Eighty Years in the Making,
Still Dancing Like He’s 22

Juanito’s birth name — and legal name still is — John Michael Madden.

His mother resented ’til her death that her in-laws made her give him the name John — the name of his paternal grandfather, who nobody even liked.

Three years ago, a server in Cozumel, Mexico spontaneously started calling him Juanito. The rest of the staff in that restaurant (all related) picked it up — and it stuck.

It translates as “little John” — or especially as Johnnie — the name his best childhood friend and favorite aunt and uncle called him. It makes him happy.

He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1975 from the University of Rochester in upstate New York.

He has, at different times, been licensed in New York and Illinois.

He practiced psychotherapy and clinical psychology for 20 years in settings ranging from:

• •A VA hospital on the West Side of Chicago — which many poor Black vets regarded as too dangerous, and where he was once thrown through the air by a Vietnam PTSD survivor, into a doorpost, requiring nine stitches in his forehead.
• •A mental health center in Nova Scotia.
• •A therapeutic day school for children who could not manage a typical school.

He worked as an Organization Development management consultant for 15 years, four of them as an internal consultant at AT&T — where he specialized in management coaching, team development, culture change, speaking truth to vice presidents, and mentoring some of the brightest high-potential young managers.

He also did a great deal of diversity work for clients including Ford Motor Company and three of the largest accounting firms in the world (at that point called the Big Five).

For three years, he played a key role in a gender diversity consultation at the accounting firm which at that point was named Deloitte and Touché — which was so genuinely systemic and high-impact that it was turned into a Harvard Business School case study.

From 2004–20, he was in “semi-retirement” in Asheville, North Carolina — working at various front-line customer service jobs (including cab driver, restaurant server, and Whole Foods cashier), and became:

From March of 2020 to May 2025, he lived a romantic life as a camper van cowboy throughout the Southwest US and Mexico — spending nine months in the Rio Grande Valley before dropping down into Mexico for two years.

In June 2025, the US Consulate in Playa del Carmen (Riviera Maya, next to Cancún) medivaced him back to Asheville, North Carolina for treatment of total renal failure — with an erroneous diagnosis of end-stage prostate cancer.

After living with that diagnosis for several months, he was found to be cancer-free. Prostate surgery in September 2025 returned him to the vigor of a 22-year-old — who had just spent 18 months lying in hospital and rehab beds!

Now rooted in Brownsville, Texas, Juanito is offering what he views as his last and best professional contribution: La Vida Extática — sliding-scale ecstatic dance gatherings, embodied retreats, and life coaching for all ages and all bodies.