My Family History

My daughter is the latest generation in a long line of very colorful people. Her ancestor's origin range from a wide variety of places: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, England, Scotland, Spain, The United States of America and Germany. They have been farmers and artists, contemporaries of the Spanish Armada and the American Civil War, gas station attendants and trumpeters.

My daughter is the latest generation in a long line of very colorful people. Her ancestor's origin range from a wide variety of places: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, England, Scotland, Spain, The United States of America and Germany.

They have been farmers and artists, contemporaries of the Spanish Armada and the American Civil War, gas station attendants and trumpeters.

Mara darling, this little essay is for you. When you are old enough to read this, I hope that you will leaf through this little article that concludes this suite of short stories and maybe you will be inspired to write yourself and maybe you will be transported to different times and realize what a cool bunch of ladies and gents these people were.

Let's start with the Nilsson family, the ancestry on my grandmother's side. We have a very productive woman in our family. My mother's cousin Ulla-Britt Larsson is the daughter of my grandmother Anna's sister Ruth. My father always used to say about her that she is the kind of person that keeps a family together. She made all kinds of things for our home, there were hundreds of little things about the house made by Ulla-Britt, most special was a little sown tapestry of a Christmas landscape.

Ulla-Britt was responsible for the family history research. She kept on searching in old city hall and church archive books for the people that were married and baptized in the various communities. This family has a very renowned member. Somewhere in the past a woman emigrated from Spain to Scandinavia. We know that she was a contemporary of the Spanish Armada in the renaissance or baroque times. All this lead up to my grandmother, who was the daughter of farmers in a little house called Friskamålen (pronounced Friskamohlen). She was the fourth or fifth in line of nine children. Her father was Gustav Nilsson and her mother brought her to the world in a city called Åseda, the town of Sweden's most delicious brand of cheese. Anna Julia Sofia Nilsson was born on October 18th 1900.

Her siblings were Carl who was born in 1889. He would later found the first movie house named Saga in Sweden, where my mother often went to see her favorite movies. Calle, as he was called, took the name Albien and remained the eccentric original throughout his life, but his contacts within the Swedish movie industry was extensive. He knew the big film entrepreneur Sandrews personally and the movie actor Edward Persson came to visit him now and then.

Anna's other favorite sibling was Olof, or Olle for short. Where Calle was eleven years her senior, Olle was eleven years her junior. Little brothers are fun, especially when you can teach them stuff. There was Ruth, who like Anna knew songs and poems by heart and called my mother a gypsy once. There was Hjalmar, who died in the Spanish Flu in the 1920s' and Agnes who died in childbirth. She left her son Lennart in the care of Anna, who grew up alongside of my mother like a brother. The other siblings have eluded me. I don't remember their names.
Anyway, at Friskamålen many children were sharing a home and the first year Anna walked three kilometers to school every day. Then, when Anna was eight years old, her Aunt Emily in Kalmar asked her if she wanted to live in the city and go to a good girl's school.

She said yes. That was the beginning of 88 years in her chosen home town. She shared a house with her Uncle Thomas and Aunt Emily, who were rich relatives, and their stepson Herman. Herman got all the benefits and Anna was treated with a step motherly haughtiness. Emily asked if she wanted to call them mama and papa. Anna said that she already had parents, promptly writing her folks that she would rather be at home with mama's homemade garments than with silk and satin in town.

Good friends were not rare, though, and so life in Kalmar was fine. Her girlfriends in school kept close contact with Anna for seventy or so years, meeting annually to commemorate graduation. She studied how to play piano, which eventually would lead her to a position playing piano at her brother Carl Albien's cinema. She remembered the Mary Pickford and Rudolf Valentino movies and how the old film cameras had to be monitored by hand. The camera operator spun the wheel of the camera slower when he was drunk and so Anna would have to play Strauss and Mozart slower in order to fit the technical capabilities of the camera man.

She had a partner one day, a violinist, but apparently he nervous. His bow got caught in her hair.
Her brother owned the local restaurant Byttan (named after its' buttercup form, en smörbytta) in the city park. I gather that Anna got to play piano there as well.

To return to her teachers in school, that prompted this excursion. Syftan and Snyftan were a couple of ladies that taught in her school. Syftan always used to use her thumb to assess measurements in drawing pictures to insure the right proportions. Att syfta, to assess, gave her this name. Snyftan would cry all the time, she would get moved by everything. Att snyfta, to whimper, gave her this name. My mother and my grandmother had the same teachers in school and were taught the same things 30 years apart.

My grandmother would seem a rather decent woman and she was everything that and more. In school, however, she did behave at times like a rascal. In learning how to bake, the teacher told her to turn the cookies around and bake them from the other side. My grandmother actually turned the whole thing upside down.

One thing she learned in school stayed with her until the day she died at age 95. She loved reciting poems and songs. The French National Anthem, Lorelei by Heinrich Heine, Two Little Kittens One Stormy Night, and a thousand Swedish poems, including her own: all of these were performed at every possible occasion. Humorous was her rendition of It's a long way to Tipperary: "... it's a long way to Tipperary to the Swedish girl I know. Goodbye, Piccadilly! Farewell, Mister Square!"

Her Anglo-Saxon linguistics aside, Anna's Victorian values had been given to her by Aunt Emily and they stayed with her all of her life. Her brother Carl owned the cinema next door, but the house named Framstad itself had been inherited from Thomas and Emily. As a young girl, Anna came in contact with quite a few famous personalities due to her Aunt's prominent local status.

They owned the Tourist Hotel in Kalmar and many Swedish star stayed at the hotel when they performed at the local theater. My grandmother also worked in the hotel as a maid and this was a chance to meet the stars.

Ingmar Bergman actor Victor Sjöström came to visit Framstad and peeked in the door of her room to see her sleep. Anna only pretended to sleep and heard Sjöström say: "Look at how sweet she sleeps!" She told all her friends this in school next day and they all said that they would come to her for breakfast the next day before school, so that they could meet the famous actor.

Ernst Rolf was the most famous singer of his day, sort of like a Fred Astaire of Sweden. He had a concert in the local theater and when Anna saw him sing she thought she sang to him. "Mitt svärmeri är alltså här, men jag vet inte vem hon är. Kanske hon det det är, hon som sitter där. Hon rodnar ju, det klär." In English this would be: "My flirtation is actually here, but I don't know who she is. Maybe it's her, she is sitting there. She is blushing, how sweet."

Ernst Rolf pointed at her when he sang this and my grandmother told me about this until she died.

