Corey Fischer, whose underwater photo accompanies "The Mask of the Octopus," is a writer, actor, director and teacher, co-founder of A Traveling Jewish Theater. In 2000 he received a Kennedy Foundation Grant for his stage adaptation of David Grossman's See: Under Love. It was while he was working on this adaptation, in Hawaii, that he took his first SCUBA lessons. He has been diving, and writing about diving, ever since.