One for Billy Joe Bianchi

Bill Bianchi 1/16/1950 - 9/4/2020

Thinking of you lots, these days, Billy Joe. Like the song, you’ve been on my mind. I was talking to Dennis de la Montanya the other day. A rarity as I hate talking on the phone. We used Messenger. Even worse, with video. No way to hide how we’ve all aged. I remember when we were young, during the 1960s, Pacific Bell set up mobile labs in the San Geronimo Valley Horseman’s Arena, and we rode down to see what the future might entail. Inside the trailers were telephones with video screens. Cumbersome things. I thought it would never come to pass. But here we are. Do you remember? Phone calls to the future, or to the dead. Dennis had sent a photo of the San Geronimo Valley baseball team. Suddenly I was remembering watching you playing baseball at Lagunitas School, running, top of the ninth, the bases were loaded, we were all yelling slide, slide, home run. How you loved baseball. You could’ve been a contender. Or at least a major league pitcher with that throwing arm. Do you remember that first kiss? Or the time you took the old truck into the lower field, with your sister Cottie and me trailing along behind, little pests that we were—how, as you spun us circles in the dirt in that old Ford, it was as exciting as any carnival ride. But the passenger door flew open with the centrifugal force, and you grabbed my arm as I hovered in space, my legs flying like little flags, the dirt spinning past me. It was the closest I ever got to solo flying. But you didn’t let go of my arm. You didn’t let go. Brave, you are. Blessings upon you, old friend. Blessings. May you walk the bridge in peace. You gave the Big C a heroic fight. Showed it what a home run really meant. Bring the team home, Billy Joe. Bring it home. It’s OK to let go. Walk on. 

William Bianchi obituary

Home Run

We were talking about baseball the other day. Old Lagunitas School friend Dennis de la Montanya was checking in, because of the evacuation. We reminisced about the past, I wanted to see a photo of his father Dean the Milkman, whom I was crazy about when I was a child. Was he is handsome as Dean Martin, the face I remembered? After Dean was killed, Irene married Joe Bianchi. Dennis sent me some photos, among them, a junior league photo of our San Geronimo Valley classmates. I posted it in our San Geronimo Facebook site. Names crawled out of the past: Marc and Wayne Peacock, Johnny Kaufman, the Fahey brothers, Jeff Sousa, and Dennis. No Billy Joe. I guess he had moved on. But in the intricate basket weave of memory, his presence was winnowed. He was our star player. We thought he’d go onto the big leagues. Someone, perhaps Liz Haas, complained that in those days, girls weren’t allowed to play baseball. And she was a good player. I remember one afternoon, everyone gathered at the baseball diamond at Lagunitas school, there were so few of us, that girls and boys played on the same team. It was late afternoon with long shadows, and Linda Gregg hit a home run, her ponytail was a golden stream of sunlight as she ran the bases. Billy Joe Bianchi slid into home. Slide, slide, slide. The bases are loaded, teammates on both sides cheered. Slide. Safe. And now Dennis says Billy Joe is going down for the final count. Bases are loaded, but Billy Joe gave the odd a run for their money.

Three generations of de la Montanyas, Dean, Sr., Dean, Jr., & Dennis 

Why I Teach, or Why I am a Writer, final draft

WHY I TEACH, OR WHY I AM A WRITER   MANIFESTO   —Maureen Hurley

due 12/13 SAT  5 min presentation/performance.

It's hard to choose between teaching and writing

each process informs the other.

See, I was an artist before I became a poet.

I was a poet before I started teaching kids art,

but I was also literary jailbait. It was a bootstrap affair.

 I arrived late to poetry all out of breath,

with things to say and nowhere to channel them.

I was a bad student in high school and college.

Least likely to succeed. I couldn't keep what I learned.

It was like a hive of bees swarming inside my head.

Stinging my tongue so I couldn't speak.

Why I Teach, or Why I am a Writer. 1st draft

WHY I TEACH, OR WHY I AM A WRITER

It's hard for me to choose or to make a distinction between teaching and writing as each process informs the other.

