Profits & Passions Teacher, playwright, puppeteer, lawyer – the many lives of Steve Gottlieb BY LYNN WOODS

Profits & Passions
Teacher, playwright, puppeteer, lawyer the many lives of Steve Gottlieb
BY LYNN WOODS

Attorney Steve Gottlieb is a partner in the law firm Moran and Gottlieb in uptown Kingston. Specializing in bankruptcy and civil rights law, the firm also operates a divorce mediation service as an affordable, less stressful alternative to litigation.

Since starting his law career in the early 1990s representing tenants threatened with eviction for Bronx Legal Services, Gottlieb has been passionate about protecting people’s right to a safe, clean habitation. He has successfully taken on numerous pro bono cases in Ulster County related to issues of eviction and substandard housing.

Every Friday he sets up a free legal clinic at a local soup kitchen, providing advice on issues related to employment, housing, Medicaid reimbursement, immigration status

whatever the attendees ask for. “We do everything we can in a reasonable manner to help the person,” he said in an interview in his office, which is crammed full of papers, books, antique toys and other detritus. In some instances simply sending a letter on behalf of his client is enough to incite action. “The people who are least able to get legal services need it the most.”

Playwright Steve Gottlieb has written more than 30 plays for adults and kids, many of them produced in regional play festivals. He co-authored, with Gillian Farrell, “The Trials of Sojourner Truth,” the story of the illiterate slave woman who won a lawsuit in the Ulster County Courthouse to regain custody of her son, who was sold to a Southern planter. The play sold out during its 2001 summer run at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Theater and has subsequently been performed in other area venues.

Gottlieb’s agent is currently distributing his screenplay for a legal thriller titled “The Chaser” to Hollywood producers. Last year, he went to California himself to pitch his screenplay about the Cherry Sisters, real-life vaudevillians whose act was billed as the worst ever. The calico-clad spinsters were a sensation, selling out theaters and dodging missives of rotten vegetables. Although he hasn’t yet sold the script, his phone rang off the hook for a few days after his return, an encouraging sign.

A regular at one of Woodstock’s weekly poker games, Gottlieb also has a book titled “Texas Hold-Zen,” a kind of Zen guide to poker playing, which his agent is circulating to publishers.

Puppeteer Steve Gottlieb started his career in 1974 at the Catskill Street Fair and now oversees a touring company, Smoke Out Productions, which performs at elementary schools, libraries, summer camps and county and town fairs throughout the state. Many of the puppet shows have an anti-smoking theme, which also helps qualify the company for grants. (Gottlieb also gets grants for the ads he writes for the Ulster County Health Department.)

In the late 1970s Gottlieb’s puppet company was commissioned by the United Nations to tour the Cayman Islands. Just last year one of the anti-smoking plays won an award at the Woodstock Film and Video Festival, and two of the puppet characters, Timmy and Mr. Science, regularly appear in radio and TV ads. Each year Gottlieb trains a couple of college students to put on the shows.

Oh, and by the way, Steve Gottlieb is also an adjunct professor at Ulster County Community College, where he teaches a class on the criminal justice system as portrayed in film, called “REEL Justice.” For his work as a first-grade teacher in the South Bronx in the late 1980s, he received several awards, including The Reader’s Digest American Hero in Education Award.

Originally from Queens, Gottlieb came to the Catskills in 1970 and while a college student majoring in sculpture crafted his first puppet heads. He dropped out to write and do his puppet shows. Tired of scrounging a living in “the typical Ulster County way,” after 15 or so years he went back to college and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then earned a master’s in education, returned to New York, and taught school in the Bronx while getting his law degree at night.

Eventually he moved back upstate, settling in Woodstock. After meeting Andrea Moran, the mother of one of his nursery school students, the two attorneys set up shop in Kingston in 1995.

Becoming a lawyer was in part about having a decent day job. “I don’t believe in the romance of the starving artist,” he said. “People are more creative on a full stomach.” The practice of law, however, also feeds his creative life. It gives him “the inspiration to find stories to write about. You need the fabric of characters.” Most of his plays and screenplays pivot around a legal issue, be it libel, custody of a child, or naming of a corporation (in “Business Plan”).

Furthermore, good storytelling skills are as key to the lawyer’s profession as to the writer’s. “You have to make the jury believe your story,” he said. Being able to explain a complicated case to a judge in five minutes is pretty much the same thing as pitching a screenplay to a producer, he said.

His secret to being so productive? “You have to do it every day, both the work and the creative work. There’s a limited amount of time to accomplish a lot of stuff.” Gottlieb doesn’t get to everything, however. Glancing over a list scribbled on his writing pad, he noted the chains of his hammock had been lying on the floor for a month.

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