Some Things I Thought You Should Know....

Saturday, February 02, 2008
WI: Do Unto Others

They buried my prophet today. When he was asked "How are you?" he'd reply, "Better than ever! And the best is yet to come!" The leader of one small country once claimed that Gordon Bitner Hinckley could "charm a donkey or a king," and attributed this gift to his love of people, and his great humility. I will miss his gentle ways and his quick wit. It's reported that when he learned Mitt was considering a run for the White House, he said, "If you decide to run and you win, it will be a great experience. If you run and lose it will also be a great experience!"

I will miss the twinkle in his eyes. I will miss seeing him throw kisses toward the crowds in China, and Africa, and in the Philippines. I'll miss his waving hello's and goodbye's with the cane he was supposed to walk with.

Someone in the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas said they would all be out to picket at the funeral, calling President Hinckley a "fraudulent old fool." I don't know if they actually came or not. If they did, none of the news chanels reported it. WBC also says "God hates Hinckley ...and all Mormons without exception. All such go to Hell." I think these nuts are a very small fraction of evangelical Christian folks. I also would hope if they really came, that President Hinckley could've hit 'em over the head with his cane--but I'm positive he would have simply turned the other cheek.

But that's not saying I wouldn't have hit 'em over the head with MY cane (if I had one)! Here's the word from Bill Keller, host of a Florida TV program. It says: "this information has been given to you in love, and we can assure you that it is accurate and honest." Yeah, right.

And why in the world are they so obsessed with our "magical" underwear? Is anyone out there so obsessed with your underwear? I think not. My underwear is my business.

Well, then.--I'm off to spend eternity in Hell. But really, when the time comes, I'm taking my cane with me...and my magic underwear.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 6:02 PM 17 comments
Friday, January 25, 2008
Brother

This is a picture of my big brother, Gaylen, and me. I called him "Brother," because for many years I thought that was his name. He hung out hundreds of my diapers on the clothesline for our mom, he carried me around on his back, he paid me pennies and nickles to smell his feet and scratch his back. I first time I ever heard Mairzy Doats and Dozey Doats was when he sang it, drying dishes after supper one evening. I thought it was the funniest song in the world. He built model airplanes and hung them from the ceilings all over the house. There was a perpetual smell of balsa wood and model glue. He flew them in circles over the desert with our cousin Billy. He learned to play the trumpet. He listened to Stan Kenton jazz records, and to Woody Herman, subscribed to Downbeat and Metronome magazines.

Walkin' with my baby, she got great big feet...
Caldonia! Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard? Hunh!

That was the second funniest song in the world.

He said he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and fly real airplanes. He bought his own plane with money he earned reading gas meters, and took flying lessons. But when he went away to college, he studied music, and became a performer and a composer, and a teacher. Igor Stravinsky liked Woody Herman's scat and screech Caldonia too, so much, in fact, that he wrote music for Herman's band. WHen my brother composed his own music, years later, much of it echoed the sound of Stravinsky. For his PHD at the University of Utah, my brother wrote music for a ballet gala, performed by the U of U Ballet (which became Ballet West), That piece, TOXCATL, based on Aztec history during the periodic "War of the Flowers," was no doubt inspired and influenced by Stravinsky. This is where he met my sister-in-law, Marianne, a ballerina with the company. They married and had four children, two boys and two girls. He played French Horn with the Utah Symphony under Maestro Maurice Abravanel for years.

He set a poem I wrote when I was seventeen to music for a 75 voice choir, performed and recorded with brass and timpani. He also used a text of mine called JAEL, for a short opera written a few years later. Most recently (April, 2000), I was pleased when he asked me to provide and edit the text for an ambitious piece called APOTHEOSIS, based on the writings of Neal A Maxwell and performed by the Ricks College Chamber Orchestra and Collegiate Singers. A CD was made for Tantara Records as part of their Heritage Series, called Three Sacred Works. An absolutely fantastic piece of music! The last thing he wrote was a piano piece called Fallen Angel, for a special project uniting LDS classical composers with LDS visual artists, performed by Grant Johannesen, called Mormoniana.


He accompanied the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on several tours around the world, he was invited by the Chinese Minister of Culture to spend time in China lecturing and performing at three of the conservatories there. He's performed with George Shearing (on bass), Mannheim Steamroller (on horn), and has accompanied Margaret Whiting, the Lennon Sisters, Liberace, Ray Charles, and many others. He played a jazz concert once with Paul Horn, Conte Condoli, and Milton Bernhart.