She experienced all the things the rest of only heard about. In 1912, she saw the news of the Titanic having sunk on the covers of the magazines. In 1914, news reached neutral Sweden about the starting of the First World War. In 1910, she went home to a friend in order to hear a record being played on a gramophone and wondered where the man was who spoke inside the machine. A local inventor presented his radio in the local school. It was a fantastic event, but unfortunately the radio didn't work at the time.

Another wonderful story was her encounter with a phrenologist at the hotel she was working at. He analyzed her veins and by that could calculate her talents. He told her that she had very good music veins.

She was also the first woman to take a driver's license in her home town of Kalmar in 1923. It cost her 5 crowns and she needed a certificate from the police that she was sober and proper. She had forgotten how to learn to drive backwards, so that lesson was added afterwards. Her first car was a Fafner with the gears on the outside. One man told his friends to be cautious when Anna drove about. She was a speed freak. 40 km/h.

It might have been true. She did stop for the horses, though. One coachman even asked her if she was afraid of the horse.

She learned German in a Girl's Pension in Wernigerode and escaped out against regulations at night to meet boys. When the Great War ended she worked in a Fuel Commission to mend poverty. She was one the most sought after type writers, writing over a hundred signs per minute. One of her most favorite colleagues was "Besvärarn", "the difficult one", who was called so because he thought everything was so difficult.

Her husband Knut Kronzell was the son of a trumpeter that founded the Helsingborg Symphony. I performed on the same stage as my great-grandfather. He was a strict man, but my grandfather Knut was a very gentle and funny man with a great sense of humor. He had a thousand jokes at the ready and used to tell them over and over. He got my grandmother to take him out by jumping up on her automobile sideboard while it was driving.

Knut had a great voice, but wasn't allowed to sing. He joined the navy and became a sea captain and eventually founded a company that fabricated steel. It went bankrupt in the fifties because of his partner's mismanagement. As a substitute, Knut became administrator for the church.

It was a different time. The so-called "originals" roamed about the counties and townships. Either they were professionals, like the odd barber with a funny expression at the ready, or homeless, like the apparently rich bum that collected bottles, or plain nuts. However, they were different and they didn't have any problem with it. One of these "originals" was Kalle Lindahl. He used to walk about with a wheelbarrow loaded with stuff in Kalmar and welcome everyone that was new to town. He knew everyone. Once he asked my grandmother how much time it was. She answered that it was four o'clock and he answered: "Good, I'll be home by three thirty!"

My grandmother was a great enemy of Hitler during the Second World War. She did have a dream, though. It was shocking to her that Hitler was very nice in the dream. Her enormous contribution to welfare organizations like the Sailor's Help and The Welfare of the Blind made her receive all the more help when her sight grew bad in her old age.

My grandmother was always my best friend. She would pick me up from school and occasionally we would meet at the local café. We had a nice sport we called Baloon-Tennis. Two badminton rackets and a balloon thrown back and forth in her living room turned into sheer heaven for this boy. Our record was 869 throws. I would be Björn Borg and she Jimmy Connors.

She lived to be 95 years of age and my times with her were the best in my life. I will always remember the maid she kept using for her birthday parties. She was still serving drinks at her parties until she reached age 85. My grandmother would also sneak up to the kitchen during the night and have a cup of coffee if she could sleep. She would grab some breakfast food directly from the package in the kitchen when she had the munchies. She loved Pavarotti and we played cards games in her kitchen. When I studied in Sweden, the weekends were always bliss. Then I could visit her. When I worked as a tour guide, the lunch break was the greatest thing. I could ride home and eat lunch with her. My grandmother was a lady.

My mother was born in Kalmar, Sweden on July 6th 1930. My grandma would still tell my mother what to do when she was 90 years old and my mom 60. Children always remain children. Early on, my mother showed in intense interests in music. She knew she was talented and so she played the main part in the school play about "The Smallest Little Santa" and danced ballet to the sounds of "The Blue Danube Waltz". The visits to Stockholm, though, were the start of her love for opera. It was there that she really started to adore what happened on the opera stage. She and her family would travel to Stockholm in order to see the greatest stars sing opera. She and her very witty father Knut would be riveted, while her brother and mother found it funny that the singers died and then went to thank for the applause. Soon enough, Gun Margareta Kronzell knew what she wanted to do: become a singer.

This led to singing studies for Ernst Reichert in Salzburg as well as the legendary Russian singer Madame Skilonsz in Stockholm after her debut as a singer in 1949 in the Cathedral of Kalmar. She moved to a tiny apartment in Stockholm's old city to study at the Music Academy, where she spent her formative years and worked with many a later famous singer. She sang in the chorus of the opera with people like Jussi Björling, toured with Eric Ericsson's famous choir and sang parts in oratories. Lasse Lönndahl was the operetta tenor turned famous pop star and he was her colleague in Stockholm.

In 1952, my mother spent three months studying in Salzburg and lived in the center of town. She here met Bishop Bonifaz Madersbacher at the side entrance of the Dome and this friendship would become the most important of her life. They would correspond and write letters to each other every time she felt bad about anything. Even when he moved to Bolivia and founded a Christian congregation there he would answer her letters truthfully and eloquently.

As soon as she was awarded Norway's Rudd Foundation Scholarship by Kirsten Flagstad, she moved to Wiesbaden and studied for Paul Lohmann. He had lost and arm in the war, but his skills as a singer gave him the greatest flexibility. He would work with her meticulously on every note and every single letter of the alphabet. Gun Kronzell worked at the opera of Wiesbaden.

From here on, she moved to Bielefeld and still speaks of this place as her greatest career experience. She first here got to sing the greatest roles. She had sung Elisabeth in "Tannhäuser" and Dorabella in "Cosi fan Tutte", but now she got to sing Asucena and Abigail. Working simultaneously at a home for mentally ill children was a wonderful change. The children gave her the reality check she needed.

After that came engagements in Augsburg, Paris, London, Paris, Recklinghausen, Lübeck, Regensburg and many other cities. Her great reviews became renowned and people spoke of Gun Kronzell as the new leading mezzo in Germany.

Hannover was fine professional place for her. By now she had sung most of the great roles: Erda in Rheingold, Kundry in Parsifal, Ortrud in Lohingrin, Brünhilde in The Ring, Adriano in Rienzi, Brangaene in Tristan and Isolde, Emilia in Othello, Eboli in Don Carlos, Dame Quickly in Falstaff, Abigaille in Nabucco, Czipra in Zigeunerbaron, The Innkeeper in Boris Gudonov, Chiwria in The Fair at Sorotchinzk, Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, Asucena in Trovatore, the mother in Hänsel and Gretel, Orpheo in Orpheo ed Euridice, the leading part in Antigone, Ludmilla in The Bartered Bride, The Countess and Madelon in Andrea Chenier, The Old Woman in Die Doppelgängerin, Begonia in Der Junge Lord and Ulrika in A Masked Ball.

