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IONE CITRIN — Throughout these countries I managed to speak with everyone I could. I've taped, recorded and photographed my conversations from inside the huts of African villages to the alleys of remote towns in China. I've shared beetle-nuts with women squatting in circles in temple areas in Algeria. Been in places where no one had ever heard of the Jewish religion. I could go on with my endless adventures ... endlessly. But they did not satisfy my thirst for communication.

Then there was my performing career. I appeared on television every morning in the Chicago area for WLS-TV. My show was called "The Prize Movie With Ione." Here I chatted and connected with fellow Chicagoans five mornings a week from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. for over seven years. The show was the highest rated television show in that time slot.

For over thirty years I performed on a variety of television and radio commercials. With an ear for mimicry, and an ability to sight-read I was a "natural" for voice-overs. I sang, and did multiple voices on all sorts of recordings in the Chicago and Midwest area. The average listener was unaware of who I was, because doing commercials as a "voice" is anonymous, particularly when I did a huge range of voices similar to Mel Blanc. Old ladies, children, accents, dialects, impersonations, cartoon characters were in my repertoire of hundreds of voices. I was able to accomplish these voices through visual images of the characters. If I could see the person I was trying to capture, I could produce the voice or sound.

But this was not enough.

I was tired of physically performing. Tired of presenting myself in this fashion, I took this huge imagination coupled with endless driving energy, and thrust it on canvas, cast it in clay, and welded it in metal. Now I can reach out beyond the limits of my previous endeavors to touch and find love, appreciation and understanding.