My Irish Redhead post on Celtic Woman Forum

Ha! My Irish Redhead blog post is quoted at length on Celtic Woman Forum

Only caveat is that I rewrote and revised that blog for months after‚ so this is an early permutation.

Quote from: Gail on June 06, 2009, 10:51PM

The "redhead" of Ireland originally came from the assimilation of the Norwegians into ancient Eire (sorry, Ireland) - according to Irish history, Eric the Red had flaming red hair and so did his son, Leif Ericson.

History and scientific genetic studies show otherwise. In fact it may have been the reverse.
It's been proved that the red hair gene Melanocortin 1R was present in Ireland even before the Celts.
The Celts arrived in Ireland around 700 BC, the Gaels around 100 BC.
The Vikings invaded almost 1500 years after the Celts, in 795 AD.
They were defeated by Brian Ború in 999 AD and again in 1014 AD.
Dr Jonathan Rees, Edinburgh University Professor, discovered the recessive gene Melanocortin 1 while conducting studies on redheads.

Here is a quote from a piece about redheads:
"So far, I've found no evidence that Dr. Rees, or any geneticist, equated Irish red hair with the introduction of roving Viking or Finnish genes. If anything, it was probably a stray bit of Irish (or Scottish) DNA in the Viking gene pool that introduced redheadedness to Scandinavia (but not Sweden) as the Dublin Vikings routinely took Irish wives, and some went back to Norway.

Early medieval literature reveals that most Vikings were blond (or dark), but not red-haired. The few redheads among them were singled out with names such as Eric the Red, or Rurik, as they were not typical of their Nordic Race.

Several genetic studies reveal that the highest per capita red-haired genetic marker was in Ireland. Period. Not Scandinavia. I've yet to find a study stating that 40-46% of all  Scandanavians or Finns carry the recessive marker. Genetic DNA tests also suggest that red-hair genes were common among the first Britons."

The ancient Greek ethno-historians, especially Dio Cassius, noted in their observations that there were an awful lot of really big blond/flaxen and redheaded Celt warriors with grey eyes. He described the Iceni warrior Queen Boudicca as being “tall and terrifying . . . a great mass of red hair fell over her shoulders” to her hips.

According to the Roman historian Livy, Roman general Manlius Vulso called the Celts of Asia Minor a fierce nation: "Their tall bodies, their flowing red hair, gigantic shields and long swords, together with their howling as they go into battle, their shouts and leapings and the fearful din of arms as they batter their shields according to some kind of ancestral custom—all these things are designed to terrify!"

The Celts certainly got around; they also settled en masse in Macedonia and Thrace. Philip of Macedonia had a large Thracian Celtic armies. Alexander the Great commented upon the  Celtic warrior's bravery.
Also, thousands of Celtic mercenaries were employed by the Egyptian Ptolemies, in 283-246 BC and 186 BC, and they attempted to overthrow Ptolemy II. By the way -  Cleopatra (a Ptolemy) was a redhead.

Red is the rarest hair color in the world: less than 4% of world's population has naturally red hair. Scotland and Ireland have an unusually high incidence of redheadedness. Irish people carry the highest ratio of red-haired gene (and its variations) in the world.
Those of Celtic Origin in Ireland share a cultural and musical tradition with Celts in Brittany and the Celt-Iberians of Gallicia in Northern Spain, where the redhead gene is much in evidence.

VANCOUVER VARIATIONS

VANCOUVER VARIATIONS

It was eerily amazing to see
a huge Iranian rally in Vancouver
students lining both sides of W Georgia St
all the way from Stanley Park to the top of the hill,
to Burrard, the heart of Vancouver's financial district.
Everyone in black, holding green balloons,
clapping and flashing peace signs.
Drivers honking in unison and in solidarity.

6/28/2009

Blast from the Soviet Past

Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales‎  wrote:

Hola, guess what we got an email from Sasha Karpenko. He has two kids from 2 different mothers. He wanted to know if we know anything from Fred Ptucha and John Masura.We have not spoken to them since 1997. Are you in contact with either one? We started the concerts this weekend. We had two great shows. Today is the third one. Besitos MM ;)

Maureen Hurley No, I've been SO out of touch! we're in Seattle, just returned from a week in the San Juans, Victoria & Vancouver, BC. Home again in CA, but NON is off to Scotia on Wed. to see his mum. We'll catch up later.

ACROSS THE BORDER

ACROSS THE BORDER

Within hearing distance of Victoria Harbour,
we sit and savor the long white nights;
but we're really south of Friday Harbor, San Juan Island,
So why does twilight seem so much longer
across the border?

6/25/2009

ORCAS IN THE STRAITS

ORCAS IN THE STRAITS

Orcas on the Straits,
we sang them in on the Solstice.
Kyaked into English Camp
& hiked Young Mountain (awk, I'm not so young)
for a panorama of the San Juans;
the Olympics so clear, so close,
you could touch them with a spoon.
They rose up like orcas breathing to the sky.


6/22/2009

Facebook censorship, Iran election

I posted an Iran election link to the New Yorker and got this from FaceBook: "Your behavior indicates that you may be in violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.”

FB Block is still on my account. This is a test. It's just danged irritatin'—considering the two actual Anderson Cooper news links I was trying to post on censorship in Iran! It amounts to a gag order. And here, the Army is lifting their block on social networking. Who's your army now?  If my profile disappears, you'll know where to look. Please send in bread and water at neap tide. No ruler-bearing nuns, please. I already have splinters on my tongue,

VARIATION ON YEATS "Love is like a Lion's Tooth:"

VARIATION ON YEATS "Love is like a Lion's Tooth"

Love arrived like thunder before a storm,
all pompous and out of breath.
It tingled with ozone and the odor of first rain.
It stung the eye with a splash of red roses
splayed against an neon blue wall.
It itched like wild strawberries on the tongue.
It planted butterflies deep in the stomach
like when a mangy dog licks your lips.
There was no howling of wolves

or wolfish howls, wolf whistles,
or an aural fixation of harp stings.
No angel bands dancing on pinheads

needed to apply for the job.

The position was already filled.
Love sharpened its claws and gnashed its fangs,
drew its customary pint of blood until the sky
was filled with such longing and an urge for
a rousing game of Tic-tac-toe with the moon.
The outcome was inevitable.
All those Xes and Os led them astray.

It was also a very long time ago.

6/14/2009

This was a prompt for a poem on the five senses for Donna

Last days teaching

Tho I be sick (thanks to kinder kids for sharing those bugs), my 2nd Grade poetry finale at Beach ES was a brill sendoff. We designed symbols from our lives and dreams in our hands, and wrote poems: Inside my hands... they became extraordinary illustrations for their poetry anthology. We sent them into the cusp of summer with their hands full of poems. And now I have to glaze tiles with Cleveland ES kids the rest of the day...deadlines....ah, the restorative power of thick, blacker than gall Irish tea! Up & at 'em!

