Bread & Roses award for volunteer service

My connection with Bread & Roses began when I landed a job through my childhood friend, Micaela Wall to clean the Mill Valley office for Mimi Fariña in the late 1970s.

When Mimi discovered I was also a calligrapher, she put me to work making all the signage for the big benefit concerts (1979-82?) at the Berkeley Greek Theatre. I was promoted to calligrapher-in-residence and chief hooverer. I still have all the vintage B&R T-shirts designed by Stanley Mouse, and my backstage passes. (They all mysteriously shrank! Hmmmm.)

When College of Marin classmate Robin Williams spotted me backstage after a concert (we survived Jim Dunn's theater bootcamp together), he gave me a bone-crushing sweaty hug, introduced me to Eric Idle, of Monyt Python fame, who reminded me of a Siamese cat, and local comedian "Big Mike" Michael Pritchard. I can't remember a thing—other than I laughed so hard I wet my pants.

In the long run, the annual B&R weekend benefit concerts proved costly to produce (but they were memorable—a musician's wet dream) so Mimi began producing local benefit concerts in Marin. I moved to Sonoma Co. We lost touch. But Mimi did write me a glowing letter of recommendation.

Fast forward, about a decade later, I met musicians Neil O'Neill and Wendy Worsley, who, coincidentally, were performers for B&R. Which led me right back to B&R. I was the background roadie getting Neil ready for concerts, etc. Sadly, Mimi got cancer, and stepped down from B&R... The end of an era.

Then, ca. 2004, B&R staff asked Neil and me to sing in the holiday concerts for the old folks. I think I missed a few years due to viruses (no sharing colds with the old folks).

Also, beginning in 2004, Neil and I volunteered at the B&R booth at the Kate Wolf Music Festival, and we've attended that festival off and on since then.

I mentioned to one of the B&R coordinators, Lisa Starbird, that I used to work for Mimi way back when, and she immediately put me on the Appreciation list, as a form of documentation. And now I'm actually getting an award for something like 40 years of service! OK, so I missed a decade, plus change, and was incognito for another decade...but I was always rattling around in the bushes.

I'm floored and flabbergasted and honored to be getting this award this afternoon at the annual B&R jam. So, if I hadn't whined to Lisa that I wanted my own invite to the annual B&R Jam, vs always being Neil's plus one, this award recognition would've never happened.

So many fantastic folks I've met through B&R: Peter Mertz, Jeannie Bogardis, Ken Harrison, B&R coordinator Marian Huebler, Brenda Laribee, and Dennis McIntyre, have been my steadfast and stalwart connections throughout all this. So many dedicated folks at B&R. I am honored to be among them. If not for them... Just wow!

Who knew that hoovering and spit-polishing Mimi's B&R office so many years ago would lead to all this? Give us bread and gives us roses. And vacuum cleaners too. It really was a Hoover.

Summer of Love, etc.

You know the Robin Williams line—even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there. What my classmate Robin should have said: Remembering the '60s is tricky, at best.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave in West Marin which was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks who shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District—LSD (I know, 'splains a lot). I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world (living with my Irish Victorian grannie), and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age—and me, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task.

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School—the only high school (emphasis on the word high) in the nation to shut down a local draft board.  We were a pretty radicalized group of kids.

Our student body president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name should ring a bell—as his older brother, Michael Rossman, was a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. On the eve of The Summer of Love, we marched to town and shut down the San Rafael Draft Board. Our school made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock News. And we gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the roadside kid hitching home from school. This is how I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

During the Summer of Love, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14—a mere 'tweenie. Between worlds. What I remember most from that era was the original 1967 "A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be In" in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal. Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was at the epicenter of The Summer of Love. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often. Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in. A vicarious bystander. Sure, there was fallout, growing up like that in unchartered territory. But I survived the social revolution more or less intact.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert ("Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played in the parks were our near neighbors in West Marin: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

For some reason, though we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it so, from time to time, I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told former Sonoma County poet, Colorado Arts Commissioner Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

I was living out in rural West Marin and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre. This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the 'tween years—we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Choose Three Famous People

Molly Fisk asked on Facebook: Name three famous people you'e known.

Mine would be a litany too long to post. How do I choose just three?