The last three years, my brother has suffered with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, and diabetes (which took his sight a year ago). But it never, ever, took away his spirit, his sweet nature, or his sense of humor. Now he is dying. We all went over the night before last to say goodbye -- but I hate goodbyes. I said "Goodnight," and he said, "You've been a good sister." We said our "I love you's," and I asked him to please hug Mama and Daddy when he sees them, and to tell them I miss them. And to "leave a light on" for the rest of us. (You know, like that Motel 6 commercial).

Night before last he said to my sister-in-law, "Did you order this?" "Order what?" she asked. "This music," he said. They were playing Faure's REQUIEM for him. Whoever they were, bless them. And bless him.

(Please click on the link to hear a bit of Fallen Angel)

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 11:57 AM 15 comments
Friday, December 14, 2007
Last Words.

But, hey. This is my last word on the subject, I promise!

When Lawrence O'Donnell, in his little fit of anti-Mormon rhetoric said that the Mormon Church was "racist" and "ridiculous," he also said that it is "based on the work of a lying, fraudulent criminal named Joseph Smith" he was treading on ground that got Don Imus fired. Maybe O'Donnell should be fired for his lack of on-air civility. Had he lived in a less forgiving culture, say, Islamic, and said that about the Prophet Mohammed, they would undoubtedly put out a bounty on his head. Here in America, while we tend to take a dim view of name-calling and slander, such statements are usually overlooked. We don't behead folks for their views here in the land of free speech. But I saw the broadcast. You could almost see the spit flying from his enraged lips.

I was shocked. Sort of. We Mormons are, historically and intellectually, pretty resilient. So, just for the record, let me offer another view. Joseph Smith was a farm boy from upstate New York. Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom, who has written many, many books, has written one called The American Religion, in which he writes of Joseph Smith: "I can only attribute to his genius or daemons his uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly." Joseph had a third-grade education. His mother described him as a "relatively quiet" boy. When he was 14, reading in the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which says: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him, he then went out into the woods behind his house, knelt in prayer, and said he had a vision, in which two "Personages" appeared before him; one pointing to the other said, This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him.

Ministers of the day told him his "vision" was of the devil, and that he was "deluded," but he knew what he had experienced. "I had actually seen a light," he wrote, "and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? I have actually seen a vision, and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it...."

And I, and thirteen-million-plus other people believe him. He assured us that God continues to speak to people, that he is alive and well, and that he had not said everything he had to say thousands of years ago and has nothing left to say: "For unto him that receiveth I will give more."

Joseph Smith taught that the glory of God is intelligence, and that Man is, that he might have Joy. He taught us that "Families are Forever." He taught that whatever principle of intelligence man attains in this life will rise with him in the resurrection. And that we are to seek wisdom and to "study and learn and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues and people." He taught us that we are not alone in the universe.
"And God said, Here is wisdom, and it remaineth in me...And worlds without number have I created...But only an account of this earth give I unto you, For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine, and I know them." And, "Every spirit of man was innocent from the beginning." And animals have souls. Well, there's more. But you get the idea.

As for the the "racist" thing: we believe that God has not only spoken to the Jews who wrote his teachings in the Bible, and to the people who wrote them in the Book of Mormon, but "Know ye not that there are more nations than one?...and because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another, for my work is not yet finished...for I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them." (And I say, yes! there is Truth and Beauty in the words of Black Elk, and the Buddha, and in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad -Gita, and the Koran.)

A Book of Mormon prophet says, "Ye shall not esteem one flesh above another," and "one man shall not think himself above another." And because every single one of us is a literal child of God, we are all brothers and sisters, and are loved equally.

So, Brother O'Donnell, I forgive you for saying that we are ignorant and gullible, misguided and ridiculous racists.

God bless.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 7:44 PM 5 comments
Thursday, December 13, 2007
We all know Mormons are evil...NOT!

So, Lawrence O'Donnell, a panelist on "The Mclaughlin Group" is lamenting on TV that Mitt Romney Did not "Take the opportunity to distance himself from the evils of his religion," calling us "racist" and "ridiculous." So O'Donnell is a nasty bigoted little man.

But I am disappointed in Mike Huckabee, who, after saying "I would never try, ever, to pick out some point of your faith and make an issue of it," did just that, and then blamed his statement on the New York Times reporter Zev Chafets. Apparently after describing himself as the "only Republican candidate with a degree in theology," Mike was asked by Zev if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion, and his answer was, "I think it's a religion. I really don't know much about it," and then surprised Chafets with a question of his own. Chafets says Mike asked "in an innocent voice, 'Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'"

Well, Mike, that was about as slick a maneuver as any other remark designed to inflame anti-Mormon prejudice against Mitt. I thought you were better than that, Mike. I even thought you were kinda cute. Now you're starting to scare me....

