Ryan Keating Performs IN THIS TRAVELING HEART At Don't Tell Mama

Cabaret singer Rian Keating's trajectory has been a variation on the "local boy makes good" cliché with unpredictable twists and turns and a fair amount of obstacles.

A severe hearing loss in early childhood created a sense of isolation that was only assuaged through music and theater.

The day after graduating from the very bottom of his small regional high school class of forty three, Rian moved from New Hampshire to New York City with $500.00 and no interest in higher education. After finding his bearings, Rian fancied himself a "poor man's Dick Cavett-sans-the-self-reverence, and began hosting Spotlight! for Manhattan Cable and spent his early twenties interviewing such luminaries as Gwen Verdon, Kathy Bates, Quentin Crisp, Margaret Whiting, Julie Wilson, Theresa Saldana, Kelly Bishop and Charlie Sheen, among others.

Spotlight! was followed by several years of volunteering for various AIDS organizations before Rian entered CUNY as a freshman at the age of thirty with the specific goal of becoming a high school English teacher. Rian has spent the last twenty five years teaching immigrant and at risk students on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

In the early years of his teaching career, Rian noticed a specific dilemma facing his undocumented immigrant students who wished to pursue a college education was their ineligibility for financial aid or student loans. Having taught Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus", he knew well the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty and founded The Golden Door Scholarship, specifically to aid undocumented graduates wishing to pursue their American college dream. The Golden Door Scholarship was established in 2004, coinciding with Rian's return to the cabaret stage and all of his performances to date have directly benefited his college bound students.

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