Doug Menuez

His father moved the family to the south side of Chicago to work for the community organizer, Saul Alinsky.

As a teenager, Menuez played in a blues band with his friend Seth Fahey and other local boys.

In March 1972, while a ninth-grader at Northport Junior High School, the 14-year-old Menuez and Fahey reached out to the gospel blues singer-guitarist Blind Gary Davis, then ill and nearing the end of his life, to perform at their local First Presbyterian Church in Northport, Long Island.

Menuez printed the concert tickets in his woodshop class, while Fahey's mother, a painter, silkscreened posters for the boys to put up on telephone polls in the town, as well as around the nearby Huntington and local colleges.

On April 24, the boys welcome Davis to Northport and escorted him to play the church's basement, where he opened with a fierce rendition of his popular song "Death Don't Have No Mercy" and finished the show to immense applause from a sold-out crowd of more than 250 people.

These assignments included the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, the Olympics, the Amazon, the World Series, presidential campaigns, Silicon Valley, the AIDS crisis and other events.

Published in 2008, with an introduction by Dame Elizabeth Taylor, Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda [4] is a photo-essay of the East African dance troupe.