I was a poet before I became interested in teaching for California Poets in the schools, but just barely. The two events were nearly twinned. I arrived to poetry all out of breath, with things to say and nowhere to channel them. I wasn't a writer and I was a below average student in high school and college. I couldn't retain or access the information I learned in school. It was like a hive of bees swarming inside my head.

RIP Jack Gilbert

Joy Harjo, Bob Hass & Linda Gregg

I met Linda Gregg backstage at the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley in September—Bob Hass said, Maureen, do you know Linda Gregg?

And my jaw hit the floor.

I told her about an after-school softball game I watched at Lagunitas School—the Gregg twins were on 2nd & 3rd base, Billy Joe Bianchi hit a home run and when they ran, they were so freckled and golden, I was in awe.

Someone was up at bat. Maybe it was Liz Haas. Or one of the Farley boys. I remembered them from catechism class.  I think it was Lagunitas vs. Nicasio. It was a foul ball that rolled right down the third base line and turned out at the last minute, so everyone had to retrace their steps.

I was about 6 or 7, so baseball was a mystery to me—but Billy Joe was my neighbor (family friends). So, I watched the game and cheered  as he brought them all home.

Linda was a little blown away by the baseball story—expecting something more modern, perhaps—her role as a major poet and me as sycophant—instead it was about a childhood softball game.

As it turned out, her sister was in the audience, too. So I got to meet the Gregg twins together again. I always want to call her Alma, but that's the name of Linda's seminal poetry book—if women can have a seminal books, that is. But perhaps her sister was Linda's Alma. Louise lives in Tomales. The weather has taken its toll on her. She favors the same plaid shirts as did her father. Tough no-nonsense women, the Gregg twins. 

Linda & Louise Gregg

Linda had just come from seeing Jack Gilbert. She said that he wasn't doing well. His mind may have taken flight. But he always knew her. A bond that deep.

I'm racking the brain as to how the story is possible as they are 10 years older than me but Lagunitas was such a small place in those days and I started school early—perhaps they also started school late, to make the timeline work.

Or, they were already in high school. I remember someone saying they were 8th graders—and that seemed like such an impossible distance in time, I couldn't fathom it. Maybe Carol Manning remembers it better.

Summer Camp

As a kid growing up in West Marin in the 1950s & 60s, I lived in a place where we never went to camp but kids from all over the US came to camp where we lived.

It was an uneasy mix as the Forest Farm summer campers were from the land of faraway (mostly the eastern seaboard—NY) and they had no notion they were guests in our land—they weren't nice to the natives. Nor was Old Man Gregg.

Camp counselors and campers hailed from the far reaches of the known world and descended upon Forest Farm Summer Camp each June, founded in 1944 by the Greggs. They may as well have been Martians.

The official story goes that the Greggs welcomed everyone—they built their own pool when a Chinese counselor was told she couldn't swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club. But we local kids were never invited to swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club or in the Gregg pool. Ever. No matter how much we drooled. Funny how that goes.

Somebody At Forest Farm Summer Camp must've had a sense of humor: SAN RAFAEL. Calif. (AP) —A sign posted recently on the office door at the Forest Farms Camp by owner Harold Gregg reads, please keep door closed so bird won't eat our cat." The bird is a turkey vulture. (Miami Herald/Lewiston Evening Journal/The Evening Independent, etc., July 26, 27, 1965). 

 I actually do vaguely remember the sign. Only I didn't get the joke at the time.

The FBI was interested in the Greggs for suspicious activities, but then anyone who moved to Marin and Sonoma from Hollywood or New York was under investigation during the paranoid era of McCarthyism—including my best friend Stephanie's mother, Johanna Stone, a former Russian translator for the UN.

Mrs. Gregg was OK—she was a former teacher who was originally from Petaluma, so she was nicer to the local kids than her husband, Harold. I believe cookies may have been involved.

Harold Gregg, a New Englander, dressed in plaid shirts, thin and dour as they come, taunted Jack Gilbert when his daughter Linda brought him home. The apocryphal story goes: Old Man Gregg said Jack wasn't a real man, but a sissy poet.

