Occupation: I’m a dance caller for traditional social dances like 18th Century dance, contra dance, folk, and square dance. The band I work with is The Reel Thing. We go all over the tri-state area and other New England and Mid-Atlantic states. I teach and lead dances, workshops, and balls for schools and other organizations, and for anyone who wants to have a dance. I also do desktop publishing and consulting.

Family: I’ve been married to Bill for 18 years. He is the guitarist for The Reel Thing. Our son, Alex, will be a sophomore this year at Newtown High School. My parents and sister live in Norwalk, and my brother and his family live in Catskill, N.Y. We’re all very close.

Pets: We had a wonderful Brittany spaniel named Abbey who passed away 4½ years ago and now we have a 3½-year-old golden retriever named Skipper, who is the most loving dog I’ve ever owned. Jaspurr is our 5-year-old cat that we rescued. He fit in my hand and still had blue eyes when we rescued him. Now he’s about 18 pounds. And we have one Betta fish.

How long have you lived in Newtown? We moved here in 1992 from Woodbury.

What do you like to do in your free time? I love to read — there’s never enough time to read. I work out at designerbodies in town. I listen to music and we have traditional folk music gatherings at our house. Music is the next best thing to dance. I also love oldies from the 50s and 60s, and Gilbert and Sullivan. I’m also a reader at St Peter and Paul Orthodox Mission, just over the line in Bethel on Route 302.

Do you have a favorite book? I always have more than one book going and I always have a book on tape when I am in the car. I just finished Possession by A.S. Biatt on audio. I had the book out at the same time, read a little of it, and then started listening to it on tape. In listening to it, I realized how rich the language was and I might have missed that if I was reading to find out what happened next.

Do you have a favorite travel destination? I love Hungary. I love the country, the cities, the food, the people, the culture. I’ve been there twice. I also fell in love with Brittany, France. You feel like you’ve gone back 100 years. The other places on my list to visit are Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. As a family, we love going to Cape Cod.

What is the best thing about Newtown? The Edmond Town Hall Theater, especially with the new seats; the Organic Farmers’ Market; the coffee houses where they know me by name and drink; and the Alexandria Room at Edmond Town Hall. It is so simply elegant.

Who do you most admire? Other that the usual ones that I think everyone should admire like Gandhi, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, and Einstein, I would say Jacque Cousteau, Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, C.S. Lewis, and one other important one, Randy Pausch, who died recently. He gave the Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. These people have fully lived their lives. Most were just people with a simplicity and humility about them. They’ve had an incredible impact on the people around them and have left the world in a better place.

Do you have a personal philosophy? I have a couple of them. One is from Snoopy in Peanuts by Charles Schulz: “To live is to dance, to dance is to live.” And Plato: “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

What is the most important lesson you have learned? When I was young, I devoured all the biographies of women that I could find. One of the many things I got from them was that anything is possible. What I discovered later is that more than anything is possible with faith.