To this was included a wide range of concerts and oratories and a huge repertoire of almost any composer imaginable.

1966 was a pivotal year. She studied for a teacher named Köhler and here she met a young baritone named Herbert Moulton, who had recently moved to Germany from Dublin. She found it fascinating that he always took off his shoes when he sang. They met by chance at the post office and my mother asked him if he would talk English with her. My father's joke was that he never shut up after that.

The married in Bad Godersberg and very quickly began singing together. My father taught my mother everything he knew about musical comedy and their long collaboration as the singing couple brought them not only on tour around Europe, but also to Osage, Iowa as well. In Ireland they performed on Irish TV in a talk show between a Russian spy and a prize winning cow. I was conceived during this tour. My parents were a great team.

From there on my parents moved to Graz, where my dad worked as an actor and teacher. My mom worked at the opera in Graz and had to take mother's leave simultaneously with another colleague.

I was born close to a slaughterhouse in Graz and opposite gay couple with chickens in their yard. I remember nothing of that period, but I do recall the next stop, Mödling, and my babysitter Tante Wolff with her apple strudel and her dog at whom she would always shout "Schnaps!"
My mother sang at the Volksoper in Vienna, among others a world premiere of Salmhofer's "Dreikönig".

From there on it went to Sweden, where she started working a singing teacher in Göteborg's Music Academy. Her work at the opera also included Ulrika in Verdi's Masked Ball in Swedish, which she had already sung in Italian in Hannover.

From 1979 on, she freelanced. She wrote, directed and starred in a play called "Long Live The Trolls" and this was my first acting experience. She taught organists how to sing in Oskarshamn and held church music seminars. She had private students take lessons and had big speech classes in various schools and even taught Chinese immigrants how to speak good Swedish.
Her extensive concert experience brought her great reviews and her work in the Ballet Academy wide press attention.

She played the Goddess Justitia in a communist play and even toured with a famous comedian in Swedish schools.

By 1984, she had already auditioned in two Austrian cities for a professorship and applied in three American cities. Vienna won the award and so the family moved to Vienna in 1984. This was the start of a 26 year stay in the city where she sang over 200 concerts and taught students that eventually would work with the likes of Pavarotti and end up singing at the Staatsoper.

Her wide experience made her arrange numerous appearances for her students in such diverse places as Bamberg and Langentzersdorf and even Sweden turned into a place where three Croatians became the center of media attention as singers worth a charity fee.

In 1998, she retired from the academy and kept on performing until she moved to Gelsenkirchen in 2010 closer to her son and his lovely family. She had seen them so often from a distance, so now it was time to live there herself. What a better end to a glorious career than to follow her son's career up close and personal?

This brings us to my father's family, which can be divided into two parts: the Eyres and the Moultons. The Moulton's were Scotsmen and Englishmen that eventually came with the Mayflower to America. We have a famous Moulton in our ancestry: Betsy Ross. She sowed the first American Flag for George Washington.

One of our Moulton ancestors also remembered the beginning of Civil War 1861 and told my dad about it. My great grandfather was put in an old people's home at age 96 and took the bus home. After all, there were just a bunch of old people there.

Herbert Lewis Moulton, my grandfather, spent years in the trenches of France during the First World War. He wrote letters home to America carrying his golden watch from 1912, a birthday present from his parents the year of the Titanic sinking. Big Herb, ended up as a salesman and married the daughter of an Irish girl named Nellie Brennan Eyre. Together, they settled down in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and had a son named Herbert Eyre Moulton.

The Eyre Family were an aristocrat family that founded the city of Eyreville near Galway, Ireland. The name had been given to them by William the Conqueror, because this ancestor had saved his life and given him the air to breathe and henceforth should be called Eyre.

They were party people that later would burn down their own hotel and eat slabs of meat direct off the animals on the barbecue. Two of their palaces are now haunted ruins on the west coast. The last baron to call himself that way was Giles Eyre, who was called Stale Eyre because he boarded up the windows in his house. He was apparently an alcoholic and very prone to excessive life.

During the difficult potato plague in Ireland 1848, the family fled to America.
Here the mother of Nell wrote a scrapbook in which she wrote that the laughter of little girls was the finest sound in the world.

My father Herbert Eyre Moulton was born on July 15th 1927. He went to school in Lombard at St. Petronelle's Catholic School and soon became a very great comic addition to the student council. His antics and sketches kept his friends laughing and the nuns furious.

Once, after ruining another lunch break, he was banned from the cantina all together. The next day he brought a table, a plate, cutlery, napkins and food and ate his lunch happily outside the cantina. The nuns passing by could barely conceal their laughter.

My father saw his first opera at a very early age and it was then clear, just as with my mother that he wanted to become a stage artist. In music class the following day, the nun was talking about the opera he had seen the evening before and was at fault many a time. Herbert than corrected her, whereupon the sister said: "Of course, you would know!" Herbert then, truthfully, said: "Yes, as a matter of fact, I would!" He went up to the top of the class and took over.

When he was called a worm by a nun, he went down on the floor and crawled and explained that since he was a worm he must crawl. He played the wolf in a musical rendition of Little Red Riding Hood, but was so fat that his suit almost burst. He had to sing: "For three days I have had no food, no meat, no cake, no pie!" He wondered why people laughed. At a birthday party, he emptied an entire bottle of whiskey in one gulp and ended up drunk for two weeks. It was even rumored that Nell's brother Marmaduke had contacts with the mafia. These are only a few of the crazy, coincidental tales about my dad.

After graduation, my father started studying singing and acting in Chicago. He sang in the chorus at the Lyric Opera of Chicago during this time and got to work with famous singers like Set Svanholm, Maria Callas, Tagliavini and Jussi Björling. He opened the curtain for Callas and watched her milk the applause and handed Björling his beer. Set Svanholm received a pear from the cantina after his last aria and bellowed: "You're Welcome!" Ezio Pinza pushed him away, saying "Out of my way, porco!"

Soon enough, though, my father became a name in his own right. He became Herbert Moore and was hired by MCA records as a dinner singer, performing in New York City and Chicago's Ballrooms as a Big Band Vocalist. His school pal Janice Rule went to Hollywood to film with Burt Lancaster, while Janice's brother Chuck moved to New York with my father.