To quote from a letter to the editor in today's paper: "What does scare me is that the same folks who hold major sway in presidential nominations in Iowa are the same folks who believe [God] created the universe 7,000 years ago, 9,000 years after human beings domesticated dogs."

So, I am still in Obama's camp (even though he was raised Muslim, and simply declares himself to be a "Christian" of no particular brand). Another letter to the editor says: "As the American public stumbles over itself trying to figure out who the 'real' Christians are, who was 'raised' Muslim and who is more beholden to whose God, the presidential candidates likely feel a sense of relief. They don't have to worry about explaining their stances on real issues of real importance."

I say, "Amen" to that.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 1:00 PM 6 comments
Friday, December 07, 2007
Mitt's Speech

Like Mitt Romney, I am a Mormon. I won't be voting for Mitt. Unlike most of the people in Utah, I am Democrat, and I'll probably vote for Obama. Nevertheless, it ticks me off that Mitt should need to defend his faith as a candidate for President of the United States of America, that he has to somehow prove to other Americans that he is a Christian. Or, that he is as Christian as other Christians. Like Mitt, "I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it." It defines who I am (a child of God), informs me where I came from and gives my life purpose.

In today's Deseret News, Lee Benson writes that "Weirdness, not religion, is the real issue." He says Romney's "problem is this: 160 years since they drove us out of Nauvoo, people still think Mormons aren't normal.

"They think we're weird.

"This is perplexing to us who are actual Mormons, and not just because it bugs us that our beliefs, rites and rituals attract a great deal of ridicule when other religions can have their chants, creeds and ceremonies and no one seems to look twice.

"Nope. We don't like it because we know we are every bit as normal as they are."

And as moral, and as intelligent. We are a lot like everyone else--we don't have horns, as people once believed, we are born, we marry, we love our children, we teach them to be honest, to tell the truth, to love each other, we try to be good role models, we laugh at jokes, we go to the movies, we eat at McDonald's, play with our dogs, pay our bills, dress up on Halloween, blow out birthday candles, grow old, and die. Like everyone else, some of us "get it right" and some us us "screw it up." We give, we take. We are a lot like you. Our similarities are much, much greater than our differences. In our hearts, we know this. And we hope you do, too.

One UK newspaper reporter wrote that Mormonism is a "pop-art cartoon" of mainstream Protestantism. I hope, when the first Jew, or the first Buddhist, or the first Muslim, or the first Atheist runs for President, that he/she will be chosen because they are good, and decent, and honest, and smart. I hope people will not think they are "too weird" because they are "less mainstream."

Orson Scott Card (also a Mormon) wrote in today's paper: "...when it comes to choosing a president, does a person's opinion about the nature of God make any difference at all? What makes a difference is the candidate's character. Does he actually live by the rules he professes to believe in? Does he keep his word? Character is the only issue that matters, in my opinion. A person who professes correct opinions but has no honor won't be much good as a president, while a person of honor can believe what he wants about God and still be a president we can trust."

So, did Mitt persuade the evangelicals? I doubt it. Lee Benson wrote, "He might have been better off just wearing a badge that said "Vote For Me. I'm Normal" and leaving it at that. Anyway, he gave it a shot.
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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 1:43 PM 5 comments
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Labels People Have Given Me over the Years

I borrowed this idea from January, Choir-girl, Up and Comer, Democrat, Good-cooker, and Poet-Mom, and had fun doing it!

* * * *


Newborn*Girl*Baby*Daughter*Granddaughter*Sister*Niece*Cousin*
Mugwump*Blondie*Dice*Dicey*Joyce*
Joycie*Child*Skinny*Fat*Bashful*Shy*Quiet*Baby-Crazy*Student*Smart*
Latter-Day Saint*Mormon*Child of God*Desert Rat*Californian*Brownie* Girl Scout*Girlfriend*Loner*
*President of Art Club*Artist*Grand Prize Winner*Sweepstakes Winner*President of Drama Club*Graduate*Best Friend*Joycie-My-Joycie*Juice*Beatnik*Bohemian*Flower Child*Single*Passive*Agressive*Actress*New Girl*Not A Bulldog*Married*Newlywed*Mrs.*That Girl*That Lady*That Woman*Wife*Sister-in-Law*Daughter-in-Law*Joy*Poet*Author*Writer
*Cancer Victim*Patient*Survivor*Neighbor*Book Award Winner*American*Democrat*Protester*Activist*Pacifist*Telephone Operator
*Lens Polisher*Waitress*Usher*Telemarketer*Teacher*Poet of the Year*Renter*Homeowner*Pet Owner*Animal Lover*Credit Card Holder*Sis*Aunt Joyce *Editor*Moviegoer*Right-Brained*Reader*Utahn*Mother*Mama*Soccer Mom*Pedestrian*Pianist*Mother-in-Law*Grandmother*Gramma*Big Apple*Gram Cracker*Librarian*Retired*Vacationer*Senior Citizen*Spacey*
*Blogger*Contributer*Pepek the Assassin.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 7:47 AM 9 comments
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
My First Meme...!