BASIL METAPHOR

BASIL METAPHOR

I think we think in metaphor first without realizing it
and then we work our way back toward simile
so people don't think we're nuts!

This AM I looked at my recently shorn basil
(who recently committed their leaves to pestocide)
and thought of "sheep." Sheep-shorn basil.

Then I corrected myself: basil, like shorn sheep.

Either that, or it was the catnip to blame.

5/9/09

Sheep Sheer metaphor

Aristotle wrote: The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. Plato didn't trust metaphor because it wasn't measurable.

This morning I looked at my recently shorn pathetic basil (that had involuntarily offered up all their leaves to a pestocide binge on my part) and I immediately thought of sheep.

I said aloud, poor sheep-shorn basil. An involuntary metaphor!

Then I corrected myself: and said, The basil looks like it was shorn by sheep.

Perhaps my involuntary metaphor was due to a profound lack of morning tea in my system that induced such a thought. Either that, or it was the catnip.

The point is, I saw the metaphor first in my mind's eye, then I backed off, and turned it into a simile, which is weaker, albeit safer.  Metaphor makes me look crazy, simile is a logical rationalization process.

I think that we think in metaphor first without realizing it, and then work our way back toward the logic of simile so that people don't think that we're completely nuts! Crazy talk.

Reading went well

Tweet: Maureen Hurley & @cechaffin to read at Poetry & Pizza, Jun 5 @7:30 PM. $5 door to benefit: CA Poets in the Schools. Escape from NY Pizza, 333 Bush St,, SF. Pizza: all you can eat. Poetry: priceless! Glenn Ingersoll, host.

Joie Cook‎ to Maureen Hurley

Sorry I missed your show, just too tired & getting around is a problem for me, I have no good excuse and I wanted to hear you and meet you!; I'm shocked that you mentioned Herman Berlandt. I knew him many years ago, isn't he very, very old? Still in Bolinas?

I said: No worries. Reading went very well....it's a great space & the owner is a poet. Check out: Escape from NY Pizza. 333 Bush; readings are the 1st Fri of the month, beginning again in Sept. 

Some Canadians even filmed us, thinking I was going to do a Celtic thing, and I'd made a reading around Ca Poets in the Schools, as that was what we raised $ for at the door. So I sang Siuil a Run in Irish to placate them. Migod, I haven't read in CA in 10 years! Reading in grad school doesn't count.

From a Facebook post.

added 6/17

Neither CE Chaffin nor Joie Cook are with us. Chaffin came through with his suicide threat and Joie's failing health got the best of her. Not sure about Herman Berlandt. When I visited him on the Mesa, he barely remembered me. Very depressing.

David Bromige 1933-2009

I learned of David’ Bromige's passing on Facebook. And on the cusp of Walt Whitman’s birthday, at that. David was instrumental in my becoming a poet. I remember well that fateful day, in 1979, auditioning for him over the phone (I was a housecleaner-nanny in Belvedere). I wanted to take his poetry class, and upon the urging of friends, I sent in a manuscript, never expecting that I would be accepted into the poetry class, or that it would become my life’s work.

He once quipped that I came charging into the Sonoma State University creative writing program with a full head of steam. No matter that I had absolutely no backgrounds in literature, and had to start at absolute zero with language. I had no inkling what a noun or a verb was, let alone, a modifier. When it came to my unorthodox uses of language, syntax, and punctuation, he was a patient man. What I appreciate most about having been his student is that he allowed me find my own voice and style.

And I ran with it to become editor of Sonoma Mandala Literary Review (now called Zaum), Open Hand and a coordinator for countless poetry events at SSU and in the community: Ear to the Ground, Russian River Writers’ Guild, etc., for 20 plus years.

It was through coordinating poetry readings and events at many Sonoma County venues, from SSU to Inn of the Beginning, West of the Laguna, Cotati Cabaret, Garbo's, Leonard Matlovitch's Stumptown Annie's, Higher Grounds, Copperfield's Books, and the Johnny Otis Niteclub—was where I apprenticed my varied and sullen craft.

At those readings I met the contemporary poets who became my extemporaneous teachers: Andrei Codrescu, Charles Bukowski, Thom Gunn, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Hollo, Allan Ginsberg, Carolyn Forché, Sandra McPherson, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Doubiago, Robert Hass, Eugene Ruggles. Bobby Kaufman, Diane di Prima (I put on a reading for her when "Loba" came out), to name a few.

Wisely, David did not attempt to shape and mold me into a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. Fractured syntax and the exact placing of the eroded coastline of the word on the page was not my cuppa tea,

I was a narrative poet with a story to tell. He handed me readings lists: the poetry of Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert, Herrick, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Elliott, H. D., and Chaucer—to name a few.

I later came to appreciate much of what David introduced me to, but I was a stubborn, if recalcitrant student, at best. Not much of a follower, more mulish than brilliant, and certainly not much given to idle hero worship. We had our moments.

I remember one time he called me into his office, I thought, uh-oh, it was going to be bad news, Surely I’d failed a class, but he reached into his filing cabinet and pulled out some beer, cracked it open, and we went over my writing portfolio.

I knew David suffered from childhood diabetes, and having a beer on the sly, was a real no-no. I sat through the tutorial, watching him like a hawk, terrified that he might slip into a diabetic coma. And then what would I do? Campus was closed for the weekend, no 911. Phones couldn't dial out off campus. It was an in-house system. (Pre cell phone days may be hard for the current generations to imagine, but watch '70s-'80s cops & robbers reruns, and you'll see a fair amount of film spent on people hunting down phone booths.)

I loved being an accidental TA as well, when David was in Oakcrest, the local looney bin, and I learned far more from the process of having to teach my peers, cold turkey, all at once, than if I’d been just a sedentary student in our Poetics Senior Seminar. Clifford Schwartz (who was auditing the class), Jim Montrose and I carried on with the class as if the professor had just stepped out for some air. The English Department wisely let us carry on with no one at the helm.

One time we were all in the Sonoma Mandala office, I was typing up poems for the latest issue and I had a momentary starstruck dyslexic faux pas of a moment when I blurted out: "Would you trust a poet in your mouth?" David was quick to quip back, "Hey ya, that's great!" recognizing the metaphor embedded within the Spoonerism. I was so utterly embarrassed, that to this day, I've no idea of what I was really trying to say. But David taught me to value those slip of tongues as random acts of poetry.