The two guys lived together and auditioned together and studied acting together. Eventually, Herbert got his play "The Minstrel Boy" performed Off-Broadway.

It was the Korean War. My father got sent to Augusta, Georgia to join the military. His sergeant was a man they called Hog Jaw, who had such wonderful phrases as these on his repertoire: "It don't belong to be did that a way!" or "Men's, let go of your cocks and grab your socks!"

My favorite conversation was this:
"Moulton honey, what become of your ass?"
"Well, Sergeant, you been chewing it off so much there ain't much left!"
"Moulton honey, how about a couple of weeks in the eatable garbage section?"

My father's favorite cousin Frank had died in the Second World War. My father almost got sent to Korea, but prayed himself out of it. The fact that he was the chorus master of the Camp Gordon Chapel Choir helped. There are still recordings of this chorus.

Maybe it was the war, but after this my father had second thoughts about joining the stage life. He spent four years studying to become a priest. One of his teacher's was a man he described as "a floating boat with a cigar". He gave the students a test assignment one day: "What is God?" and added: "Have fun!"

After this excursion into priesthood, my father had a very bad year sometime in the mid fifties. His mother, father and girlfriend died the same year. He fled America to go back to his roots: Ireland.

What began as a two week vacation ended as a seven year stay and commenced what was probably his most productive professional period. Working with the likes of Milo O'Shea, Michael MacLiomore and Siobhan MacKenna, he performed in most of the theaters of Dublin and played major parts in movies. His work as a model for commercials blossomed and his Irish soul prospered. It was in Ireland he met his best friend: the stray dog Fred.

The sheepdog was roaming about with no one to his name and soon Herb and Fred were like Laurel and Hardy. It was now not any more: "Look, here is Herb!" Now people said: "Here's the guy that always comes with Fred!" I was two years old when Fred died.

Charity and the relatives of west Ireland were farmers and quite wonderful people. Whenever he was there he could stay in the house and enjoy the life on a farm. George is now, 2010, my age and would have taken over the Eyre farm by now, his agricultural skills leading him to give advice even to the hotshots of the European Union.

Herb heard all the strange ghost stories about his ancestors and how the two Eyre mansions now were ruins. He heard about how Bronte had taken been inspired to name the main character Jane Eyre after the famous Eyres of Eyre Court in west Ireland.

There were many ghost stories. Ireland is a country full of tales of haunted mansions and fairies that live in bushes. My father spent his time between commercials, plays and pub crawls with friends in his flat in Grafton Street. He would put on his nightie when his guests didn't want to leave and they would sit on his bed. Milo O'Shea gave him the nickname "Horrible Herb", but it was all in fun. His bouts on the west of Ireland, though, included dear relatives and encounters with mysterious apparitions.

An old man of the family died and his cocker spaniel howled outside his door at the time of his death.

In the kitchen of a house around three in the morning there were loud noises of a staff of cooks getting breakfast ready. In the morning, my father complained to the lady of the manor that he wasn't able to sleep. She answered: "Oh, those are the ghosts. They always make a racket of noise at that time in the morning!"

My father took a walk around the Eyre house one day and saw an old woman covered in a scarf and begging for money. She disappeared behind a corner and was gone completely.

Then there were the stories about a window banging open and shut in the ruin of the old Eyre mansion, regardless of wind or weather. A female friend of his saw an old stagecoach with people in 19th century clothing ride down the road. There were two dips in the road where the coach disappeared. In the second dip the coach was gone and did not reappear.

The most mysterious of all stories that my father experienced was after a New Year's Eve party in the west of Ireland. My father was a wee bit on drunk and, contrary to advice, he crossed a field of bushes, something the locals were very superstitious about doing. The fairies lived there, they said, and whenever they cut them down the crops died and a great famine struck the land. Important was also not to cross the field, but to walk around it.

As I said, my father was drunk and obviously drunk enough to take the shortcut home across the snowy field. Somewhere on the field my father lost track of his path and got lost in the snow. He couldn't find his way back out and started to grow dizzy. He saw lights and chandeliers and individuals in gala wear and elegant artists performing graceful songs.

He passed out on the field hours later and it was just pure luck that some relative wondered where Herb was and started looking. He was found in the field sometime in the morning the next day.

The epilogue of this tale was that he met a good female friend in Dublin a couple of months later. She told him that she had seen him in Dublin on her posh New Year's Eve Party that year. He had wandered in and looked around and not said a thing. It was very strange, because she had tried to talk with Herb and not succeeded. It was a gala evening and everyone was in gala wear.
Apparently, his soul had traveled across the country that night by help of the fairies.

A funny story concerns my dad arriving with his dog Fred at a friend's house. He was a welcome guest and the man of the house knew that he would be there late after his concert.

No one else but the man knew and when Herb arrived everyone was asleep. Fred was hungry and Herb had bought a heart from a butcher that he could cook for the dog. He had already put on his nightgown when he walked down the stairs with the heart and a knife and a lit candle.
The wife walked out of the bedroom at that moment and saw Herb walking down the stairs, suspecting a ghost appearance. My father said: "Calm down, I'm just going to the kitchen to cut up a heart!" The woman screamed. "It's all right, dear," he said, "it's my dog's." The woman ran into her room and wasn't seen for a week.

My father worked with a composer named James Wilson in Ireland. He sang his songs in concerts and wrote several librettos for operas, among others "The Hunting of the Snark" and "The Turning of the Screw".

There were a few duds, though. Among them was a bad movie named "Attack Squadron" made with lower than low-budget money. One of his colleagues uttered these immortal words during a lunch break: "They should call this movie The Nine Commandments. They left out one: thou shalt not steal."

His great sponsor during this time was his rich relative Lady Mayer Moulton, an eccentric millionaire. She advised him to do something about his great singing voice. There were marvelous singing teachers in Germany. That's where he must go, she said.

Meeting the famous Gun Kronzell was a joy to Herb. He loved opera and soon became her biggest fan. They bought an old Renault that they named Monsieur Hulot, after the Jacques Tati character. What really grew successful was their musical collaboration. Soon enough, they became like Astaire & Rogers and Kelly & Crosby and were rarely seen apart. I grew up attending their concerts. They were marvelous together.

My mother sang Ortrud in Lohingrin while expecting me and my father was mighty proud when I was born. Graz was a place where he could teach and act and pursue his freelance career. Once we moved to Vienna in 1972 he taught English and worked for the Austrian Radio producing amazing amounts of his own shows for school radio about a thousand subjects from protest songs to short stories. From American Musicals to Black People's Music. His extensive work in the theaters of Vienna continued throughout his life.