Wendy, who is quiet about a lot of things, answered 5 questions sent to her by her friend Karl. Now she has given me five questions (of her choosing) to answer. I'll do my best, okay? Then, if YOU want to play, let me know in the comments and I will personally craft five questions for YOU!


1. Compare and contrast women now and then.

Women then were tougher than they are now. They wore hats and bustles and corsets and shoes that required a crochet-hook to button. They didn't have zippers and snaps and velcro, or cute Nikes. They had to go out and gather their own nuts and berries and grind it into pemmican, whereas now we can put on our Nikes and run down to the Safeway, or better, the Olive Garden. They looked funny. Just look at a photograph of your great grandmother, for instance. We look good--we pluck our eyebrows and Botox our wrinkles and color our grey hair.

Women were tougher then than they are now. There is no way in hell I could ever walk a thousand miles through the snow (in my high-buttoned shoes). Or lose most of my children to flu or diptheria (as my great grandmother did), or watch them die of hunger, or cold, and bury them and leave them on the plains. I just couldn't. My children had all their vaccinations, and parkas, and braces on their teeth.

Women were tougher then than they are now. They had to read penny dreadfuls, or the Bible, or nothing at all. We have Blogs!


2. I'd like to know a bit about your faith...

I am LDS (Mormon). I believe that "the Glory of God is Intelligence," and that I am a child of God, that I have a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father. I believe that life is eternal, that I existed before my birth on this earth, and will continue to exist. I believe that the universe is filled with light, and with life, and that those are probably the same thing. I believe that "Families are Forever," and that "Man is that he might have Joy." (Joy: being loved, learning to love others, having free agency to make bad choices, learning things -- languages and histories and cultures, planets, stars, galaxies....) I believe that God speaks to men, that there are many 'holy' books, that Mohammed and the Buddha, and Black Elk were inspired with truth. I believe the Old Testament, and the New Testament are testaments of Jesus Christ. I believe the Book of Mormon is ANOTHER testament of Christ. I believe that Christ's Atonement was universal and applies to everyone, to all people, to animals, to "every blade of grass." So, yes, I kiss my dogs. But not on the LIPS. (Does this answer your bonus question, somewhat? --but, I didn't even talk Baby Talk to my babies!) I believe that animals have souls--if any of our lives are eternal, they all are. I believe that I will have the opportunity to hold the baby I lost, and kiss his neck, and raise him to a perfect adulthood as a part of our family. There it is. In a Nutshell. And, though this is not part of the original question: what do I regret the most? I most regret that I did not adequately teach all my children that what is most important in their lives, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, is that they seek first the Kingdom of God. I regret, too, that I have not always done this.

3. You said you traveled a bit...(from Home) as a young woman...How did your parents and peers feel about that?

I joined a theater repertory company when I was young and had decided to become a great actress...it was a lot of fun and I loved the people I travelled with, the people I met, and I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. I have a lot of good memories. But, my parents weren't as enthusiastic about my "bumming around the country" with a bunch of actors. But they got over it. As for my peers...I was kind of a loner (not the kind that suddenly buys a gun and 50 rounds of ammunition and shoots people!) but I kept pretty much to myself...so I don't know what they thought. My folks were supportive, in spite of their misgivings.

4. Did your sons marry women like you...or not like you?

Um, probably not like me. THEY (my sons) are a lot like me, but their wives--not so much. One of my daughters-in-law is Japanese, is a wonderful housekeeper (which I am not) and a fantastic cook (which I am definitely not). She is tiny and beautiful, a good mother to Bookworm and Starfish. Another daughter-in-law is Filipina, also tiny and beautiful (which I am not), teaches school, is a good mother to Chime and Cake, and loves to eat stuff I think is hideous--like pig's blood over rice, balut (half-grown duck embryos in a half-boiled egg *shudder*) and fish heads; another is tall and fair-haired and beautiful, and Lutheran, and Swedish, (all good things!). She has a Master's of Social Work degree, is a family counselor, and is the mother of my two fair-haired, blue-eyed and hazel-eyed grandsons. And the most recent is a Baptist/Episcopalian, dark-haired, attorney (much smarter than I!), who is a victim's advocate and looks like she should be on TV in Law and Order... and is the mom of my littlest, so handsome grandson. So, no, they're not like me...They are all four of them beautiful and smart and kind-hearted, and I love them all ENORMOUSLY! We have really interesting Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners!