Instead of being nitpicky, David had a kindly way of pointing out typos and other glaring printed glitches. In the days before computers and spellcheck, we used an old IBM Selectric. He'd say, "I wonder who...typed 'it's' instead of 'its';" or "'there' when they meant 'they're'?" Or, "Hey, that's interesting. What do you think that comma's doing there? Or "Why do you think someone spelled it 'in memorium' instead of 'in memoriam'."

That was me, on all counts. I feigned innocence on the "it's/its" typo (and never repeated that mistake again, but the"memorium" was a calligraphic scribal error, I was distracted and it was a little harder to pass off as it was my own handwriting, not the IBM Selectric to blame.

Besides, I'd already run off the flyers for Boschka Layton's memorial service, so I spent the afternoon turning that "u" into an "a" on some 500 flyers. Because of David, I learned to pay closer attention to the grammar and structure of language, as well as to punctuation.

Another time, I happened to be in Vancouver, B.C, visiting a poet friend, Fred Herskovitch, who mentioned that a British poet was in town. Imagine my surprise when we trundled off from the depths of the Capilano Gorge to hear David read in a stuffy, hot and overcrowded bookstore loft, in Old Town, Vancouver. (It was a rare, humid sunny solstice evening). Somehow hearing his work out of context of the insular Sonoma County poetry circles put a new emphasis on his words. Or rather, to my listening skills. I was able to hear him in a fresh "voice.

Perhaps that weird Canada connection was the beginning of our friendship, and the beginning of my transition from that of student to peer. Like all good poets, we all went out for beer. Margaret Atwood was there (this was before Handmaiden's Tale and her subsequent rise to fame), David's son, Christopher, and I forget who else, was squeezed into our booth. But we talked into the wee hours as poets do.

(I am still processing what David meant to me as our early relationship was sometimes a firestorm of wills. Sometimes he could be so damned English! And me, well, so Irish. So as I process and remember, perhaps this blog will expand at a later date. Ironically, David lived in Ireland for a time—sent there to recover from TB—and had fond memories of his extended stay among the Irish. So our angst may have been merely a pedestrian garden variety of professor/student, rather than that of political boundaries.)

I have not even mentioned David's illustrious career as a poet (see the Wiki entry below), he contained a multitude of writing styles, but by far, one of my favorite, delightfully earthy and humorous poems of his is from:

Tiny Courts in a World without Scales

Mañana from Heaven

I just want a couple acres
in beautiful country
where I can put two-three Chevys
up on cinder blocks
and abandon a stack
of automobile tires

Last time I saw David was in Sebastopol, ca. 2001, right before he had his stroke. We bumped into each other coming from the market, and so we popped around the corner into a wine bar and we sipped a lovely tall glasses of cabernet mid-afternoon. Sinfully delicious. The circle completed—from student/professor to comfortable old friends. Like the whisper of worn corduroy. That day, tranquil, indelible as stone, will remain with me forever.

May the road rise lightly at your back, David.
May it rise like your words on the wind.
Here's to you, lad, I raise my class on high.

P.S. Hey David, look, I got "memoriam" right this time.

YANC residency

Rolling thunder from the north...rain in June? I's gonna be a long day, It's off to my Young Artist of Northern California residency at the Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City for our final art class, silk painting session with 1st graders. Then I get to hang an art show for three classes, transform the classrooms and corridors into gallery space, and meet the parents. Gonna be a very long day.

THE ETHIOPIANS ON THE BALCONY

ETHIOPIANS ON THE BALCONY CALLING HOME

The Ethiopians on the balcony
woke me from a sound sleep,
calling home to Africa
and shouting into the distance of the night.
I really wish they'd use a better cell connection
or talk indoors, I'm beginning to recognize
words in Tigrinya.

Remind me to tell the story of the woman
who sacrificed chickens every Sunday at dawn.
Wish I had recorded her chanting to the sun.
Then it was crooning chickens on the balcony
in downtown Oakland—until a rooster got into the mix.

6/2/2009


ETHIOPIAN ON THE BALCONY, 3 AM CALL

The Ethiopian on the balcony is calling home again.
He shout the entire distance to Addis Ababa on his mobile.
What is it about 3 AM calls anyway, is the satellite closer?
I'm beginning to pick up Amharic sound bites.
Then he cranks up an Arabic version of the Macareña
heavy on the ululation and drumbeks.
Which makes him shout even louder.
I'm thinking of a bagpipe revenge at 3 AM.
Anyone loan me some warpipes?

7/30/2009 

•      ETHIOPIAN ON THE BALCONY
• The Ethiopian on the balcony is calling home again. 

  He shout the entire distance to Addis Ababa on his mobile. 

  I'm beginning to pick up Tagrinyi words and sound bites. 

  Then he cranks up an Arabic version of the Macareña on the stereo. 

  I roll over and cover my head, my gawd, it’s after 3AM.

  Now he’s dancing on the balcony, a faint glimmer of dawn in the east.

  I give up on sleep, or rather, sleep has given up on me.

  
  

  First draft, except last three lines. from Facebook notes, added 7/21

ETHIOPIANS ON THE BALCONY, DRUMMING

The Ethiopians on the balcony are drumming (indoors)
and the call & response 

sounds like the Lakota Sioux "Budwieser" chant.

I wanted to record the woman who sang to the east 

on Sunday mornings, with crooning chickens 

raised to the sun—before the fateful dispatch. 

Added a new twist to the Chicken Every Sunday idea. 

I couldn't see her, only her shadow playing against the wall. 

The photograph I will never take.

And then one night I was awakened 

by a bunch of Africans (on the balcony) 

singing Ladysmith, albeit drunkenly. 

I stood in the moonlight at 3 AM, mesmerized. 

It never happened again. 

The Africans, they come and go 

on the apartment balconies like the seasons, 

making their way in this northern land.

8/3/2009

Maureen Hurley and C.E. Chaffin to read at Poetry & Pizza series, SF

Maureen Hurley

Storyteller, Celtic scholar, artist & poet, Maureen Hurley grew up in West Marin in Northern CA. Hurley holds an MA and a MFA in Creative Writing (poetry/ playwriting) from San Francisco State University, as well as a BA in Art Studio and Expressive Arts from Sonoma State University. As a graduate exchange student at UC Berkeley's Celtic Studies Department, she has studied anthropology, folklore and literature.

Working with California Poets-in-the-Schools and arts councils Maureen brings art and poetry to libraries, schools, prisons, retirement homes and hospitals. Besides magazine and web publication (check out her myspace page!), Maureen frequently performs her work, getting as far afield as Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival and the Cherkassy Library in the Ukraine.

C.E. Chaffin
A native Californian (now living in Mendocino County) C.E. Chaffin graduated from UCLA in 1976, winning the top honor award in English, The Edward Niles Hooker Award, though, he says, he was not an English major. Later he taught Family Medicine at UCI and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Having retired from medical practice, Chaffin edited and published the literary ezine, The Melic Review. These days he keeps a blog, and teaches an online poetry course.