We moved to Gothenburg on 1974 and my father was active as an English theater again. Yet, commercials, movies and plays kept on being his forte. Kemp in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the main part in Sweeney Todd, plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill as well as melodramas. He played a small part in Firefox next to Clint Eastwood and introduced Tomra's can recycler to a Swedish audience. These were all things that characterized his Swedish years. This and countless concerts with my mother.

In 1984, my mother again returned to Vienna. This time, it was real renaissance for my father's career. Commercials without end made him a familiar face in Vienna: banks, wine billboards, cheese commercials, music videos by famous rock stars. They all carried Herb Moulton as a familiar face. He did movies with Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Alan Rickman, Jeroen Krabbé, Mickey Rourke, Audrey Landers, David Warner and Roger Spottiswoode. Through his work in the English theater, as an actor and program author, we were invited to all the premiere receptions and got to commune with famous people. Here, as well as in our regular visits at the Swedish Embassy Recidence we met Rue MacLanahan, Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, David Carradine, Anthony Quinn, Helmut Zilk, Dagmar Koller, Claudio Abbado, Alois Mock, Erik Eriksson, Esa-Pekka Salonnen, Nicolai Gedda, Kjell Lönnå, Elisbaeth Söderström, Princess Alexandra of Kent, Ricardo Muti, Otto Schenk and Marcel Prawy. My father was always very brave. He would wander up to the most famous person and chat them up. It has taken me twenty years to achieve that.

My father worked as an actor in Vienna's English speaking theaters. He played major parts in all the classics: A Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Animal Farm, Charlie's Aunt, Harvey, A Christmas Carol, I Can't Remember Anything and many more. Of course, his Pollonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet was full of wit and pride. His collaboration with Melinda May and David Cameron was fruitful toward the end of his life. They read poetry and prose by many a famous author and their evenings became popular cultural events.

His film work included "Mesmer", "Dead Flowers", "Wohin & Zurück", "Business for Pleasure", "Desert Lunch" and "Liszt's Rhapsody", but his favorite film was probably the all-star extravaganza "Johann Strauss" directed by Franz Antel.

He starred in the film as the Gypsy Baron - author Yokai, but his work as speech and dialog coach was probably the most extensive. There were so many dialects in this haphazard big budget film, that my father had a hard time teaching everyone to speak high British English. Audrey Landers and Mary Crosby were Americans, Oliver Tobias was British, Holecek was Austrian and Zsa-Zsa Gabor was Hungarian. Just imagine the mish-mash.

Zsa-Zsa arrived in 1986 Potsdam and had no idea where she was, being used to Hollywood. Finding out she was playing her age (72) and seeing her wardrobe of gray and brown tones made her furious. She ripped the wardrobe into pieces and had a whole array of costumes in pink and red made. When she walked on the set, someone said: "Oh, shit. Look: Miss Piggy!" My father did his best to tutor her to speak eloquent English. She finally said: "Get this awful American man away from me!"

Dining with Oliver and Mary (the leading couple of the movie) in a restaurant where Herbert was entertaining them with wild stories about his youth in Chicago was an experience. Zsa-Zsa turned to them and said: "You two are, of course, sleeping with each other!" They said that they were happily married and had no reason in being unfaithful. Zsa-Zsa said that she didn't understand this, since she never had worked this way herself.

Funny tales come from work with crazy actors. So it was with Zsa-Zsa, as well. She once told my dad that she resented her famous husband George Sanders killing himself. Not because he did, but because he didn't do it in Hollywood like everyone else.

My father became famous as the Milka-Tender-Man, making commercials for a delicious brand of chocolate that still exists twenty years later. He was even recognized in the sauna as the prominent actor from the chocolate commercial. Imagine the excitement the old senior citizens had in the local pool when told him that they saw their neighbor on TV yesterday. Of course, these bookies and bakers thought he was just doing it for fun. Little did they know that this was the finish to a glorious career of five decades as an actor.

Aside of being a great actor, my father was also a good buddy whom I loved traveling with on bikes and trains and what-not. We went to Copenhagen together to see operas and ballets, staying at the Astoria and eating Italian food before the show.

We had an evening off one day and spent it in the Italian place. My father noticed that there was a movie house named the Colloseum, where they were showing the Bond-movie For Your Eyes Only. I insisted we go and see it, so we asked the Italian waiter where the Colloseum was and after looking at us for a minute he said: "The Colloseum is in Rome!" When we told him that we looked for the movie house, he shook his head and said: "You don't want to go there!" However, we did want to go and eventually we got the right train to a part of Copenhagen that wasn't known for its' superior style. Only a few minutes into the movie we discovered we were in the wrong cinema. We were a bit confused when we saw a Terry Thomas film dubbed into French. Eventually, we changed room and got to see "For Your Eyes Only".

We had a special club and all of these trips were extravaganzas in that club's name. It was called "Club 31" and our cocker-spaniel Snuffy was a special member. Our club meetings were held behind the very well decorated and huge Christmas tree with its' Smurf City under the lower branches. We heard our old clock Gustav ticking and enjoyed the sight of the statues Norma and Hans Sachs as we munched on his colleague Francis' English Fruitcake after I had played Santa Claus. I enjoyed dressing up as cowboy, waitress, fortune teller, clown or vampire and so my performance as Santa each year came as no surprise.

Our home was smack full of books and art and living there was like walking around in a museum. My mum always told me good night stories about the trolls brothers Uggel-Guggel and Klampe-Lampe. Later on, my toy dog Ludde and his friend Linus had their adventures in my fantasy world. We included my bear Bamse and the five stuffed Snoopy toys and had a series of stories about a traveling magician named Macadabus and his bloodhound. It was great fun.
Let me tell you my story.

I was born on September 8th 1969 and was four or five kilograms heavy at the time of my birth. Therefore, I was called "der Bürgermeister" or "the mayor" in the hospital where I was born.
I had, as I said, been on stage even before I was born. My mother was pregnant with me in the seventh month when my parents had a concert singing Rodgers and Bernstein. No wonder I like music.
Althea Bridges was working at the opera of Graz with my mother and got pregnant simultaneously with my mother. We lived as neighbors and her son Sven was born just about when I was born. It so happened that Sven and I met 32 years later in Bad Hersfeld when we performed in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Well, soon after Graz we left for Mödling and its' small town charm. My memories of my father's dog Fred are scarce, but I do remember seeing him walk by my crib and being really surprised. My earliest memories include looking up at my mother's face as she wound up playing mobile toy. "Hänschen Klein" was probably the first melody I heard after I was born.