Jack got his macho out and shimmied up a Doug fir to fell it with a chainsaw. Something went horribly wrong—the tree split in the middle and Jack came plunging to earth like a sad soft Icarus.

Linda Gregg ran off to Greece to care for Jack Gilbert whose wings were forever clipped. He was sentenced to the wheelchair—and she became a famous poet. Most people know Forest Farm Camp as Serenity Acres—the rehab place where Jerry Garcia died. But that was long after Harold died.

Forest Farm Camp was a commune before that. One of my high school classmate ran away from home and lived there in the 1970s when Claire and Jim Felson owned it from 1966 to 1976. She later told us wild stories of musicians who lived there and even wilder parties. Chalk it up to the times we lived in.

Mrs. Barbano—who also ran Barbano's Lagunitas summer camp on Arroyo Road, just down the hill from the Greggs, opened up her pool for swimming lessons—that's where I learned to swim at the ripe old age of ten. Old Man Barbano's daughter was killed in a car accident in Mexico. He wasn't right in the head after that.

Old Man Barbano gave up the summer camp business and rented the dorms out to musicians including Big Brother and the Holding Company. Yes, Janis Joplin. When the grief got to be too much for him, he shot himself in the head. We were walking home from high school when they brought the gurney out. It was the first time I saw a dead man. But not the last.

There were other camps in the San Geronimo Valley but I don't know their names. Perhaps someone else will remember the stories of the summer camps. The transient folk. Certainly people came in droves from the Bay Area to Camp Taylor ever since the turn of the 19th century. Some families camped out all summer long along the banks of Papermill Creek and Devil's Gulch. Research fodder for another blogeen.

BAWP "Teachers as Writers" with Greg Hamilton

Bay Area Writing Project facilitator (BAWP) Greg Hamilton works at the Marin Teaching Network, Larkspur where he coordinates the Literacy Project and is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at UC Davis.

From Bay Area Writing Project 11/15/08

My first BAWP Saturday Workshop was with teaching consultant Greg Hamilton and our job was to meld memoir with the teaching practice. The personal meets the persuasive. Interesting. We all do this automatically, using personal story with argument. Only this time the process was made concrete—or should I say—transparent?

We wrote our introductions: Greg says he extensively uses the transcript process to rethink the writing process. He likes the blur between fiction and non-fiction. He asks, "Who's the audience? Teachers like story." Fiction = story (or vice versa) and concrete fact is the lens of non-fiction.

Theory and methodology.

1. Write an autobiographical incident and imbue it with story memoir). Theme: inspiration and writer's identity.

2. Write a persuasive expository paragraph. Prompt: What do you believe about teaching and language? Teacher/writer reciprocity.

Too Bright to See

Poet Linda Gregg grew up down the hill from me, on the next ridge over, Tamal Road, which was on top of a hill above my great-aunt Ellen Budjick's cottage in Forest Knolls.

We used to sneak through the Gregg’s Forest Farm Summer Camp on our donkeys because that was the only shortcut to get to Tamal Road from the Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp. We'd ride a wide loop back up into the hills where Forest Farm Camp winter-pastured their horses and then we'd traverse the final ridges homeward in darkness.

Forest Farms Camp is the same place where Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. But by that point, the summer camp had transformed into a rehab place with a different name: Serenity Knolls Chemical Dependency Center.

Jerry Garcia was personally responsible for record sales of Ben & Jerry's ice cream at the Forest Knolls store. But heroin didn't kill Jerry. Despite his daily walk down the hill to the store, his heart just gave out. I'm sure the ice cream didn't help the diabetes any either. The Godfather of acid rock was dead at 53.

Seems Forest Farm Camp was always a troubled place. Janis Joplin lived on Arroyo Road at Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp with Big Brother and the Holding Company—but that's another story to tell....

In the 40s and 50s and into the early 60s (before the economic crash happened), Forest Farm Summer Camp was a pretty radical co-ed summer camp for inner city kids who were pretty much like Martians to us.

We thought it was a weird, if interesting concept for kids to go to Forest Farm Summer Camp. So did the FBI. (In those days, most summer camps were not co-ed, nor were they such a strange admixture of kids from all walks of life—sort of a mini-United Nations).