Spring '09 saw the publication of Unexpected Light (Diminuendo Press). Of the book’s poems poet & editor Seth Abramson says, “Here are words in service of integrity, poems in service of necessary revelations, and a poet in service of attention at its most elemental and unsettling."

Gate to benefit: California Poets in the Schools www.cpits.org

California Poets in the Schools is the largest writers-in-schools program in the nation. The program's primary focus is to encourage students to write, using their imagination, life experience, and special perceptions to create poetry. Poetry classes foster creativity, intuition and intellectual curiosity through the creative writing process.

Local Area Poet Coordinators administer the program, with a policy to place poets in schools in their own communities, often in their own immediate neighborhoods. Whether the school and community reflect an urban multicultural/bilingual population, a suburban environment or a rural farming area, CPITS has poets available who are of that community and familiar with its mores and values.

Poetry & Pizza is hosted by poet Glenn Ingersoll.
Glenn is a former student of Maureen Hurley And Zara Altair's.

Pizza is all-you-can-eat, poetry is priceless.

Escape from New York Pizza
333 Bush St (at Montgomery)
nearest BART is Montgomery Stn
nearest parking garage Sutter Stockton

7:30pm
$5 requested donation

links to maps:
http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://popizza.white.prohosting.com

Maureen Hurley & @cechaffin to read at Poetry & Pizza, Jun 5 @7:30 PM. $5 door to benefit: CA Poets in the Schools. Escape from NY Pizza, 333 Bush St,, SF. Pizza: all you can eat. Poetry: priceless! Glenn Ingersoll, host.

Tweed Waulking

Photo: Mabli Agozzino, Mouth Music workshop with Pam Swan at UC Berkeley. That's me in magenta sitting next to Pam.

Listening to the Browne Sisters sing A Thousand Curses on Love in Scots Gaelic (Mile Marbhphaisg Air A'Ghaol).

Call and response tweed waulking song from the West Hebrides—possibly one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in the whole wide world. Tweed waulking is exclusively women's work. Very tribal.

They've softened the blow, so to speak, with their harmonies. Usually the song has quite a thump downbeat as the women smash the tweed into the table and pass it on. Smash it down and pass it on.

No, we did not soak the tweed in urine as is traditional. But the tweed was soaked in water. It’s quite heavy.

Laundry day

How can any one man possibly use 21 pair of socks in one week? How many feet does he have? I hate doing laundry. Oh, and I didn't count the myriad orphan socks. Does he wear a pair each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Not to mention a copious pile of shirts. My laundry, by comparison, is tiny. And he’s so dismissing of it all—like it was no big deal to wash a mountain of clothing. Women’s work. What am I, the Irish washerwoman? Indeed, I am going clean mad! In the midst of cursing up a blue storm, I wondered, Where do all the orphan socks go to die anyway? Listening to my new CD of the Browne Sisters sing A Thousand Curses on Love in Scots Gaelic (Mile Marbhphaisg Air A'Ghaol), a tweed waulking song from the West Hebrides. They've softened the blow with their harmonies. Usually the song has quite a thump downbeat as the women smash the tweed into the table and pass it on. A friend said, Then they smash their husbands who, of course, are ALREADY smashed! I replied, thinking of the laundry, An upside the head behavioral mod is useful now and then! I’m circling the drain.

Rev 5/20

Teaching notes, Wornick Jewish Day School, Young Audiences

Grueling day teaching art at the Wornick Jewish Day school in Foster City; several of the kinderkids lost their pinch pots (they were all jumbled together in the kiln—not my doing, I didn’t load the kiln) & far too many of our cool butterflies blew up. Talk about the butterfly effect! We glazed 'em anyway. And then we glued them back together. The 1st graders made amazing wet pastel landscapes. Our schoolwide art show and Open House is coming up, so the madness is on. It is hard teaching ceramics as an artist in residence, I have to lug everything to each classroom. Backbreaking work. It’s hard enough with all the art supplies needed to teach two-dimensional art. But I’ve got it down to a science. Art a la cart catering. I’ve also taught silk painting at the school as well. And that too is a real production. Massive amounts of prep for both silk painting and clay. And to make things worse, the classes are only 45 minutes long with not transition time between classes. And I’m not paid anywhere near enough for the work that I do, with all the prep through Young Audiences. They’re charging the school nearly double what I get. At least it’s three sessions. Small miracles. And the commute to Foster City is challenging. I have to get up super early in order to get there on time. Otherwise I won’t up dealing with to traffic jams. But I do love crossing the San Mateo Bridge, the utter beauty of the bay, the salt flats, and the patterns of migrating birds.

• Teaching notes YANC

Teaching notes, Cleveland ES

Prepped for 5 poetry classes today (4 are final-day classes which require an enormous amount of work to get them ready for the anthologies). And I had a glazing marathon, we glazed more tiles after school for the tile project. Dropping off glaze test tiles this AM to fire at Lake Merritt Junior College. OmiGawd, I’m knackered, but I made it to the end of the day. Then, my voice broke in 4th period (my fave 6th grade class was noisy), and after I got done scolding them, they gave me a pot of white mums! Awwww. Five poetry classes in one day = too much talking. Tiles will come out of the kiln on Thurs. We glazed a dozen more today. Life is good, and on time after all. Though I’m holding on by the skin of my teeth.

RIDING UP I-580 ON FUMES

RIDING UP I-580 ON FUMES

Riding up I-580 on fumes at 1 AM.
How exciting (no open gas stations).
I'm in love with Gaviota Pass/rest stop.
Those mountains are awesome.

Caffeined up in Kings City at 10 PM
in order to avoid driving
while under the influence of narcolepsy.

Now I really can't sleep,
knowing I missed a chance to read in N Hollywood
If only I was able to get my email this AM.

It's come to this. A cybernetic world
of missed connections.


5/25/2009

Costa Mesa Highland Games

After a miserable drive down Interstate 5 sans AC, we're at the Highland Games, Costa Mesa. Fantastic impromptu Celtic jam session last night at the Irvine Marriot bar. The Browne Sisters, Neil O'Neill, Celtic Spring kids and David Brewer. They turned up the lights to kick us out. We'll show 'em, with bagpipes on the ramparts at dawn.

MY HEART HURTS

MY HEART HURTS

Today, a kindergartner

who was the birthday girl,

painted a beautiful landscape

so beautiful, she said
it made her heart hurt,

her heart hurt.

5/4/09

REBOUND MOON

Maybe it's not you

but the moon on the rebound.
Rebound moon, swaddled
in gossamer derangements
of white on white
against an indigo night.

