This path led Ray to attend Belmont Abbey College, a Benedictine monastery in North Carolina.

During and after college he dabbled with many jobs including working as a hard rock miner, drilling and blasting 795 feet beneath New York.

Ray flirted with theater in undergraduate school and began pursuing it more seriously in graduate school in the mid-1970’s eventually jumping into the deep end of the New York Theatre scene and finding his sea legs with the First Amendment Comedy group and Medicine Show Theatre, an off-off Broadway experimental troupe.

They spent their early days together onstage at Medicine Show Theater and tending bar at Robert’s Restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen.

In addition to his success as an actor, Ray was a talented and dedicated writer, penning many screenplays, short stories, and poems.