About Me.

It started on a two-octave Sears keyboard in a mobile home in Indiana. Now I live on the right bank of Paris with my husband and help others make their own leap.

The distance between those two points? That’s my story.

The Pattern

I’ve spent my whole life learning things the hard way, then turning around and teaching others what I figured out.

Music came first. I taught myself piano on that Sears keyboard because my parents couldn’t afford lessons. The rock roads and hilly highways of Indiana became my commute as I rode my bike to band practice or to church where I was the organist. By fifteen, I’d taught myself a dozen instruments, was conducting the high school band, and playing taps at military funerals. By college, I was studying piano and oboe while pursuing a diploma in arts management and piano pedagogy.

Then came the internet.

In the early 1990s, while most people were still figuring out AOL, I was teaching myself HTML — hand-coding websites in text editors, learning by experimenting. I saw the wave coming and I rode it. By the time Google existed, I’d already built several websites. I was fascinated by what the web could do — for my career and personally — and I wanted to help others see it too. So I built a hundred more sites.

That pattern repeated. In 2008, I started selling digital products online — courses, guides, downloadable resources — and focused on digital marketing instead of just arts marketing, gaining several remote clients. “Digital nomadism” wasn’t widely known yet, but that’s what I was becoming. I learned the tools, built the systems, and taught others how to do the same.

Now, I’m applying that same early-adopter lens to AI—helping people use these tools to reclaim their time and amplify their creativity, just as HTML did for the web in the 90s.

The Career Before Paris

I built a successful career in America. Two decades of marketing work at some of America’s “Big Five” and Top 10 orchestras (San Francisco Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra) and in retail and hospitality. I spent millions on marketing campaigns, managed teams of 30+, generated millions in revenue, and met dozens of celebrity musicians. I even became a certified tour director. By every external measure, I was doing well.

I had achieved the ‘American Dream’ by every standard metric—spending millions on campaigns and managing teams of 30+. But by 2012, I realized I was living someone else’s dream, while mine was still sitting in a 16-year-old’s memory in front of the Palais Garnier.

I’d first seen Paris at sixteen, on a high school trip. Made a promise to myself, mouth wide open in front of the Paris opera house, the way romantic teenagers do: Someday I’ll live here. Then I went home and spent the next thirty years visiting France when I could. I moved around the USA: nine cities in five states. Success that, while rewarding, felt increasingly like it belonged to a different version of me.

In 2012, a friend finally said what needed to be said: “Why don’t you just shut up and move there and stop wanting to?”

The Leap

So in 2013, at forty-five, I quit my full-time job, sold everything that wouldn’t fit in two suitcases, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris.

I had no real plan. No job waiting. No apartment lined up. Just the promise I’d made to myself at sixteen and the willingness to force myself to make it happen.

The first year was brutal. I’ve written about it elsewhere — the bureaucracy, the language barrier, the humiliations that come with being a competent adult suddenly rendered incompetent by everything from verb conjugations to bathroom-related faux pas.

But here’s what I learned: the French respect people who try, even badly. The mistakes are how you earn your place here.

What Thirteen Years Built

Survival in Paris requires agility. I took the systems-thinking I’d used in American boardrooms and applied it to the cobblestones, eventually managing nearly 50 Airbnbs across the city. By applying my marketing background and building new systems from scratch, I was able to almost double the revenue for those properties.

I worked as a relocation consultant for the most established American agency in Paris before striking out on my own, helping Americans navigate the move I’d barely survived myself.

I’ve learned which real estate agencies are trustworthy and which are predatory. Which shortcuts actually work and which are traps. Which neighborhoods are for the tourists and which will make you feel like a local.

I’ve continued teaching and making music — singing and conducting with the Paris gay men’s choir, directing Broadway musicals when I get the chance. In 2020, Expatriates Magazine named me Best Music Teacher in Paris. A strange and lovely full-circle for the kid who started on that Sears keyboard.

Moving to Paris wasn’t just relocation. It was reinvention.

What I Do Now

Paris remains my passion. Over a dozen years of living here — and nearly forty years since my first visit — has given me knowledge you can’t get from guidebooks:

• ParisDiscovered : A comprehensive digital relocation guide for the DIYer who wants the blueprint. Everything I wish I’d known, organized so you don’t have to learn it the hard way.
• Relocation consulting : For the person who wants a hand to hold through the red tape. The friend in Paris you don’t have yet.
• Custom tours — Private, off-the-beaten-path experiences of the city I know intimately for the traveler who hates ‘tourist traps’.

Music continues to matter. I teach piano remotely, sing with the choir when I can, and am slowly working toward a long-deferred dream of composition.

Technology keeps evolving, and I keep riding the wave — now using AI tools to build systems, create content, and help others do the same.

The Personal

I live on the edge of Paris with my husband Robert. Our neighborhood isn’t glamorous or touristy — it’s just everyday Paris. The café where they know my order. The market where I’ve been buying vegetables for a decade. The baker who remembers that I prefer my baguette bien cuite. The butcher who remembers me because I’m the only person to ever commander un dinde from him for my ThanksGAYving dinner with friends.

This is what belonging feels like. It took years to earn it. I remember what it felt like before — when every interaction was a small performance of competence I didn’t actually have. To this day, ANY time I pass the Eiffel Tower, my eyes light up like it was the first time!

If you’re dreaming of making a leap of your own — to Paris or to anywhere in France — I understand both the longing and the fear. I know what it costs to leave a life that’s working “well enough” for one that’s a “perfect” fit.

That’s the real story. Not the keyboards or the careers or the celebrities. The willingness to keep becoming someone new.

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