CPITS reading and art exhibit at Barnes & Noble

Sweet Life Cafe, Santa Rosa, Mar 5, 1989, Maureen Hurley, Marianne Ware

Santa Rosa de Lima

Blonde haired beauty, Isabela Flores Olivia was the firstborn of 11 children. Her father, was an official of Lima and an honor guard of the Viceroy. When she was confirmed, she was upset by her name change to Rosa. She cried herself to sleep thinking of all the unsaved souls in the mountains, in the jungles in in China. 

She wanted to preach the gospel to the Indians but she stayed in Lima because of a vision of roses. Instead she helped the poor and the sick of Lima. In a bamboo and and banana leaf covered alcove Hermitage Rosa and the nightingale took turns singing. 

Some say she slept two hours a night in a bed made out of two branches and three stones. She hung her hair on a heavy nail so that she wouldn’t sleep. She kept the key to the well on a chain around her waist. She was thirsty, and said Christ gave her a drink from his side.

Hoping to get a palm frond on Palm Sunday, she got to the crowded church too late. instead Jesus said to her, Rose of my heart, be my wife. Rosa de mi corazón, se tu mi esposa. She was 29. She died at 31, in 1617. Her bones on the altar of the church of Santo Domingo like stars glistening in the dark. Her house was turned into a church after her death.

Obligatory Hug, Sept 1983, Franklin St. Clubhouse, Santa Rosa (Maureen Hurley & Charles Entrekin)

FOUND POEM FOR KENTUCKY PENDERGRASS

—for Kentucky Pendergrass

Suicide is a bridge,
The bottle of wine, the ocean.
Age brings on a comic mask
of reverent death.

The first time I knew
I could kill someone
was when I had a baby.

My grandfather’s sword
is next to my bed
and I wear a purple heart
next to my heart.

I don’t believe in senility.
A friend will drive you to the ocean
and read you a treatise on agent orange,
how 9% will live.

He mopped blood off the floor
after he caught them together.
I took pictures of the house afterwards.

Is it more justifiable to kill someone
before you kill yourself?
The violence is so subtle.
You don’t even know it’s there.

6/7/83
Café Perfetti, Santa Rosa, found poem.

1983, 1984? He was convicted June, 1983
I suspect I was reading the Press Democrat at the time. So I’ll use that date. I was also working for the Paper, so the I who was taking photos was me.

Convicted double-killer Ernest "Kentucky" Pendergrass died in Santa Rosa on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2013. He was 90. “Pendergrass was a big man about town and a widely liked one. So the tragic turn of events that he set into motion while full of booze on the night after Thanksgiving in 1981 struck the county like a temblor. Pendergrass had a shotgun in his pickup when he drove from Santa Rosa to the home on Thorn Road, southwest of Sebastopol, of the newly reunited Rick and Rosemary Edmonds, both 35.”

Obligatory Hug, May 1983, Franklin St. Clubhouse, Santa Rosa (Maureen Hurley, Marianne Ware)

Gypsy funeral

Baro Ram, the big man, the leader, or king of the San Pablo gypsies, Staley Costello died. Gypsies believe that the dead should be surrounded by what they loved in life. Things to take with them on their final journey. Stanley Costello took a Styrofoam model of a leaping fish, a rod, some cigars, cans of Coke, a fishnet—all were  placed on the bier for that final journey.

No date. 3/83?

Note bene: The last gypsy funeral I witnessed was for Baro Ram Silva, the Santa Rosa King of the Gypsies. Swarthy men on horseback, decked in heavily tooled silver saddles, people crowded in Cadillac convertibles, down the middle of Santa Rosa Avenue, women in full skirts, shawls embroidered with roses, everyone, men and women wearing astounding gobs of jewelry, I stood outside of Madame Rosa’s Palm Reading parlor on Santa Rosa Ave., and watched a lost slice of history parade by, not understanding I was witnessing the end of an era.

Silva, or Silveria, lived on High Street in Sebastopol, across from the library, and made redwood chairs and tables. He supplied my friend Donna Champion’s fathers A&W franchise with tables and chairs. Come spring he found his way to my grandmother’s house in Forest Knolls, where he collected scrap iron and fixed our pots. One time we bought two chairs and a table that lasted forever.

Donna remembers one year Ursuline High School put on a Gypsy night, and the real Gypsies wearing massive chains of gold, turned out. Madame Rachael was reading palms in one corner of the room. It was a watershed event, as they are but nominally Catholic. Donna went to school with comedian Pat Paulson’s niece, Pulika (sp) was their gypsy name.

It seems I raided old notebooks and recorded everything in March. First paragraph is from my NPC journal. Silveria story I added later, with a lot of hindsight, 4/2020

See King of the Gypsies