From high heels to high notes, the FREE players rise to every challenge in 'Guys and Dolls'

Barbara Sharkis' friends and family measure her development as an actress in steps - currently being taken in 3-inch heels. Sharkis is a group home resident with obsessive-compulsive disorder, one of 50 actors with various disabilities who are performing "Guys and Dolls" at the Suffolk Y Jewish Community Center in Commack. Last Saturday was opening "night", a 3 p.m. matinee before a crowd of several hundred.

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In 1977, the year that FREE began, the original Board of Directors envisioned residential alternatives to hospitalization and immediately started to plan for this.  Although FREE was originally founded to support persons with mental illness, within the founding year, the agency expanded its vision to embrace persons with developmental disabilities.  In the fall of 1979, the dream of residential alternatives became a reality when four homes known as Pineway, Abbott, Maplewood and Eleanor opened their doors on the East End of Long Island.  Facilitated by a contract with the NYS Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, the houses were purchased as bank foreclosures and rehabilitation was done right away. The houses were designed to support three persons per house.     Once the renovations were completed, the houses were furnished with the help of NYS employees who joined with FREE staff on moving day to unload the furniture into each new home and to help prepare it for the new residents.