Then there's "what kind of famous?" Do I choose from writers, poets, actors, musicians, public figures, etc.? By how well I knew them—an actual event vs. a one-off? 

Writers: I shared a wee drop of whiskey with Seamus Heaney in an elevator in Rotterdam with the African poets. Rita Dove was my partner in the Breyton Breytenbach translation sessions. We did not drink whiskey.

I went drinking and sang Irish songs with Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver at the Port Townsend Tavern in Washington. Let's just say alcohol was consumed and I was a lightweight. They weren't.

I hung out with Maya Angelou and her son Guy at National Poetry Week. We sat backstage with Lucille Clifton waiting for Maya to come offstage. They talked about the gravitational speed of their breasts reaching to their waists.

Robin Williams' Magic Mirror

The truth is, if anything, I'm probably addicted to laughter. —Robin Williams 1951-2014

It's really been upsetting reading the news with myriad gossip-mongers having a field day at Robin Williams' expense. Folks have been busy blaming Robin's turbulent drug-ridden past and/or a lack of money for his suicide.

According to his financial advisor, despite two divorces, Robin was not on shaky financial ground. He was solid. Royalties were coming in. He has three new movies about to be released. Income (or a lack thereof) wasn't the reason for his death.

Nor was vice the cause. His vices: he was clean from drugs having gone cold turkey since the day John Belushi died in 1982, and he was also sober for 20 years. Yes, Robin fell off the wagon in 2003 while on a movie set in Alaska, and when he began to fall off the barstool, with family intervention, he got back on the wagon in 2006—so he was eight years sober on round two.).

His vices didn't kill him; being bipolar is not a vice, it's an illness. Profound depression was the real enemy. I've seen what it did to my mother, the failed suicide attempts. When slitting his wrists failed, Robin hanged himself with his own belt, wedged over the top of the closet door. He could've saved himself, but death was the only escape route. The toxicology report is still out but I'm willing to bet it will come back clean.

Robin was also recovering from massive open heart surgery (2009), an operation that often leaves survivors profoundly depressed and suicidal. As if his plate wasn't full enough, we come to find out that he also suffered from early onset Parkinson's Disease, a neuro-degenerative disorder that affects balance, movement, and cadence; other symptoms include tremors, and facial paralysis.

One million Americans have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s; it affects as many as 10 million people worldwide. Men are more likely to get it than women. There is no cure. I wonder if Robin Williams had gotten a chance to talk to Michael J. Fox about his symptoms, if it would've made a difference? Or was being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease the final straw? With that prognosis hanging over his head, his future must have seemed like a bleak Godot.

Robin was a very prolific man, he's left behind a prodigious body of work with nearly 50 movies to his credit, and almost as many TV shows, not to mention comedy shows, and charitable work. In 1986 he helped found Comic Relief USA, raising $80 million for the homeless. He's won two Oscars Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Emmys, four Golden Globes, and five Grammy Awards.

His work literally defined who he was. Robin's very identity was wrapped up in his ability to mime and to mimic others. A man of a thousand voices and thousands of  characters. The magic mirror itself was shattered. And no amount of drugs or superglue could fix that.

RIP, Robin. You had the courage to dream big. You made your life spectacular. And we are all the better for it.

Oh, Captain, my Captain. 

Robin Spotting

Robin Williams at Redwood High School ca. 1969.

I met Robin at College of Marin in 1970. Even then, he was mesmerizing. I used to follow him everywhere around campus. Especially when he did silly walks while wearing a swimming cap and not much more than skimpy green gym shorts. He was the pied piper. I was just seventeen.

Imagine Robin wearing a women's swim cap with strap dangling. (Redwood HS ca 1969)

To my mother's delight (she was an actress at the Gate Playhouse in Sausalito), I joined the College of Marin theater department so I got to see Robin in all his zany roles. He did an incredible yellow-stockinged cross-gartered Malvolio that absolutely stole the show. He also stole my heart way back then and never gave it back. I was too frightened to audition for roles but I did costume design and ushered shows.

Robin was a brilliant actor. The comedy angle, he just couldn't help himself. It was always bubbling over. Robin would spontaneously riff on Shakespeare solliloques until we wet ourselves laughing. He drove director James Dunn nuts but we all loved Robin. College of Marin was like an extended childhood—we both attended CoM for three years. 

