FAMILY INSPIRED BY ADVENTURES.

Byline: Victoria Giraud People and Places

Suzanne Shoemaker believes in the force of curiosity.

``Live your life as curiously as possible,'' she advises. ``You can't touch it all, so do as much as you can.''

Through their company, Acts of Creation, Suzanne and her husband, Chris, plan theme parks and family entertainment centers. The life adventures and travels of these co-founders of the Santa Clarita Family Film Festival are proof of their inquisitiveness about other places, other people and curiosity has helped them develop their projects.

A family center, Playopolus, is opening in Connecticut in January. Designed around the concept of a city, it will teach children about the systems society needs to live together. Nordic America, a theme park devoted to Nordic ancestry, is planned in the near future in northern Minnesota, and they are just beginning an animation project for children that will enlighten them about the Earth's elements and teach environmental respect.

One of their first projects, Treasure Trails, was developed to teach schoolchildren about the common, everyday things that surrounded them ``that were treasures.'' The Shoemakers would take children out of the classroom and show them such things as wasp hives, bird's nests, asphalt and concrete.

Suzanne said that the idea of studying things ``we take for granted'' sprang from working with Catholic charities in Hawaii, where she was educating illegal aliens studying for citizenship. One day, she asked her teen-age son if he knew about the Magna Carta and what impact that document had today and what was the difference between the Republican and Democratic political parties.

He couldn't answer her, and she realized what she was teaching new citizens was information ``that people born in this system didn't understand.''

Suzanne's life has been a curious adventure. She was born in San Francisco, educated at University of California at Berkeley, and then went to the Midwest while working as a volunteer for George McGovern's presidential campaign. When he lost, she obtained a doctorate in drama, with an emphasis on script writing, while also attending law school. Then she ended up teaching at the University of Missouri and Ohio State University for the next 15 years.

Her teaching career came to a crossroads. ``The university road, I could see where it led. I was being pressured to write books, and I didn't feel I had lived enough yet,'' she reflected. Although she couldn't see where the other road led, she chose it.

Suzanne had met Chris, a trained actor and Ohio native who also had ``a curious mind,'' and the two went off to France to study. She took classes from famous French acting teacher Jacques Le Coq, who had taught the producers of Cirque du Soleil, while Chris studied clowning at the International Circus School of Paris. They supported themselves in Paris doing theater.

In the mid-'80s, while still in Paris, the Shoemakers received an invitation from China's cultural minister to be guests of the Chinese government to live and work in China.

``China changed my perspective on the world,'' Suzanne declared. ``It was like Alice going down the hole and through the world. Everything was upside down.''

The Shoemakers, their two sons and Suzanne's mother lived on a farm commune next door to a tofu factory in Wuhan, an intellectual center in central China, for the next two years. They were the only Westerners among millions of Chinese. Their job was ``to introduce Western culture through the performing arts,'' and they taught and worked on film, television and theater projects, and did a film and play festival.

``It was a wonderful experience,'' Suzanne reminisced. ``The Chinese, as a group, are the most honest, loving, bright and kind group of people. They are inherently joyful and thankful, having so little.''

They had a truly Chinese experience. Being paid in Chinese currency, they could only buy Chinese goods and eat Chinese food. ``We were eating dog; there's no such thing as beef,'' Suzanne pointed out with playful relish.

She remembers with great fondness the year they shared Western Christmas traditions. The Shoemakers dressed as Santa and Mrs. Santa Claus and planned a Christmas Eve candlelight ceremony in an auditorium for about 500 expected guests. They were amazed when about 8,000 showed up, and found out later the Chinese had left a traditional fireworks display to share Christmas with the Shoemakers. On Christmas Day they had another surprise when they discovered 20 pine trees (especially meaningful since China was at that time almost totally deforested) and other gifts anonymously left on their doorstep.

As a transition before returning to the mainland United States, the Shoemakers lived in Hawaii for four years and landed in Los Angeles in 1992 to start an entertainment company. Although their offices are in Burbank, they decided that Santa Clarita was the ideal place for their family.

As for the future, Suzanne says, ``We're creators. I'm a scriptwriter-director and my husband is a producer-actor. As creators we want to fund and create our own original product.''