretty big role. We did full-length Broadway musicals without the dialogue, but they could learn choreography and sing along to songs.

I was on the cusp of my 30s and thought maybe it's time to find something a little more stable. Around the same time, I started developing pain in my throat. I saw doctor after doctor. I did some alternative therapies. Nothing was working. We thought I had acid reflux and they kept giving me more and more medication, and all it did was make me sick. It turned out that I didn't have acid reflux at all. A doctor at Thomas Jefferson University figured out that I have a rare nerve disorder in my throat called glossopharyngeal neuralgia, which not even anyone in my cohort or graduate program knows about, except for one voice professor. It's super rare, but I had to work with voice therapists, which is a specialized kind of speech therapist. Looking back, the biggest thing I got out of that voice therapy experience was deciding to become a speech pathologist.

When I was about to turn 33, I started at the UD program to be a speech language pathologist. There were a lot of things about having a theater background that were transferable. Anyone who has been an actor or singer has studied voice, just not necessarily from the perspective of a clinician. We're treating someone who has a disorder either from extensive use of their voice for professional reasons - teacher, performer - or maybe they have Parkinson's disease, or other things like that. In a formal acting program, they also teach you a lot about speech and articulation: ‘Moses supposes his toes are roses’ kind of thing. I think those are probably the two biggest reasons you find that people from a musical theater, theater or opera background often work their way into speech pathology. I had the unique experience of having also worked in special education, so it was really dovetail for me because they talked about things like Augmentative and Alternative Communication, which we call AAC, that spreads across OT and special ed, too

I think my strongest interest lies in voice just because I feel the most confident about it, because I've studied it as a singer and actor, but I definitely have a real passion for helping people with disabilities, intellectual disabilities and people in the autism community.

I just want to help people. I want to help make their lives better in whatever way that means for them. I love that we can do it from birth to death. We work with newborns, with people in hospice, and literally everything in between. And it's so broad. You can go back and forth between these populations. You're not pigeon holed into one for your whole career. I love the flexibility. And I love the fact that I'm going to be a man in the field. There's not enough of us and I think that there should be more of an example that men can be in caring fields and nurturing fields and that it’s not just women's work."