Offstage, Robin was just about as shy as I was, so at cast parties we'd sort of sit there looking down at our feet kicking rocks and go au-um. I absolutely adored him. I think he knew it too because he once invited me to a party at his house in Tiburon. I hopped into in my old Volvo panel truck (at least it started), and followed his VW Bug to Strawberry. We gassed up at the station, he dropped a rolled-up dollar bill and took off. The wind fluttered it to my feet. I picked it up. Portent of things to come.

I remember going over to the Trident restaurant on the Sausalito wharf just to watch Robin who was working as a busboy/waiter. He'd juggle plates, knives and glasses, do cartwheels, and a side dish of stand-up comedy while bussing dishes. It was always hilariously entertaining until the owner shooed us out.

I was no stranger to the Trident. In the mid-60s, my actress-mother was once a famous Trident waitress wearing little more than a bustier and fishnet stockings—she knocked 'em dead nightly with those showgirl legs—Bing Crosby autographed a napkin for her. Even in the 70s, Trident glitterati included: Grace Slick, Carlos Santana, David Crosby, Bill Graham, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Bill Cosby.

Another favorite Robin-spotting pastime was watching Robin-the-mime greet perplexed shivering tourists at the end of the trolly car line in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square. Or watch him improv at the Old Spaghetti Factory. I saw him once at The Boarding House, but by then his fame was growing, and it was crazy jammed, so I left without saying hello or goodbye.

Robin took the LA comedy clubs by storm, and in 1973, he was accepted to Juilliard along with other classmates of mine, Mark Rasmussen, and Joel Blum (a 2-times Tony winner), but Robin always kept up his west coast connections. Marin was home.

Robin Williams & Joel Blum in the wild west version of Taming of the Shrew, directed by James Dunn,  1971, went on to win the Best of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that summer. Many of us helped raise funds (car washes) for the tour, but didn't go with the cast. Harvey Susser was also my drama teacher. It's his photo. Don't know why the Daily Mail is claiming it.  Great interview with James Dunn, though. 

I only saw Robin once again in 1981 at a concert after he got famous. Backstage, after a Bread & Roses show at The Greek Theater (I was the resident calligrapher for Mimi Fariña), I ran into Robin later with Michael Pritchard, and Eric Idle. Robin did a wild ribald set with Michael Pritchard that had the audience rolling in the aisles.

Robin Williams & Michael Pritchard at the Other Cafe reunion in SF (photo: Nathan Nayan)

I watched the show from the wings. Robin came offstage and recognized me...which shocked me. He gathered me up in his arms saying, I know you! I know you!!! and kissed me soundly. I said: Eww! Gross. Stop. Sweaty! swatting him off...

I got to hang out backstage with Robin, Mike and Eric Idle and watch them crack each other up. I don't remember what was said, one-upmanship was involved, and I had laughed myself senseless. Somewhere I have photos of the show.

Robin said he'd keep in touch. Never happened. 

I always thought I'd see him one more time again.

So long, old friend.... Robin Williams

My friend Molly Fisk posted a photo of Robin on my Facebook page and said, such sad news this afternoon. thinking of you. intensely sad. i'm unfriending people right and left on FB who don't seem to understand depression or how people soothe themselves.

Thanks for the photo post Molly. Jim Carmin said: Robin William joins more than 105 Americans each day in such a sad fraternity... Back in the day, Molly and I sat next to each other in costume class at College of Marin. She once said, We used to dress Robin. It’s true. Malvolio’s crossed garters and all.

When I first heard the news, it was a visceral sucker-punch to the gut. I nearly threw up in the parking lot at the Redwood Credit Union in Petaluma. I was stealing their wifi while waiting for my cousin when I saw the news. I was devastated, then angry. I always thought he had the demons under control—or at least under the barstool.

Someone said Robin just had open heart surgery—and a lot of people commit suicide afterwards. A friend, Richard Beebee, couldn't bear the depression oand pain—nothing worked and so he hung himself. Robin's been on my mind a lot lately.