Anyway, varying shades of McCarthyism colored a rosy hue over our little valley so the FBI was interested in several families.

We locals were definitely not welcome at Forest Farm Camp at any time which upped the ante during the summer months when we'd sneak through camp on our slow-dreaming donkeys and have staredowns with the camp kids from New York—it was as if we were in a bad spaghetti western with a thin plot. They were big, bad and ugly.

But Brenda Fullick who leased her Icelandic pony, Helgar from the Greggs after summer camp was over, liked to sneak in a visit to see Helgar who hated the city slickers on his back. He was a one-girl pony. And Brenda was his girl. Whenever he saw her, he'd buck off his rider and come over to wicker a hello.

We had a strange notion that we were invisible on our long-eared mounts, lost in the resulting meleé, because everybody else was on horseback too. The Gregg girls never finked on us or told us to leave. Only Old Man Gregg would chase us off like vermin.

I remember Old Man Gregg, I thought he was the most dour man alive. He'd just as soon bite your head off rather than give you the time of day.

Ironic in that they'd taken refuge in Forest Knolls, far from the claws of McCarthyism, like many Valley folk. Then they too shunned everyone.

Mrs. Gregg was kinder, she was a local, who grew up in Petaluma, but the Anglo Saxon Presbyterians kept themselves separate from us Catholics. The Troubles of Northern Ireland were so deeply ingrained, the distance lent itself to generations. You were marked at the church door.

When Jack and Claire Felson took over Forest Farms Camp from 1966-1976, it became a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place that invited participation from Valley folks. But by that time I was long gone, chasing the wind over some distant horizon.

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Interview with Ann Woodhead 2/92

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK:
20 years of Dancing at the Cinnabar Theatre
An Interview with Ann Woodhead  (The Paper)
—by Maureen Hurley   2/92


After a dancer worked with the class, a kindergarten student of mine dictated a poem: “If I were king of the universe, I’d dance for a living!” Dance, the most ephemeral and impractical of arts, takes a special kind of vision, or insanity, to choose as a viable profession. Addicted hoofers proclaim they have no choice but to dance—like Gene Kelly who shouts “Gotta dance!” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” It’s definitely not the medium for making big money (unless you’re lucky like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire), it’s usually expensive to stage, so it’s gotta be for love.

Avant-garde modern dancer/choreographer Ann Woodhead fits the bill to a ‘T,’ or should I say to a ‘2,’ since she uses arabic numerals as a structural basis for some of her floorwork. Woodhead’s choreography, which has received solid and artistic critical acclaim on both coasts, and in Europe, has been enthusiastically praised by audiences and critics alike, as sensuous, challenging, and exhilarating. She has been dubbed the “neo-classic” or “post-modern” avant-garde choreographer on the cutting-edge,“stretching the limits (and concepts) of dance” in America. However, staging dance performances is an expensive proposition: Woodhead, who estimates she loses about $2000 per piece, says she doesn’t do it for the money—“Dance is hopelessly impractical, I feel crazy if I don’t perform, but I feel ecstatic when I dance!”

The Sonoma County-based Ann Woodhead Dance Company’s latest production, “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” spans Woodhead’s illustrious 20-year career as a dancer/choreographer in residence at the Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma. Woodhead, who estimates she has created over 125 dances at the Cinnabar Theatre since she first performed her euphorically sensuous trademark “Spinning Dance,” in the style of Isadora Duncan, where she literally spins out of her top, will include vingettes from several of her older pieces, as well as present a major new work entitled “Short Stories.”

Woodhead commented about the upcoming retrospective: “one piece is the same as it was in the ‘70s—a musical phrase.” When queried as to why she mines past performances for material, the now long-haired (her short punk orange hair was a familiar trademark), Sebastopol dancer exclaimed, “I no longer have a passion for discovering or inventing ‘new’ movement.”

When Woodhead works with dancers, she likes to work with a very tight structural idea, and utilizes a familiar structure, for example, the shape of a number 2, and then asks them to make their own movements through space within the given shape. “I’m facile at making movement, but I’m tired of it, I’m bored by teaching people steps. I teach people forms. Steps are too time-consuming, we don’t have that kind of time.”