5/8/09

DVD Cover Spoofs

Today Sinead and I designed fake DVD covers for her Women's Studies class show and tell final. We didn't have a lot of time so these had to come together rather quickly. She picked three movies that could've been about women. We tried to match the general feel of the movie images. We didn't have time to develop a full text, which could have been fascinating.

 When we were done, we were struck by how the happenstance of what we chose, created a stunning women's causal timeline. It gave us pause to think that Sojourner Truth's actions also gave rise to Amelia Earhart's flight, which leads to a futuristic scenario where Barbara Boxer will become the 45th president..

We picked Barbara because she was local, she is gutsy, and I worked for her way back in  1972, she she ran for  Marin County Board of Supervisors . I made her signs and posters, so it was fitting. Anybody but Sarah Palin, please!  (Double click on images to see full size).

back cover                                           front cover

back cover                                                   front cover

back cover                                                   front cover

Once we slipped the covers into the DVD jackets, they looked convincing enough to fool Neil into thinking they were real movies. So why hasn't anyone done a feature length movie on Sojourner Truth or Amelia Earhart?

PYGMY OWLS

                           —  for Crawdad Nelson

I remember the first time I saw 

a family of pygmy screech owls
marching out of a burrow at dusk,
we were riding the donkeys home

around the last bend before the barn.
I thought the gophers had gone mad,

or taken leave of their senses,
until I realized they were small owls,

on a Groucho Marx drill parade. 

With white eyebrows raised,

wings tucked back, they gravely 

inspected a forest of equine legs,

a slow moving grove of hairy saplings. 

How many times had we passed their door 

walking home from school, sight unseen?

On the backs of our mounts,
we were the invisible ones.

Beltaine, May Day dream sequence

Lá buidhe Bealtaine shona daoibh. 

To celebrate the day of Beltaine,
wash in the May morning dew.

The woman who washes her face
in it will be beautiful;
the man who washes his hands
will be skilled with knots and nets.

Dew, they said DEW. not a feckin' downpour or monsoon! Sheesh! The rain woke me. No chance of dew. Then I remembered, the dream flooded back.... Beltaine, May Day is the night when the gates to the Otherworld open, it often comes in as if a dream. May First begins the season of the dream walkers.

* * *

OweynagCat
YouTube of Oweynagat, a journey into mother earth. 

I dreamed I was traveling on foot across the countryside, and in a wooded clearing, I stumbled across a wide barrow on my right. Thinking I'd stumbled upon something like the massive rabbit warrens that my grandmother crawled into as a child, seeking refuge in the hills above Bantry Bay, I got down on my hands and knees to see what I could see. I must've heard a noise because I looked deeper into the limnal jaws of the underground maw.

As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw vermin, no, a little black fox, with matted fur, or at least I thought it was a fox. He was mangy and grubby but unafraid of my alien presence. Behind him I saw a buried Liliputian city, replete with Victorians painted yellow, orange and red, fiery, as if lit from within, in this underground cavern. It was night in that realm, streetlamps cast small pools of light on the pavements grey. Perhaps it was a reminder that this was a dream, not real.

The little fox was standing on a street corner, perhaps in another land, or another time. I no longer knew where I was, but I was growing frightened. This much I knew: the burrow was the gates to the Otherworld. To enter the Otherworld was to never return to this realm, it was also the gateway to enchantment or death. Land to the west. Tír na nÓg. Perhaps. like Oisín, I would return to another century.

Sometimes in dreams, my dead mother comes to visit. Sometimes she is with my grandmother. It is always a tearful reunion, they can never stay long. And here I was, willingly crawling underground, still very much alive.

But like a changeling child, the little black fox kept beseeching me with his milk blue eyes and small whine, begging me to come to him into the cruachan, but I was afraid of his fleas, and imagined diseases. 

I thought of rabies and of the bubonic plague, the black death that killed many millions during the Middle Ages, they knew rats were somehow involved, they never dreamed it was the fleas. 

I thought too of my grandmother's stories of the OweynagCat, the cave of the great Irish three-headed saber cat, in which case, I was right in the middle of some seriously dark Otherworld sidhe mojo, as Samhain was the feast night of the Great Cat. And this was Beltaine, the beginning of Hafgan's realm, the Annwn Welsh lord of summer. A time of stolen children and horses. At least I had enough sense to leave the rowan and whitehtorn unplucked.

But the young pup cowered and whimpered, wanting creature comfort. I realized that he was as lost and out of his element as I was, so I crawled into the burrow to comfort him. He gladly crept into my arms, licked my face and throat. Initiation by saliva. He whimpered with recognition and squirmed with joy. Who was this little fellow and why was he abandoned on the metaphorical mean streets of an underground city?

I realized that his unkempt appearance was not because of mange or disease, though I still feared his fleas, but because he was a puppy, not a fox, and that there were others of his kind, hiding in the alleys and back streets. He was a sentinel scout for his brothers. The litter came bounding forth, surrounding me with their joyous puppy energy.

I was gathering them in, comforting them, when I sensed another darker presence on my right, and I was looking into the ominous yellow eyes, not of a fox, but a wary long-haired dog, a dog unlike anything I'd ever seen. Surely not an Alsatian or a German shepherd guarding the gates of hell.

The dog's ink dark coat was longer, thicker, no distinctive saddle markings. Her head was narrower, her ears bigger, her snout longer. Perhaps she was a half-breed. No Cerebus, but there was something unkempt and uncivilized about her that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

I realized I was looking right into the eyes of a wild wolf mother and I was in her den. In her territory. I froze and we eyed it off. I backed away slowly, but the pups would have none of it. They bounded in my arms, pounced on me, pulled at the tie that held back my waist long hair with their milk teeth, and paraded it forth until I was bound up in a veiled tangle of my own hair, I was a selkie caught fast in the fisherman's net.

The mother wolf backed off her stance, lifted a front paw slightly, and sat, as if to acknowledge that I meant her babies no harm, and then she stiffly, or formally approached. I offered my curled right hand, palm down, for her to sniff. The tension crackled like static electricity.

I willed myself into calmness and looked down at the ground, not daring to make eye contact as I knew that would be perceived as a threat. My throat exposed, my hand, soft in supplication, I had to will the fear from my body and just be there, in timeless suspension. I focused on my breath. When I felt her cold nose on my hand, I knew that the danger was past and that I would live to see another day.

The loba returned to her young, sat down, with a ribbon of tongue lolling out, she began the endless task of bathing them, taking in their sour milk-odor, as they settled in for a long suckle. I retreated from their burrow and with that, I awoke to the heavy downpour of rain on the first day of May. 


So much for bathing in the May morning dew.