A friend saw him at Olney Hall, and said there was a heckler in the audience. Robin took out an invisible fishing pole, cast the line out over the audience and simply stated "Fishing for assholes." It brought the house down. Sometimes you gotta do a catch and release on some of those Facebook “friends” who are being assholes.

Robin would have understood.

O Captain! My Captain!

• Robin Williams' Magic Mirror
• Robin Spotting

'Tween Worlds

You know the Robin Williams line—even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there. Meanwhile Gertrude Stein said: There is no there there. And there you have it as my grannie would say. What Robin should have said: Remembering it is tricky, at best.

SFchronicle_vault Dec. 9, 1987: Robin Williams hangs out with comedian Will Durst (left) after Durst lost a mayoral run. We're thinking that's Vera Carp of "Greater Tuna" on the right. 📷: Chronicle Archive

I follow a couple of Facebook groups and we've posted collective memory threads from multiple perspectives. Some of my recent blog posts are outtakes from those threads. Sometimes the outtakes gel, sometimes. they're merely placeholders of an idea I might revisit later.

We were reminiscing what it was like growing up between times during those turbulent years. Part of the backstory was the anniversary of the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre (which I didn't include). These outtakes are from random fragments that drifted in and out of that series of dialogues.

For some reason, though we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it so, from time to time, I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told Colorado poet, Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

However, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14—a mere 'tweenie at the original 1967 "A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be In" in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal.

Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was also one of the first artists to transform and live inside the Hamms Brewery vats—but that's an '80s story of punk rockers & hippie wars. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often. Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in.

(I'm leaping ahead in my story here. The problem with a run-on memory fragment is that it's a challenge to force it to toe the timeline of congruity. Not an easy thing when the 60s' are invoked.) My mom knew Kush of Cloud House. She got around. She was featured in Whitman McGowan's poem-video, White Folks Was Once Wild Too. That's her dancing around the bonfire.

sfchronicle_vault June 1959: Allen Ginsberg flips through a Jack Kerouac book at a San Francisco bookstore. The Beatniks, as named by Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, had a positive influence on visual arts, performing arts and music. They challenged the values of a conservative city. And they built a foundation for a progressive future. 📷: Joe Rosenthal

I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert "Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played were near neighbors: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave which was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District—LSD ('splains a lot). I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world (living with my Irish Victorian grannie), and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age—and me, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task. 

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School—the only high school (emphasis on the word high) in the nation to shut down a local draft board. 

We were a pretty radicalized group of kids. Our class president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name shoulld ring a bell—as in his older brother, Michael Rossman, a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. When we shut down the San Rafael Draft Board, we made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock news. And gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the kid hitching home from school. How I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

I was living out in rural West Marin and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre. This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the 'tween years—we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.



My related blog post

Ken Kesey

Hitching in Marin during late 60s, early 70s

Note bene: for some reason someone, who posted a comment as "Anonymous" took umbrage to this post and wrote "b.s." Of course I didn't publish it—as they didn't bother to sign their name, nor did they say why they thought it was b.s. It's my past I'm writing about, so how is it b.s.? Maybe he thought it was made up. Who knows? Clearly he was full of b.s. for posting it. And so it goes. I invite comment and dialogue, but not b.s.

Missing conversation (w/o Pete)

A Facebook conversation with childhood friend, Pete Sutton where he removed all his comments. My feelings must be hurt.

You were the first Pete I ever knew! When you lived on Arroyo Road... Somewhere between that long distance of almost 5 and maybe 6. Nick was in diapers. You're older than me. I  remember my grannie stopping off to visit your mom on the way back from the store or church—we had no car. It was always a long walk home. When did you move to Lagunitas? I remember visiting you once or twice. But it was too far away.

Remember red-haired Miss Lenz and her pet skunk? Miss Lenz was the best. They let her go after we moved on—whatfor? Perhaps a tad too rainbow? Then there was the longterm sub, Mrs. Brennan. OMG! And to think we went to LSD school....

