Ellen Becker: I got the impression from your book that one of the things that tipped some of your folks over the edge and led them to want to stop being part of the free medical clinic was a powerful lack of privacy because people were constantly coming into the clinic/communal residence.

Patch: We just never separated one part of our life from another. It was all connected.

Even on what one could call the "friend" scale, where someone invites somebody over, you like to offer them some kind of space, particularly if they are troubled.

Ellen: Yes, and in your house people were sleeping on the living room floor and on people`s bedroom floors, too, right?

Patch: All the time.

Larry: What led you into this work or this play?

Patch: Well, I`m a multi-faceted person, and I think that by the time a person becomes fifty-three years old, they`ve had a lot of things influencing their lives.

A lot of why I do what I do is because I had a great mother, and I try to emulate her.
She was gracious, she always let everyone come into our home.
She treated them equally.
She was never rude to anybody.

However, I`m rude. (Laughter)
You don`t totally transfer, you know.

I was also influenced by my father`s being a soldier and dying because of it.
I was always growing up on Army bases.
My father died when I was sixteen.
That laid the groundwork for my coming back to the South where I experienced racism first hand, where I saw black people denied the right to be free.

I thought that anyone with any brains, even one functioning brain cell, could see the injustice.

I came face to face with the indifference to injustice that most of our society still holds, and I felt that I had to do something.

The most essential question I asked myself in my whole life was, "Can I look at injustice and do nothing, or can I do something?"

With that Gesundheit! was born, and whether it`s clowning in Russia or Bosnia or Cuba, it comes out of a concern that in the luxury of all of our livesóand in this country even the poor are living luxuriously compared to the rest of the worldówe all still have to take the time to do the right thing.