Was it May Day, or maybe mayday but then I realized that I was true dreaming, that I had indeed traveled to another place and time. It was a dextrous right-handed dream, and in that moment I realized that in the face of death, the fear is something I make daily, of my own choosing.

And in that moment I realized also that the reason why my mother and grandmother were hovering in the wings of my dreams, was that they had come, not for me, but for their remaining daughters and sisters, my aunts—where the cancer blossoms inside them like a black rose.


I awoke to the urgent ringing of the phone—on the answering machine was the dark news no one wants to hear. The ravening wolf.

YouTube of Oweynagat, a journey into mother earth: still images of the entrance to the Otherworld, by Mike Croghan, with music by Afto Celt Sound System.

END of Poetry Month

Argh! Got up early and tried to revise three poems that wouldn't jell. I'm racing against time, my mind turns into an old shoe sans tongue, but with plenty of eyes, like a blue-eyed clam (they have 32 eyelets) and we all know how poetic clams are in the morning before coffee. 

Neil comes in, a broken axle changes the shape of my morning to that of  chauffeur, taxi and loaner car. Meanwhile I find the noon deadline is now EST, not Left Coast time. Bogus. Maybe I should hang myself with my shoelaces.  So much for trying to finish the other six poems abandoned before they were written. I bitchslap the three troublesome ones into some semblance of shape and post them on the blog. But it seems everyone else is doing the same, it takes me an hour to post three poems.

At least Writers' Digest could've given us a heads up on the East Coast timing of that one. Three whole hours, precious time I was counting on. Driving back from the mechanic's I realize my Leaving Las Vegas penknife  poem should be written as an ode... It flows right out, an easy birth, too bad I can't post it. I'm way past deadline.

Then, the embroglio begins over whether posting our poems on Writers' Digest constitutes as being "published." People panic and begin pulling their poems from the site. I left mine, stet. 

The way I figure it, is that the poems mine to do with what I want, whether or not they're published on the Writers' Digest site, as a workshop process, is moot. They're not published, Writers' Digest is not going to give us tear sheets or street credit saying we're all now published in Writers' Digest. There was no editor involved in the selection of poems. Anybody could post anything they wanted, warts and all. It's certainly not going to appear on our resumes or in Poets & Writers as a publishing credit, so, ergo, we're not published. What nonsense, I thought.

Then I began to realize the whole internet posting thing is a huge issue. Does publishing work in my blog constitute self publishing? Have I stolen my own first publishing rights by posting on the internet? I don't consider it so. I consider my blog as an open writer's notebook, pieces in progress, some destined to be published, but most are not. 

I can't see what needs fixing until I see it in formal print. Word docs just don't do it. Maybe it's the angst of knowing that there is a potential audience out there that makes me pay attention to my language usage and typos, my God, there are typos, no matter how carefully I reread these pieces. 

I consider my blog my journal, having eschewed pen and paper. After the car accident, I fell out of the journaling habit. It was just too hard to write, to hold the pen. PTS left my hands shaking with tremors. 

Publishing my work as a blog means there's also a bit of a self-censor involved in that there is a potential audience out there who MIGHT one day read this drivel. But hey, at least it keeps me writing. And laziness coupled with a profound lack of time, erodes all best intentions to write daily. It's also about convenience, wherever I go I can log on (provided that I can get wifi) and continue to work on any given story or memoir—and the indexing process is handy as well. It's a tool.

I consider the blog a transparency of writing available for others to see and give feedback, a large workshop as it were. But with millions of blogs out there, who reads any of this anyway? Chances are slim. Second to none. No one. Well, maybe a handful of people somewhere with time on their hands.

With all this opportunity to publish on the internet, we're ultimately facing the demise of the written word. Or at least the well-crafted word. Everything is reduced down to Twitter bytes of 140 characters or less. We now have the attention span of gnats. Who's going to remember what we've posted?

ODE TO A PENKNIFE

Ode to my lost penknife
that once rested cool
and sleek as a schooled minnow
nosing in the murky depths
of some young boy's pocket.
The deer-antlered handle, chipped,
diamond cotterpin askew,
Siamese twinned blades of grey
carbon steel, pitted with rust,
arabesqued from myriad sharpenings,
blades that once carved goose quills
or initials in wooden desks with inkwells
and sweet hearts on slender saplings,

in a silvery copse, now grown ancient

with the ponderous weight of age,

bark hearts splaying out into Crab nebulae,
blades that once sliced eggs, cold potatoes.

cleaned fingernails, and pared apple cores,

picked teeth, and in that order.
A small child's penknife,

a memento I carried for three decades,

a small something from my grandfather,

I carried it forth daily into the next century,
played a final game of hide and seek in my pack,

only to be flushed out by Homeland Security.

No: Olly olly oxen free. Or Kick the can.
or frustrated oceans of tears could save it.

It was branded a threat to national safety,

and as we missed our flight anyway,

in it went to the TSA dropbox,
destined for the slag heap.

No more feather quills to sharpen,

no more words to carve and hone

on Formica desks or on the wings of planes,

only this fleeting farewell
carved into memory.

4/30/2009

PIKE STREET MARKET

                 — from a photograph

A smiling Japanese woman
leans into the camera lens
holding her right hand up to the sky
never dreaming she was a waitress
offering the belly of a lavender fish
swimming in a billboard sunset
with neon green lettering like scales
pointing the way to the next fishy bar.
Her head blocks the "et" in Market
so it reads Mark, in tall red letters
as in X marks the spot or maybe
she's waiting for ET to phone in for sushi.
As the sun sinks over her shoulder,
hanging from the fishmonger stalls,
small fairly lights like the braille ellipsis
of an unfinished thought lighten
the end to a perfect day in Seattle.
Perhaps she was thinking of a sushi sunset
done up in salmon and pale wasabi stars.

4/29/09

Never say

Never say never. I never thought I could keep up the writing, a poem a day and I was right. Some days, I wrote several poems, other days I completely dried up. I dried up before taxes (because I was doing taxes) and this whole week's been a wash.  A lot of strenuous teaching and materials prep.

To do by May 1st: poem # 12 (revise),write poems # 13, 14; poem 22 (revise) write 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30. That's a whole lotta work to pull off in 2 days. Today I imagined I'd get several poems done, I revised, edited and posted 17 prompts. A few had several versions, so it's more than 17 poems total. 

Then I have to get the CPITS poems in for the anthology as well. Friday is going to be one busy poetry day! One new principal meeting too. I'm scheduling three new schools for poetry.

Tomorrow is pretty full with teaching and prepping for tomorrow night's ISED class at SFSU. I was interrupted today with a teacher meeting at a new school and scheduling, follow up emails, etc. I never got back on track. I edited one classes' poems; two more to go and I'm tired, it's late and Hulu beckons. Rescue Me blares: It's another day c'mon, c'mon... and I watch the Twin Towers fall in slo-mo for the unteenth time.