I totally forgot her name—Smith. I remember making cut-out trolly cars in math—a measuring exercise. I just wanted to look at the model and make my own which was far quicker way to go to my way of seeing, but she insisted that I had to follow directions (never my strong suit). All I could think of, was that was not the best way to approach it. But that wasn't the lesson. I don't remember her being British! Was there a rotund Mrs. Smith and a spinsterishly thin grey-haired Miss Smith? OK, so then I had MRS Smith! More like midwestern. Did we have two 4th grade teachers? I think not. I guess my ears, attenuated t my grannie's Irish English, didn't notice. So there were 2 4th grade teachers! I think I had Mrs. Smith.

Oh no! That's Miss Smith? Tall angular sunken chested. I had her in 5/6th grade for art (awful). So there wasn't another 4th grade teacher? Mrs. Bryce for 5th grade, then we began to rotate classes. Mr Sliney and Bob Plant for science, Coach Harry Roche (the eraser & chalk thrower if you got it wrong) for math and Miss Kolanoski for chorus. Who am I missing?

No Pete, I said we went to LSD! Not on it.

Remember Mr Brown at Drake? Yes, Jim Brown instilled a love of clay and Thano nurtured it. You used to throw these BIG pots—you practically had to crawl inside to throw. I was duly impressed seeing these HUGE pots grow up to the ceiling. Eric Ahola was in that class too.

Pete, is Thano Johnson still alive? Last I heard he was in Colorado. I ran into his ex-wife on the Airporter returning back from Amsterdam ca 1999—he wrote to me and I never wrote back...horiffic car accident knocked me for a loop. A lot fell by the wayside.

I was in your effing class with David Best for 3 years running ferpetesakes! I was a painting major and minored in ceramics—even took glassblowing with a crabbit of a man whose name escapes me. Yep, Al and I didn't exactly see eye to eye. Good thing I never took clay with him.  I did love glassblowing so I gritted my teeth with Al.

I can't believe we hung our teabags up to dry in the glaze lab. What did we ingest? I did an ash glaze project—very timoku. We had a wood-burning stove (as did most folks in the Valley) and I gathered ash. Newspaper—lead

Oh gawd, the names are churning: Bernerd Leach was at the De Young in the early 70s—a huge show. He was quite charming. I adored him. Sasha the Russian, Ron Blett. There was a guy who had a studio above San Quentin. My first boyfriend Sweet Old Bob (Hamilton) was a clay major so we visited everybody in N. CA. We often went to the big Daly firing at Waddell Creek ... Yeah, some of those guys got famous. Sasha Makovkin—we helped fire a dinnerware set. Oh what a drunken feast followed as we broke in those newborn plates. Vodka. Lots of vodka.

Also was in the theater dept w/ Robin Williams... Yep. Malvolio—Jim Dunn blew a gasket. Ha! Robin Williams' cross-gartered yellow-stockinged Malvolio was, er, innovative to say the least. I was ushering and I laughed so hard I wet myself—a different Malvolio every night.

Shit, Pete—tyou do realized this is probably the longest conversation I've had with you since i was about six... :-) and it takes Facebook? LOL. This makes for a surreal thread, as Pete removed all his comments. Should my feelings be hurt in retrospect?

Letter to Robin Williams

Dear Robin,                                 1/14/1992

I read an interview of you in last Sunday's Pink Section of the Chronicle and something you (reportedly) said compelled me to write to you. How to begin a letter to someone I haven't talked to since we were in our teens... and not very much at that! 

It's been a long time since the College of Marin drama salad days. In the good ole days at COM-dom, you, in locker shorts, a bathing cap with a dangling chinstrap, doing silly walks across campus. Oh yes, you had shoes on too. 

Please excuse the impersonal format of computer letter, but it winds up in my prose and poetry anyway... I decided to mainframe it. Besides, I feel silly writing you a letter having no place to send it to. Mimi Farina gave me your address years ago but... 

Remember Joel Blum? God, I wonder what happened to him. Back in high school, one assumes people will be around forever, and I wake up and a half a lifetime later, wondering about my classmates. 

Remember Mark Rassmussen? His father "Stu" used to write and direct plays with us little kid actors. I was Julia in the original production of San Geronimo! and I still remember, "the jerseys? Ah juust love the jerseys." 

A very useful line to remember and my mind's like a sieve anyway. (My mom who was in the theatre, coached me—that's how I discovered I got carsick—reading a script in the white Nash rambler with red leather seats. The curves on White's Hill did me in. To this day, I can't read in a car.). 