My eager will to discover the world backfired once or twice. During an aphid epidemic, ladybugs were there in the millions and my baby carriage was under hundreds of them and this is a memory I have vanquished. I did fall on a stone staircase one summer day and hit my tongue and sticking my fingers into a toaster was not exactly comic.

My mum was at the phone and speaking to a colleague she had not spoken to for a long time and heard this shriek from the kitchen. I remember having seeing the nice orange color in the toaster so many times and now I wanted to test it. I paid for it by letting my fingers rest under cold water for an hour before rushing to the hospital.

Well, my mother received her job in the Volksoper and so we moved to Vienna. I went to a Kindergarten, where the nuns were really serious. I was very surprised the sleeping break where the nun actually smiled. My time in Kalmar with my grandma was the best. I joined Ulla-Britt's Kindergarten and fell in love with a girl named Julia. I called her Hallejulia. The other kids called me "Tysken", "the German". Kalmar was Sweden to me and even when we were in Sweden we were not in Sweden until we were in Kalmar.

I knew bits of Swedish and English, but most of my linguistic knowledge was German. When we moved to Partille in 1974 I immediately learned Swedish in such a speed that my German got lost. For a while there I spoke no language fluently that my father spoke. That was all changed when we visited America in 1976. My English was complemented to perfection during those six weeks.

We visited the east coast and the mid west. I even remember making ice-cream and swimming in a lake surrounded by car tires. I remember driving through New York City and my father getting lost trying to find the U.N. building. I also remember being served something called Baseball flakes and a little dog named Wienerschnitzel. I even remember a neighbor dog named Hitler. I remember catching fireflies in the garden at a relative's house and seeing where my father grew up in Glen Ellyn. I remember the fourth of July and I remember watching Moonbase Alpha on TV. I remember going to see Dumbo in a big movie house. I remember my parents' big concert in Osage, Iowa and how I was called up on stage in my lederhosen to join in and sing the last number of the concert: "Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein!" This became my mother's standard last da capo in every concert she did from then on.

I started first grade in a catholic school in 1977. After having gone to a wonderful kindergarten in Partille, we moved closer to my mother's job in the music academy in Gothenburg. My best friend was Julian Reyes, a good looking guy from Columbia that later would move to Canada and become a bartender and model. My best friend from Partille remained Olle. My summer friend was Claes-Håkan, who spent his summer holidays in Kalmar with grandma just like me.

Anyway, I was quite busy. The English speaking children received home language education after school. It was with one of these children, an Indian-English girl named Sophia, that I attended jazz dance class. My teacher was a pretty woman named Susanne and I kept on taking lessons from her until her colleague Bosse Westerholm took over. Every year they had a Glenn Miller Show with tap and swing numbers in a theater in the center of Gothenburg. This show was a must every year. In addition to all the other great art influences I had, this was one catalyst in my artistic creativity.

I kept on taking dance class pretty much consecutively throughout my life until I was 16. I wrote poetry and drew pictures and fabricated stories. I danced an Austrian "Schuhplattler" dance in a school play and there was naturally a lot of music at home, me playing the flute and my mother playing the piano.

My mother's initiative to set up a production of her play based on her good night stories impressed me. It took amazing courage to resign from the academy and become freelance. She had the costume sown by a professional and the evil magician's cape done in real silk. The boots of the trolls were covered with fur bits that were donated from fur shops. We rehearsed on weekends. Uggel-Guggel, the wiser troll brother, was played by a gay Spanish teacher named Törbjörn. Doctor Miracle was played by a friendly event agent named Nisse. My mother played Madam Klara and I was Klampe Lampe.

We had two performances of this production in 1981 and so "Long Live The Trolls!" became my first stage experience of a production. That was 29 years ago at the time of the writing of this article, 2010.

In 1983, we had a second meeting with children's theater. This time with a musician named Eddie Nilsson, who played a traditional instrument named Nyckelharpa, Keyharp, and an ex-comic from a famous acrobatic ensemble named Galenskaparna. His name was Ole Moe and so we called ourselves Moerötterna i Trollskogen, The Carrots in the troll forest. I read a troll poem and sang songs with my mother. We toured the schools and this time we had twenty something shows mostly in gym halls.

My move to Vienna was filled with new and interesting things. My studies as a freshman at the American International School was very hard. The great thing was that my first hour every day was the subject of Drama, exactly my cup of tea. We performed an anthology of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Due to financial reasons and other things beyond my control, I enrolled in the musical education of the academy and started a two year education there. I took speech lessons from Professor Calix, singing from my mother, dancing from Sam Cayne and drama from Professor Ferolli. My first German role, Lamon in Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten, was a nice experience. Soon enough, my best friend Uncas came to Vienna to see me sing Ol' Man River made up to look like an Afro-American slave.

Christmas time 1984-85 and 1985-86 saw me performing multiple roles in the International Theater production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, alongside my father as the Ghost of Christmas Present. I played Young, Scrooge and Peter Cratchit as well as the Turkey Boy.

1987 was the beginning of a flirtation with my high school diploma. I had dropped out and was unhappy about that. I had an interesting life, no doubt about that. Ten or twenty concerts a year, embassy receptions and premieres, studies, a loving home life. Still, my studies were important.
So, I enrolled in the correspondence school Liber Hermods and finished two courses that year with straight A's: English and German. A teacher at the school where I did the tests told me that I could get the books from the school and do the tests right there without going through the correspondence school. Six years later I would do exactly that, but the time wasn't ripe yet.

In 1988, I was back in Sweden and studied singing, drama, musical theory and guitar in the boarding college of St. Sigfrid's Academy. I traveled to my grandma at the weekends and danced my butt off on Thursday, when the local disco had Happy Hour beer day.

I did two productions that year. Prince Alexander in the homemade musical Molly Munter, where I sang the Triumph March from Aida with another text. Then, during the spring of 1989, I played the leading part of the auctioneer in Nils Ferlin's Auction. The college trip we took that year was to Prague and we spent many evenings singing Barbershop for the tourists on the Carl's Bridge.

I had been walking the walls and halls of the grand renaissance castle of Kalmar all my life. The cannons, the view, the moat, the drawbridge and the well were all very familiar to me. In 1989 I became a tour guide and would spend four summers doing this. It was an interesting time, where I learned a great deal about history.

I soon returned to Vienna to continue my singing studies there. My collaboration with the Colorado-born and ingenious pianist Russell Ryan had begun in the eighties and that begun a collaboration that would continue for fifteen years and have us perform almost a hundred concerts together in Sweden, Germany and Austria.