Never gonna make it.

No, never. Never.

Addendum May 1, got the poem a day challenge down to all but 6, but several poems shifted focus in revision, and so I have multiple poems for some days, and none for others. I probably posted 30 poems total counting haiku, which doesn't count for much. With an estimated 25K poems being posted, one of mine being chosen for the final 50 poems roundup are slim to none.

But it was a good practice, and I met on Facebook, wondrous poets who were also posting poems. Pam Uschek's work is luminous as is Molly Fisk's. They were the ones that kept me in the great PADI race.

MOONCAKE INSOMNIA

Insomnia...
apparently the fridge has it too.
It keeps opening the door
and throwing a wedge of light
across the kitchen floor.
I found the culprit,
an abandoned mooncake
wedged in the back.
trying to get out.

4/26/2009
from a FB memory added, rev.  4/2016

AFTER THE SOLSTICE, MACHU PICCHU

© Maureen Hurley 1984 All rights reserved.

On the northern slopes of the Andes, 
the packhorse veered sharply from the trail
that led to the fabled lost city of the gods,
makeshift hacamore biting into his eyes
he was running blind, but his hooves knew
the paths, both sacred and profane.

I pulled the runaway's head into in my lap,
I gasped as the thin air whipped my face
thigh muscles burning to maintain balance,
but his eye was a lake of fear rimmed by a pale shore
as I hammered on his hollow forehead with my fist.
Perhaps he was remembering his Andalusian blood,
his tail was a prayer flag raised high to the wind.

The grey gelding raced up the slope to a chicha bar.
Unaccustomed to the live weight upon his back,
his hooves tattooed a drumroll of panic on hard clay.
At the last second, I hoisted a leg over his neck,
as he slammed sideways into the adobe wall,
the wooden pack frame splintered into kindling
and the hut resounded like a wooden drum.

The startled Indios abandoned their beer gourds
and scattered to the four directions like crickets
away from the flash and churn of hooves and teeth,
and a crazy gringa astride a wild packhorse, sidesaddle,
without a bridle, only a stiff lariat across his nose.


* * *

Like Frost's pony, the dappled packhorse

was used to stopping there. No frozen woods
or downy lake, this was an alien land. He stood shaken,
with heaving flanks, head hung low, nostrils flaring red,
as the Indios gathered around a crazy Epona in their midst.

The Poet rode up to translate us out of that mess.
The Gates of the Sun and Moon to the Lost City
of the Incas opened wide to let us in.
We made peace offerings on the intihuacana.
We made poetry, equating it to eternal love,
we played a benediction of mathematical equations
with the piercing stars of the Southern Cross,
compared it to the emptiness of the sky to the south,
and descended into the inferno, as a forest fire
raged on like a ruby-throated monster gone mad
on the terraced slopes of Machu Picchu.



But when we returned home from the Cordilleras,
the Poet went south, without so much as a tu
or an entonces or even a pues, he translated
the burden of a mid-life crisis, into the classic
binary subdivision with a blonde student—
younger than his daughter. Of course. She was
a descendant of the ill-fated Donner Party,
she was born into a cannibal hunger for men,
and a survivor's lust for horseflesh and melodrama,
he blamed her strange appetites on the vagaries
of weather and stars but in the end, 
she left him for another woman.

Poetic justice.
4/24/2009  
24 Write a travel-related poem

Famous People I once knew

On Facebook, someone asked me about the famous people I've met, and I replied in no particular order. Small fragments of stories began to appear, some are pasted here, in hopes I'll do something with them at a later date.

Some fragments I've already blogged on about, but I'll want to compare the language, to see if I have any fresh perspectives, or new leads...otherwise, it's merely archival, and maybe it should stay in draft form. Tho I don't think I ever wrote about the musicians or Scatman...

I've met Scatman Crothers, Kate Wolf, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. I've met so many of the legends. Where to even begin?

Well, it WAS the 60s...and 70s and 80s...Janis lived on Arroyo Road at Camp Lagunitas, or Barbano’s. She'd be getting up about the time we walked home from high school...

Grace Slick—we wandered into her house in the middle of a drug deal...there were red roses on the piano and a sunken hot tub in the living room with a blue and green shag rug. She stumbled out of the bedroom around 4 PM, in a black ecru-hemmed babydoll negligeé (I kid you not), raccoon makeup caked under her eyes, and she was quite cross with us for being in her living room. But the guys were in the kitchen having a smoke.

Scatman Crothers was at the River Theater in Guerneville, after his concert, we all piled into a booth at a Guerneville coffeeshop (River Inn?) and gossiped the night away. He was a great storyteller. What I remember is Scatman imitating Cab Calloway's famous song, with a Heidi heidi hei. I took notes, it appeared in The Paper with photos. All my tear sheets have melted back into the earth after the biblical rains we had in the 1990s. I have the negatives somewhere. 

I met Kate Wolf there at the Rio Theatre too. Nina Gerber was on guitar. Man, that girl can play. It was a fundraiser for something—was it for Kate's own leukemia? I don't remember. Kate kept quiet about it. I remember she sang so drearily, I was bored to tears. It was only later that I found out about the leukemia and I felt so bad for panning her performance. But it was dreary. I'd seen her around before, at the Forest Knolls Post Office, in her white Ford station wagon. She lived up on Resaca.

Never actually talked to Janis, she was pretty hung over... We were shy high school kids, so we merely said hi as we went up the road home. She never picked us up hitchhiking. But I loved her Porsche with its mural.

Stan Getz,  Etta James, Dr. Maya Angelou, Irving Layton and Donald Sutherland. OK, Stan was the lie. No one caught it, though.

Dave Brubeck wrote a letter to The Paper praising my Russian River Jazz Fest photography. It was a thrill watching him from backstage playing Take Five, one of my mom's favorite theater sayings. And Stan was very approachable between sets, chatted with me about my work teaching lids poetry and art. I gave him some anthologies. (Note to myself: I have to find my famous people letters and scan them).

Steven Gross who also was working for The Paper, took pix also, I secretly think he coveted my job, and he coincidentally stole my negatives of Etta James. He was quite nasty about it too. Not on my list of people to reconnect with.

Maya Angelou and her son Guy Johnson, I read with them in SF for National Poetry Association. This was long before she got famous. Guy and I exchangeds letters for a while. 