You knew Dima Birich too, right? Last time I saw her, she was still living with Frank-who-likes-the-horses at Alice Kent's—long after Roger died. 

You were right when you said, "if you remember the 60's you weren't really there." There was a permanent dope cloud over Marin. I blame all memory loss on that, and dyslexia. Like the woman, who, noticing her husband had set up an alms cup with a "Please Help Daily Sex" placard says, "you better let me help you spell dyslexia, Dear."... 

BUT, what I really wanted to say is that I saw you in the Dunn /Krempetz Shakespeare productions and I always thought you were damn good actor. The public wants a comedian to play a comic part. I think Woody Allen is finally taken seriously for his films...but he's had to reduce his visibility to make people pay attention. 

I felt saddened seeing you always in the movie role of Fool crying, "Nuncle." (However, I have a special fondness for your Malvolio with his crossed garters). 

So much depends upon how much film is left on the editing floor, and the audience thinks the actor is at fault. I had to review movies for a while, and I sure do like that fast foreward button on my VCR machine! 

While you were the hottest action in comedy, I missed the serious actor... and now, you've said, "if you don't hit a home run, you'll be optioned off to the minors." Well, the bases are loaded and it's the top of the tenth. It's how you play ball with the land mines that counts. I wish you luck on your latest film and maybe it will be the showcase you've been looking for, and if 'it ain't—well, back to the ball park. 

Best,

Maureen Hurley 

P.S. You may well wonder what prompted me to write to you. (Deep subject). Part of it had to do with guilt from not reading the Sunday Paper on Sunday Ilike normal folks and it got put off until the end of the week. 

Like the Welsh princess Rhiannon stepping over Mathelwheny the Shaman's rod to prove she's still a virgin, I stepped daily over the paper, your photo obscenely staring up at me. 

I preferred Rhiannon's sister Arianrhod, who dallied in the waves with a Silkie of Sule Skerry, and upon stepping over the rod, gave birth to Dylan (not Bob—who often stole Irish songs and melodies and called them his own) of the Waves, a halfling—neither from this world nor the otherworld. 

"Spare the rod and spoil the child?" And there's her other son, Llhew who was betrayed by Bleuodwhyh the woman made of flowers. 

I read everything: outdated newspapers, cereal boxes, medicine containers. It must have something to do with being Irish—the sacredness of the printed word. 

A writer friend, Carolyn Forché told me to read "only what is good" because it will affect my writing. Will I become a writer of recycled newspaper tidbits, cereal boxes and medication warnings? I am especially fond of contraindications on medicine containers. The contras are indicated in right-wing medicine? Land mines in Nicaragua? Hairy fish balls for pear pimples??? 

I forgot to say I find the Funny Section more relevant than the front page though some of the "headers" make it worth reading. Like 

BASEBALL TALKS IN 9TH INNING. 

Or BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES IN FALKLANDS. 

My, weren't they housetrained? 

Due to this compulsive habit, not only do I find an article about you which prompted me to write, but in the Book Section, there's a photo of Tess Gallagher. Aside from the fact that she's a friend, a writer, and also Irish, imagine my surprise when I realized it was MY photograph on the front page with no photo-credit, and of course, no money. 

The Czech is in the mail. 

I prefer anonymity, write? Wrong. 

On this synchronistic bent, I read John Huston's, or should I say, Joyce's The Dead is now a movie. I recognized all the falling snow.

"It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right:..." Joyce's intimate affair with Ithe dead and the living, the ultimate erotic act. The movie opens at the S Clay theatre..oof! 

Of course, Huston, Joyce, and his fictional character Michael Furey are all dead and buried in the clay along with my grandmother who was recently buried in Colma which boasts of a rather large permanent population of a million and a half. 

Some say it's the fastest growing underground city in the west. According to the Sunday Paper, a few of the illustrous neighbors she now keeps are; Ishi, the last Yacqui Indian; Lefty O'Doul, whose headstone is engraved with his lifetime batting average (.349); Emperor Joshua Norton, "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico."

Meanwhile in the Jewish cemetary, Wyatt Erp presumeably keeping eternal law and order on the ultimate frontier; and, William Randolph Hearst who is responsible for the Sunday Paper to begin with! 

