Good things, as the saying goes, often come in small packages. Georgie-Porgie-puddin-and-pie weighed one and a half pounds when he was born, and fit nicely upon an open hand.  This dimension proved to be prophetic, because his open hand was to beome the defining measure of his work, his world, and his life.

And natally was not the only way in which George was ahead of his time.  He was touring and touching, smoothing and soothing the flesh all over the United States and Europe before Esalen® was born.  He came to us not as an apprentice to learn, or a seeker to explore, but as a seasoned master to teach.

Much more than George's infancy was being incubated in those first months of his life.  In that isolation grew also a hunger - a keen hunger for touch, for adventure, for friendship and love, for good food and good wine, and for every enchantment that a world traveller could contrive to get his hands on.  And also in that plastic, climate controlled box grew a hearty distaste for the artificial, the inauthentic, the unresponsive, for anything less than the organically genuine.

George ran away from his suburban Connecticut home to join the circus (actually, not metaphorically) before he finished high school, and the world became his university.  After leaving the circus, he joined the Navy, where all of his spare time at sea was spent developing a balancing/tumbling act with several other sailors.  After leaving the Navy, their act appeared twice on the Ed Sullivan show; George had hit New York, and show biz.

Self-taught in virtually everything he did, massage came as naturally to him as handstands, and for the next twenty years his sign-in book collected many of the artistic Who's Who in the City, from Leonard Bernstein to Rudolph Nureyev, from Candace Bergen to Eartha Kitt, from - I had better stop:  He would be revolted by my name dropping.

And finally to Esalen, from Manhattan Burn-out to Big Sur Reborn, from camping out at Dai's trailer and helping me clean the baths at 6AM to a place on the massage crew, from a permanent place in our community to a permanent place in our hearts.

Of all the things about my friend that I can think of to miss, no loss will be greater than his sense of humor.  Like everything else about him; it was gloriously extravagant.  He could find hilarity in a gum wrapper or a stubbed toe.  And if he detected in you a whiff of pretense, you had better be ready to laugh at yourself or run.  A grand trickster, and Ulysses of the world, a most unplastic surgeon of renewal, a poet of the flesh and composer of music in the blood - I never expect to meet his like again.  Good-bye, Georgie, and thank you.