Ran has been, at one time or other, a poet, a coach to corporate misfits, a rural family therapist and counselor to violent boys, a college professor, co-founder of Sonomama Improvisation Dance Theater, an Aikido student and teacher, an oil field roustabout, a carpenter, a student in Japan for three years, a Harvard maverick for eleven years, a Montana football player, an Oklahoma ruffian, a southern Illinois runaway, and the child of a northward-migrating, oil-chasing, quarter Indian Okie father, and a mixed-race, Taoist mother who, like Will Rogers never met a man she didn't like, including