Clay was one of those stories I read as a kid... my ex-patriot Irish grandmother who raised me (everyone should have an Irish grandmother) always kept an ample supply of light reading material (as in Joyce) and whiskey around the house. Try reading Ulyses and Finnegan's Wake as a young nipper...No small wonder I'm dyslexic. 

And we had none, you know, for my grandmother, who, of all people, deserved a decent wake and good wee drop of Irish whiskey to send her off. Notice it's spelled with an "e," none of that Protestant stuff (though she never said "no" to a gift of a "botthle" of Bushmills.). She kept her liquor in magenta shoe pouches in the bedroom closet. Good for rubbing on her arthur-itis, she said. Perhaps she was afraid of getting arthritis of the foot? 

That reminds me of the Scotsman suffering from the same affliction reasoned that plants growing in damp places, which aggrivates the disease, would offer a cure. He discovered it all right—in the bark of the Sally tree—willow as we call it. Only problem is, he had to eat pounds of bark to get relief from the disease. Sallycilic Acid better known as aspirin. 

I, on one hand, can't stand whiskey or whisky—no matter how you spell it, and am trying to weave disparate events into an art form. Perhaps I should call this, On Reading the Sunday Paper a Week Late ... and a dollar—make that 5,ooo dollars short. But that is another story of a writer seeking fame and fortune who found obscure fame in a small Minehune fish pond in Sonoma, Iand is still seeking the fortune part. 

One more letter marked "return to sender." 

On the other hand, I just needed the excuse to drink, I mean write. 

&"Not tonight Dear, I have a headache."

Dream: Robin Williams

7/24: Last night I dreamt I was hanging out with Robin Williams, and it seems so real. I was amazed that he remembered me after all these years. After all, I haven't seen him since 1983. And despite all those years since College of Marin, (1970-1973), I was surprised to discover that a part of me still loves him. 

I awoke with a sensation that one doesn't ever really fall out of love, it just moves over for another person, like a lazy dog at the hearth. And so, I chose Bob Hamilton, or should I say, he chose me, because I was too shy to pursue Robin, and he was too shy to pursue me. I was left standing in the field.

 Imagine how different my life would've been if. If we had managed to handle the mating dance? But now, more years than I care to imagine, have passed. What is the half-life of a first love? If requited, or not? 

I dreamed we'd absolved all that self-confessed shyness. I regret all the lost years. I said, too bad we weren't in touch when you did Moscow on the Hudson. We could've practice our Russian. Yours was pretty good, I said. But mine's better.

There wasn't a romantic twist to the dream. We were just glad to see each other after all these years. But our lives, once intertwined, were interrupted, and I lost sight of him, both literally and figuratively. And the world claimed him, as he lost sight of himself.

7/24/1998

Memory: Robin Williams

I'm sitting on a couch in Amsterdam watching David Letterman's guest, a former love of mine, not a lover. That came later. How I loved him, still seeing him at age 19, love without words, without conversation.

At a party in Tiburon, he sat alone by the fireplace. The others all cozied up for the night. A cast party for Twelfth Night, I believe. I was the wardrobe mistress.

Just to be close to him, I toiled over the sewing machine to make costumes. They were so good that they went on to Scotland that summer for the Shakespeare Festival in Edinburgh.

Ah, Robin, that Malvolio of crossed garters. My young love, whom I followed across the campus as you did your silly walks, wearing little more than a green gym shorts and a woman's bathing cap with a strap dangling like a limp worm.

Ah Robin, once I knew you well, and I can't help but look at your face on the telly, those lips I once wanted to kiss, what but was too shy to let you know. And you wanted me too. We circled each other like moths to the flame, singeing our wings, and retreating off into the night. The danger, too present.

Once we met years later, you took me into your arms, sweating after performance at the Greek Theater, thousands of screaming fans. And held me close until I nearly suffocated. I lost your address on purpose. I couldn't reconcile the idol you had become with the young love.

Now at age 43, I contemplate my lost youth. For what it's worth. Wondering where you are, where you've gone off to, behind that mask. So strange to be thinking of you while sitting on a couch in Amsterdam. So far from home. So far from me.

7/21/1996
added 10/2015