This technique allows dancers to invest in the final product, rather than mirroring her every step. “But, when you lose the people, you lose the dance, it’s ephemeral.” Her modus operandi is to rely heavily upon intuitive approaches, and contact improvisation, drawing from the dancer’s own experiences, thus building a dance piece by the process of accumulation. This process-oriented format reminds me of Stanislavski’s inner-directed approach to acting.

“In Dance” Magazine described Woodhead as “articulate with just the right amount of feistiness, her non-conformity is elusive…. She creates complex, yet deceptively simple pieces that aim at the evocative, rather than the illustrative.”

“Nobody knows what we dancers are doing, dance is too esoteric.” Woodhead laments the general public’s lack of understanding of, and appreciation for modern dance, for which she blames MTV and video. “The odd idea that a dance should be a frontal, frantic 30-second bite of hyper energy—that’s not dance. As a culture, we know less about dance now than before the advent of TV.” She added, “TV has no depth of field, no depth of range, the scale is all wrong. TV trivializes dance.”

“It’s painful to realize the most wonderful dancers cannot bring in a full house. I keep thinking—if only I just did this better, they’d get it. I’ve had to let go of that.” But she is obsessed by the quest for absolute truth in dance movement. “Your body is honest, whether or not you are. I’m after the right movement for this moment, the truthful, authentic movement for the times. Forget about being original, try to be truthful.”

The 50-year-old choreographer compares her structural approach to dance more akin to musical scores and notation, than to language. “I think like a musician, versus a playwright or painter. I never try to tell a story. Language tends to get in the way of dance; poetry and dance often makes a bad mix.” Woodhead said she has only used a poem once to evoke a dance piece, “Copperhead” from a poem by West Marin poet Linda Gregg. She is intrigued by forms about time and space. “Space is very easy for me. I don’t know that much about time. Space is a musical concern. Dance is conscious movement through time and space.”

Originally a native of Santa Barbara, Woodhead studied piano and cello. Like Ginger Rogers, Woodhead excelled in social, or ballroom dancing, and the only other option, ballet, held no appeal. “It had no relationship to dance.” Then one day noted avant-garde choreographer and modern dancer Merce Cunningham taught a master class at Woodhead’s high school, “I was blown away, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

But it wasn’t until her mid ‘20s, at an age when most ballet dancers retire, Ann found her calling. “I realized I was a dancer.” Married at 16, she entered U.C. Riverside as a math major. Divorced and remarried at 22, with two babies by 23, Woodhead migrated north to San Francisco, and survived by writing textbook copy, and taking dance workshops whenever she could.

Woodhead admits her training as a dancer is unconventional. “I have no credentials, except those I’ve created—no, those I’ve forged,” she added. Woodhead discusses the powerful influence German Expressionism had on modern dance; she studied with many noted dance masters including Merce Cunningham and Anna Halperin. She acknowledges both Jennie Hunter as a mentor teacher, and Erick Hawkins (Martha Graham’s choreographer-husband) as the most technically influential. Woodhead debuted her first production in 1969.

When I asked her how she, a dancer, in need of a city to perform and survive, arrived in Sonoma County’s clement backwaters, she quipped, “How else—by following a man.” The relationship fizzled, she loved living in the country, but needed a means to survive, and a good performance space.

Sonoma State University offered Woodhead a job, and the Cinnabar Theatre, formerly an old church, provided the space—the rest is, as they say, ‘her story.’ In the summer of 1972, Woodhead performed her first piece (“Spinning Dance”), founded the very successful Mercury Moving Company in 1973, and in 1980 she formed the Ann Woodhead Dance Company “in order to pursue my choreographic interests more intensively.”

Dean of Performing Arts at Sonoma State University, Woodhead is unconventional, she holds no degrees in dance, but has a M.A. in psychology. Seventeen years of teaching has nourished her performance career (as well as paid the bills), it allows her to constantly move and experiment. Teaching spurs on her choreography. One of the trade-offs in teaching is giving away energy, and finding a balance between being teacher and artist (she sees 100-150 students, six classes, four days a week). “I can get creative on their dances, but I’m giving it away.”