What my mother taught me in the classical field, Russell taught me in musical. His advice was invaluable to my training.

I had many teachers, but Russell was the finest pianist that I ever worked with. His teachings and his collaboration was wonderful.

I was an internal and external student in the music academy from 1989 until my mother retired in 1998. I perfected my vocal training by working on all genres: opera, lieder, musical, swing and chanson. My love for Schubert was born during this time. Sing through "Winterreise" was a joy, not only for the sake of the music. Schubert's amazing storytelling gripped me more than anything. Pieces like "Gefrorene Tränen" (Frozen Tears) gripped me so much I cried every time I sang it.

My film work coincided partly with my father's work and together we performed an anthology of Edgar Allen Poe's work, a work my father had written called The Strangest Trip. It was a joy to again stand on stage with my dad. Another show we did together was Vienna Patterns and we sang together at the American Embassy, among others in a choir named The Protocols. I was very much supported by the Ambassador here, a woman named Swanee Hunt. She now teaches law at Harvard.

Vienna Patterns was a show that, I believe I have mentioned. It was a world premiere where I played multiple roles in Vienna's English Theater. Speeches, readings, films, solo concerts. Professional life was interesting enough to have me learn a lot. A lot of the credit of my amazing professional discovery goes to my mother. She worked with me vocally, but she also arranged many concerts with her class and this gave me a great deal a fine experience in performing before a live audience and developing a great deal of stage relaxedness.

Wiener Urania, Engelmayersaal, Palais Lichtenstein, Langentzersdorf, Bisamberg, Mattersburg, Bamberg, Kalmar, Finja and a hundred other places with concerts halls were filled with our many glorious voices, always ending the show with "Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein". The concerts were very versatile and had every possible genre. It was humane, artistic, creative, generous, friendly and very fascinating work. I became an artist during these hundreds of concerts that I sang from 1985 to 2000.

My collaboration with Hubert Sauper proved fertile as well. I translated his films "On the road with Emil" and "So I sleepwalk in broad daylight" for subtitling. Later, Hubert received an Oscar for his film "Darwin's Nightmare".

I have been a performer practically since birth. I was even informed about vocal technique. The only thing I really needed was vocal coaching and repertoire. I had been dancing since I was eight. I even learned pantomime. I felt like a drifter back then, but realizing the amount of stuff I did back then and the kind of life I was leading it wasn't all that bad.

In 1993, at age 23, I decided to finish my high school diploma. It took me three years and round about twenty tests and 35 000 pages of material to finish what I had missed when I decided to enroll in the academy at age 15. In 1996, I could look back at 11 straight A's and 4 B's and proud relatives celebrated me that day.

I had another try at Shakespeare when I played Lysander in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", but in 1995 my work at the Vienna Chamber Opera commenced. Barbavano in Offenbach's "The Bandits" was a colorful experience and the first of five shows I did there, that included "The Tales of Hoffman" and "Dona Francisquita".

A tenor in The Protocols, who know lives in China, advised me to take contact with the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien and audition for their upcoming show "Tanz der Vampire". This was a show that the famous Roman Polanski was directing.

I auditioned once and was called back four times. My first audition was in February and my last was in May. Receiving the news of being hired was a jubilee. I was on tour with "Broadway Musical Night", singing all the leading baritone roles, and I decided to celebrate my newly found success with a trip to London. Within eight days I saw fourteen shows and managed to visit Stonehenge and Oxford as well. I was busy from early morning to late at night.

It was my third trip to London. 1979, 1991 and now 1997 and I loved this city more and more. I would go back 1999 to audition for Les Miserables. I met a young man in London and we became buddies. We kept contact for a long time. I didn't know until after he died that he was lethally ill with cancer.

Working with Polanski was an interesting experience. He had an odd sense of humor and was a visionary in many ways. I played Koukol and Ensemble Roles, which translates as chorus. This show was wildly popular in Vienna and we played the show over 700 times to a million people. Steve Barton, our main vampire, was the greatest actor I have ever worked with.

During this time I also started working with Werner Hackl, who gave me the chance to sing original music by Nancy van de Vate in "The Prince and the Maiden" and "The Death of a Hard Working Man", where I played leading roles.

It was also Werner Hackl that hired me to sing Raphael and Adam in Haydn's "The Creation" in 2000.

I was on a roll. Next up, I moved to Hamburg and played the Big Bopper and Mr. Bishop in the Rock Musical "Buddy - The Musical". My parents really were impressed with my first cast leading part. My dad told me that I stormed on stage. They shared my tiny flat in Hamburg. My parents came to Hamburg loads of times to see me in various shows I was doing. My father joked about his son being a Hamburger. My mother loved watching the airplanes lift and land from the balcony, since I lived close to the airport.

My time living with my parents in Vienna had been a good time and my life there had been very inspiring. The amount of fascinating people we met made it even more stimulating. We communed in the créme de la crème of Austrian society due to my parents' and my work. At home, we were three artists living together. We were not just parents and son. We were buddies that met at the end of the day and shared the day's work.

Moving to Hamburg, though, provided a great new life. First cast positions bring attention and traveling every day across the river to work in "Buddy" made it worthwhile to travel 45 minutes with the subway each day. We had a pre-show that told the story of Buddy's last concert. Impersonators of Fats Domino (played by my singing teacher Jimmy Rivers), Chuck Berry (my good friend Melvin Edmondsson, who now has a blues band in Hamburg), Elvis Presley (the Australian dancer Shane Morley), Little Richard (our own extravagant genius Alvin LeBass, who later played Louis Armstrong): they were all a part of the pre-show.

The show itself had been re-mastered and rewritten by a television director and was very with-it. We had rock roadies from various rock acts as stage hands, so the stories of building up stages for the likes of Michael Jackson circled the stage.

I met my ex-girlfriend Bianca on that stage. She came to see me as the Big Bopper 10 times. My assignment to choose a girl every time I sang "Chantilly Lace" always fell upon her. I was desperately in love. We had a very romantic time that was sugary sweet that it had to fall apart. Once she got her place practicing law in a real courtroom it was over. I spent a year brooding, until I met my current wife: this really was the happiest decision of my life. I met my future.

In September of 2001, after six weeks of learning 150 songs and six shows full of scenes and choreography, I embarked on a global journey. I sang all kinds of music on a cruise that would take me to North Africa, the Mediterranean coasts, Brazil and the Caribbean. Except for a shipwreck in November of 2001, that had us stranded back home for six weeks, the trip was an amazing lesson in getting to know the world. I saw piranhas and pelicans and dolphins. I walked the rainforests and strolled through Rome. I saw the leading tower of Pisa and got sunburnt on the Copacabana. There was even a lady that asked me to marry her in Fortaleza, Brazil, probably thinking that I was rich.