I met Irving Layton and Donald Sutherland at his sister Boschka's wake. Never talked to Donnie. so I guess I didn’t meet him.  Irving was quite the charmer. I could see what she saw in him. That Newfie crowd got rather famous: Irving—Canada's Poet Laureate, Donald took some Oscars home—Ordinary People or Six Degrees of Separation? And there was Leonard Cohen. So I'm one degree of separation from Leonard. The wake was at Boschka's new home at Goat Rock so the events are inexorably intertwined.

I met the Bridges all at once at the Sacramento Music Circus: I think it was Guys and Dolls. We were all staying at the same motel. I wanted to know why Lloyd named Beau "Boy" as Jeff clearly was younger (closer to my age). Mr Sea Hunt himself gathered me up on his lap and roared with laughter.

Lloyd bought me a crystal star necklace. A prized possession that I lost down the back seat of a neighbor's car. I cried, and Agnes was too drunk to help—at 9 AM. Lloyd's crystal star slid down my neck, down into the void. Later, I would meet Leeta, my first boyfriend's  mother—who went to high school with Lloyd in Petaluma, so our worlds were all fairly intertwined.

Big bad Beau wouldn't let Jeff play with me in the pool. My feelings were hurt.

My mom was costuming the play. It took me a half a lifetime to figure out why Lloyd was laughing uproariously at my unconscious Beau/Boy "joke." I was pretty sure adults weren't to be trusted. Beau didn't want to have anything to do with me. I was 6, I was a girl, I couldn't swim so Jeff & I eyed each other in the shallow end, with Beau being the bossy older brother....they were so blond, they took my breath away. Even then.

Tommy Smothers used to babysit me at Gate 5 while my mom was at the Gate Playhouse theater. Dick Smothers never babysat me, he left it to Tommy who liked kids. And he was more fun to be around.

Bobby Darin was in Big Sur and my mom met him after midnight at the Esalen baths. She met lots of people: even Frank Sinatra bought her a drink once at the Cal Neva—she showed me where they sat. They drove up to Forest Knolls. Bobby showed me the chords to "If I were a Carpenter." Can you dig it? I payed badly for him on my palomino pony guitar, until my fingers bled, I was but a child. What did I know about fame?

Tom Waits, Joan Baez, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Dick and Tommy Smothers and Sterling Hayden. I've met them too.

I met Tom Waits at Ruth Mankin's 50th birthday party in Sebastopol but he was afraid of being bugged by fans, so we ignored him until he began to feel like a ghost of his own choosing. I felt sorry for him so we mostly just stood at the stove and ate sweet potato fries with lime & chili powder, talking of food and inanity itself. He hennaed his hair so his sideburns were sort of an auberge-eggplant color. I taught his daughter art and calligraphy one summer at LBC...she was sufficiently spoiled to be too cool for her own good.

I was an extra a few times on Nash Bridges. Cheech Marin and Don Johnson arrived on the scene, so I guess technically, I've met them as well. I was shouting out to them and taking photos like a good brash reporter. I took fake photos with my camera. On hindsight, I wish I'd had film in my camera. They blew up the VA hospital. It was quite astounding. My blue truck was an extra too, & it got paid more than I did. Tiny little checks from Universal Studios...almost not worth cashing. But I did. In those days, every penny counted. Still does.

Extras blend into the woodwork or wind up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Neil had a longer scene with Jeff Bridges in Tucker, that was reduced to a 30-second blip. You have to slo-mo it to see him.

Oh, we met Dame Edna too... We ushered at Theater on the Square in SF and met Barry Humphreys after the show...but I've already done far too many of these Famous People quizzes.

Seamus Heaney, Kenny Rogers, Carlos Santana, Robin Williams and Eric Idle.

I went to school with Robin way before fame came along...I ran into Robin later with Eric Idle at the Greek Theater, I was working backstage, Bread & Roses Festival. He remembered me...which shocked me. Nothing like getting a slippery, steamy bear hug from a very sweaty performer after a show... Once I was madly in love with Robin when I was 17, I used to follow him all around College of Marin, as he did his silly walks in green gym shorts and a woman's bathing cap on his head with the chin strap dangling.

Eric Idle looked like a cross-eyed Siamese cat up close, but was very kind. I mean what DO you say to a Python. When Robin and Eric revved it up back stage with Big Mikie, Michael Pritchard, I about died  of laughter.

I was asked to take photos of Kenny Rogers with some friends in the Green Room at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, in Santa Rosa, after a show. He was very nice. Lotta pancake makeup. I got to see the show too. I gained a new appreciation for Kenny Rogers, not formerly on my music radar screen.

Then there was Bo Diddly. It was at the Sonoma County Fair, I was taking photos, and Bo Diddly invited me into his trailer after the show for an interview (I was dancing up front, and taking photos during the show). I expected to do a story on him. What I wasn't expecting was to be chased around the trailer by him. He had his guitar, Lucille, strapped on, and nearly had me cornered, but I ducked under her neck. Made my escape. Needless to say, I was much more cautious around Chuck Berry, who was a perfect gentleman.

Redux list, 2021

People I’ve met or been within five theater.

Sheesh, I’ve met and chatted with so many famous people, it’s impossible to pick just 5. So it’s 5 categories. Actors, musicians, scientists /public figures, political figures, writers.

1. Robin Williams

Eric Idle

Lloyd Bridges, Beau and Jeff

Connie Stevens

George Lucas

Sterling Hayden

Tommy & Dick Smothers

Dame Edna

Cheech Marin

Don Johnson

Faye Dunaway

Ron Perlman

Brian Cox

Peter Coyote

2. Kenny Rogers

Pete Seeger

Joan Baez

Dave Brubeck

Bo Diddly

Eartha Kitt

Jesse Colin Young

Van Morrison 

Bob Dylan

Janis Joplin

Bobby Darin

Tom Waits

Carlos Santana

Grace Slick

Scatman Crothers

Kate Wolf

Mimi Fariña 

Tracy Chapman

3. Commander Chris Hadfield, astronaut

Dr. Al Baez, invented lasers

Bill Moyers

Noam Chomsky

Leonard Matlovich

Maria Shriver

David Brower

Famous Amos

Edwin Drummond, famous rock climber, ex boyfriend

4. Irish president Mary Robinson

Irish president Mary McAleece

Jerry Brown

Willie Brown 

Barbara Boxer 

Gary Giacomini

Robert Reich

5. Rita Dove

Seamus Heaney

Joy Harjo

Robert Bly

Maya Angelou

Lou Welch

Raymond Carver

Irving Layton

Isabel Allende

Joseph  Brodsky

Galway Kinnell

Alice Walker

Allan Ginsberg

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Robert Hass

Juan Felipe Herrera

James Patterson

Tim Severin, explorer, writer

Ken Kesey

I see I need to work on my politicians. George Lucas is the only lie. Chomsky and Clinton I was pretty far away from. Martin Sheen too.