If Woodhead was living in the midwest, or New York, she says her work wouldn’t be any different. Woodhead doesn’t feel she’s bound by regionalism. “My concerns are formal, location is not important. I see very little dance—though my tastes have broadened considerably. Avant-garde is nothing new.” But there’s some trouble living in paradise—and outside the mainstream of the dance world, largely an urban art form. A choreographer in a big city has more options, more funding, less work to publicize. Though even in the Big Apple, it’s hard times for dancers. At one point, Twyla Tharpe, tired of trying to secure funding, disbanded her internationally famous troupe.

Woodhead despises the system used for getting grants, in spite of the fact that she has been very successful at it. She received several grants and awards for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer fellowships, a Sonoma County Foundation fellowship, and a Sonoma County Arts Achievement Award. “Funders want five-minute video tapes; my dances take 20 minutes! I hate toadying for money, I feel defiled by it. Funding on the basis of quality is a joke, it’s about fashion, trendiness, who’s currently popular.” She thinks a lottery system would be a fairer approach, but she readily admits she’s not good at working within the system.

Woodhead cites other trade-offs of living in the country: a lack of public and corporate funders and presenters, little or no publicity, or press coverage, rare reviews, and a scattered, and small audience as major deterrent. “It’s not a very innovative to me for dance right now. It’s tough, it’s never been a gold mine. I’ve survived by teaching. I’m lucky, I do have an audience, I’m able to raise some money.” Her salary from SSU supplements her career as a dancer and choreographer. Expenses include dancer’s salaries (there are 8 in her troupe) , rent, musician, printing, photos, costumes often leave her in debt after the show closes.“There’s very little praise or financial reward for what we do.”

“It’s hard times for modern dance, there’s not enough serious dancers coming up through the ranks.” She added, for young people willing to take the artistic vow of poverty today, “living on the edge is harder to do, because being poor is so much scarier now than it was in the ‘70s.”

Woodhead continued, “aerobics has killed us.” Those who used to take dance classes for pleasure and exercise, forsook dance for the trendy fitness phase, but they’ve discovered their bodies can’t keep it up. Some are returning to the more ergonomically sound techniques of dance, and aerobics teachers are beginning to use dance in their exercise programs.

Woodhead briefly talked about the role of the older dancer. With the exception of superstars like Margo Fontaine, who is cosseted, Woodhead is a pioneer in the field of the aging of American dancers. “We modern dancers always have to make our own work. I ache every morning, my feet always hurt, mornings are hell, I’m literally too stiff to roll over. (Ibuprofin is a dancer’s best friend .) I succumbed to dance. I’m not young, I’m not skinny, but, hey, I’m still dancing.”

The red-headed dynamo claims she’s basically lazy—a paradigm if ever there was one. The secret to her success? 90 percent of the magic is just showing up at the studio every day, says she. “The rest is improvisation.”

“Dance the first art form, not even sound can happen without movement. Movement is the mother of arts, the source, it remains the most completely human of the arts.” She gets more praise as an actor without any “acting chops. Our literalness is what separates us from actors; acting is not real, it’s illusion, while dance is truth.




One of the joys of transcribing these print articles is that I can provide links, and articles that weren't available to me when I wrote this piece. I was dancing with Ann four days a week at Sonoma State during the late 1970s. We were required to watch videos of other dance companies. Thus began my training to write this piece which appeared in The Paper. I have no publication date  for this piece, just this file that said 2/92—but that was the date I last "saved" it onto a floppy disk, not its origin date. I think it's written during the late 1980s—I quoted a line from a kidpoem that came from Mark West School where I was teaching poetry in the mid-1980s. I think this piece was published in The Paper during Nick Valentine's reign as editor).   —MH

Links for further reading:

DANCE: THERESA DICKINSON AND ANN WOODHEAD (1983 NY Times)

Where Worlds Collide (1998 Sonoma County Independent aka The Paper)

Dance Dreams: Choreographer Ann Woodhead stages final piece (2001 North Bay Bohemian—aka The Paper)