In Santiago in Brazil I ran out of money and had to somehow find cash to pay the check. The waiter ran with me through town in order to find a bankomat that spat Euro money. As a thank you, I invited him for dessert. Proudly, he showed his friends that he was invited to eat with a guest. He spoke only Portuguese and I spoke every possible other language but Portuguese, but somehow we managed to hold a conversation with hands and smiles.

Once I was back in Germany, it was back to the old audition circuit and my luck was good. That summer I was cast in the Bad Hersfeld production of "Jesus Christ Superstar". It was like a fascinating theater summer camp. Performances outside, great restaurants and nice colleagues.
I traveled back to Hamburg next to be a walking cover of the roles Scar and Pumbaa in "The Lion King", a show that I performed at the same place as "Buddy" for a year. Pumbaa's suit was worth as much as $ 30 000, so I always said that I was playing in a Cadillac. He was the favorite of all the kids. Scar was my biggest challenge and really did include everything: a two octave range, a gamut of emotions, 50 minutes in the make-up-chair, a half hour being wired and dressed in a custom-made lion suit, security wires, jumps, seven meter falls into a pit, fast songs, sword fights and dramatic continuity. Scar was funny and dangerous and it was joy to play him.

During this show I met my wife. I was searching the net, looking for information about the archangels. I needed some good facts for my trilogy "The Haunted Kingdom" and so in Vienna I sat down in my mother's room and googled websites. One website impressed me especially much. www.engelreich.com was so beautiful that I sat for three hours and looked through it, admiring every detail. Later on, she would manage the full creation of my own homepage www.charlesmoulton.de. I wrote a mail to the creator of the website and thanked her and she was so touched that she wrote me back. We began exchanged addresses and phone numbers and soon enough we were seeing each other in Hamburg and she was seeing me on stage. We did a Chakra seminar in Rheinbach together and kissed for the first time on the 6th of January 2003.

After doing a second year of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Bad Hersfeld, I spent a few months rehearsing and performing the Sprecher role in Mozart's "The Magic Flute". For three months I lived with Tanja in her hometown while I auditioned for various opera houses. After thirty productions and seven years in the musical business, it was time to return to opera.

On December 14th 2004, I had my first show in the Music Theater of Gelsenkirchen. Since then, I have played a thirty something roles here in addition to my choral work. Most notably among the 80 productions, 60 roles and 200 concerts I have done have been studying Bartolo in "Le Nozze di Figaro" and playing Masetto in "Don Giovanni" ( a role I rehearsed in opera school), Bartolomeo in "Il Furioso", Sam in "Trouble in Tahiti", a triple role in "The Bandits", Helenus in "The Trojans", Zuniga in "Carmen" and many, many more. My annually repeated work as a solo singer for the yearly openings have seen me work in numerous settings singing with rock and pop with huge bands up to a hundred people. The greatest experience was performing solos from Rocky Horror Show and Lion King before a crowd of 3500 people.

My dear daughter Mara Sophie Moulton was born on March 23rd 2006. She is our pride and joy. She sings, acts, makes music, paints and dresses up. It is a joy to have her and I think that I can learn more from her than she from me. I am proud to teach her what I know. She already understands two languages and a bit of a third, has tested her skills on piano, guitar, flue and xylophone and draws, dances and bakes cakes. My daughter is also the funniest little girl I know and I am a great fan of her sense of humor and honest attitude. If I could only be more like her, I would be happy.

My wife Tanja and I got married on March 28th 2008 and as a celebration the family celebrated a honeymoon in Pineda de mar in Spain. It was a nice thing to have our daughter with on our honeymoon.

My wife was born and raised in Mittelfranken. She learned salesmanship and marketing, spending her formative training in the company Ihr Platz. This led to many successful years as a traveling production manager, a position that gave her the possibility to administer the structuring and set-up of new company shops throughout Germany. My wife describes this as her most interesting professional experience. She got acquainted with at least two hundred German cities during this time and still benefits from this experience as a driver. After this, she settled down as the boss of a McPaper shop in Ansbach.

She translates professionally nowadays, among others for a lighting company. She knits and fabricates textile and woolen art for markets and fares. She is also the best mother anyone can imagine. Her invaluable strength is an inspiration to me.

My wife's family is also a fine mix of craftsmen and professionals of different categories. Her father Werner Bauer has eleven siblings, so you can only imagine the number of people that arrive at a family gathering. The last family gathering had a total of fifty guests that arrived to drink, eat, sing and joke together. Werner grew up in Marklustenau during the end of the Second World War. This gave him the unfortunate bad luck of experiencing the bombing of Nürnberg first hand.

Werner is today a multiple grandfather with a past as a craftsman that worked in some of the same companies that Tanja worked for, but he also was the administrator of a gas station for many years.

Eventually, he chose time with his children before the gas station and a job closer to home which gave him the possibility of seeing them more.

My mother-in-law Inge worked for a company that fabricated gloves for many years and together Werner and Inge have three children. Her mother and my wife's grandmother meant a lot to my wife. Her house was always full of grandkids and her kitchen always smelled of freshly baked plum dumplings and freshly baked cakes. Having been driven out of Sudetendeutschland during the war, a former part of the Czech Republic, she had many years of crisis to look back upon.

Her favorite flower was the Margaretenblume, because it also carried her name. Just like my grandmother, she was rightfully proud of her first name. Isn't it uncanny that my wife's parents live at the Annastrasse in Schopfloch?

So, Mara: you see that your background is as versatile as it is interesting. We have artists and craftsmen alike here. There are farmers and barons, actors and sailors, teachers and factory workers. The recipe goes as follows: take a spoonful of the Spanish Armada, a cup of an Irish jig, mix in a centiliter of Swedish sunshine and stir it. Put it in the oven for a few minutes and then take it out to cool off. Add some English pride, some Scottish honesty, a pinch of the American dream, a handful of German logic and a dash of Danish fun. Sprinkle it all with Austrian charm and you have the most fabulous blend that can only be found at the most exclusive of services and only in one place: it is a bouquet by the name of Mara's Magic.

The Moulton - Bauer - Kronzell - Nilsson - Eyres of European Community Drama can be proud to say but this: life remains interesting when so many nations meet in a family that come together in a pretty girl like Mara.

We are the epitome of the global village.

Thank God for that!