5. What food soothes you?

What food? ALL food (but not blood, balut or fish heads). I am like a vacuum cleaner, soothed by old crackers, stale cake, cold spaghetti, ...anything. Unfortunately.

Bonus question: Do you kiss your dogs? How about Baby Talk?

I love my dogs. See question/answer #2.



Directions for the Interview Meme:

1. Leave me a comment saying "Interview Me."

2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.


** Photo of my great grandmother, Laura Ann. Thanks, Wendy. That was fun!

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 10:07 AM 10 comments
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Metaphor: The Tree of Utah (Or, What I Did Last Summer)







Monday, May 15, 2006
The Wild God's Grace

A nice piece I found in some old papers today while looking for something else. This article appeared in SUNSTONE, August, 1990. It's written by an old acquaintence, Levi S. Peterson, and was presented at the 1990 Washington D.C. Symposium.

A MORMON EVOLUTIONIST AND THE WILD GOD'S GRACE

(excerpts)
...Prairie dogs are rodents which live in burrows. In prehistoric America their subterranean dwellings covered hundreds of miles of grassy plains. Viewing them, I thought of the birds to whom St. Francis of Assisi preached, for these prairie dogs seemed like a congregation of worshipers--curious, attentive, and devout. I join St. Francis in declaring the plants and animals of the earth to be my closest brothers and sisters. I rely on my mute intuitions to inform me that the impulse to to live I find everywhere on this fecund earth, in grasses and algae and pine trees as well as in prairie dogs and human beings is godly. This inorganic planet of magma, rock, water and air, is divine; but even more divine is the life that has occupied it and made it home. I love the wild world because it is so replete with an unapologetic impulse to live. The plants and animals claim their birthright. They do not agonize over duty; they listen to an inner commandment and strive to exist. And in their presence I worship, for God has spoken them, and they are his Word.

...I do not limit culpability among animals to the carnivores, for herbivores are guilty of maiming and killing plant life. For that matter, plants too participate in evil as they ingest, inhibit, and kill other plants or animals. It is the inborn curse of the mortal order whereby all living things are under the grim necessity of devouring other life. To achieve the goodness of developing my own life and the lives of other human beings and the lives of the plants and animals I choose to favor, I must sacrifice innumerable other plants and animals.

...I do not try to clear God of complicity in this tragic state of affairs. It was God who ordained that the original protoplasm from which life has evolved should be mortal. So on Judgement Day, if there is to be a Judgement Day, God will stand indicted under a law of his own devising. On that day I will be ready to forgive God, as I hope he will forgive me. I will forgive him because I do not believe he can intervene in the natural order he has established. My only certitude regarding God is this: he is the creative force of the cosmos which expresses itself in natural law. But of course, I am pleased to imagine, to hope, he is much more as well. I hope God is the guarantor of certain outrageous miracles, one of which is the immortality of individual human beings...I hope he is the supernatural destiny toward which consciousness and spirit in the natural world are tending.

...Each Sunday as I partake of the sacrament, I devote a portion of my meditation to a prayer for pardon. I do not ask Christ to forgive me, because I do not believe he has ever condemned me...I must forgive myself, over and over for failing to be a saint. I affirm that the best and purest expression of God in this wide universe is in the imperative of the human conscience toward self-sacrifice in behalf of others. "If any man will come after me," said Jesus, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me...." The cross of our new ecologically oriented age is vaster, weightier, more hopeless of being borne than the old cross of earlier ages. We are asked to be eco-saints. Though our duty to our own kind is in nothing diminished, we are now asked to love and cherish the wild world as well. We are asked to covenant ourselves to the cause of clean air, pure water, and natural soil. We are asked to engage ourselves in behalf of snails, meadowlarks, kelp, moths, and earthworms, too. The living world is our temple and we are asked to keep it holy."


(It's LONG but it's worth it.)
Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 4:10 PM 6 comments

Monday, August 01, 2005
MOVIE STARS
The day after the tsunami hit South Asia, taking nearly 30,000 lives and causing incalculable destruction, Elder Subandriyo called Bertha Suranto to take leave of her job and travel to the city of Medan in northern Sumatra. As a volunteer for her church, she began purchasing building materials, tents, food, clothing, cooking stoves, and materials for thousands of hygiene kits. As each truck was filled, Sister Sutanto phoned ahead to her husband who was helping out in Banda Aceh, and he helped distribute the items among those in need--99 % of whom were Muslim. Everywhere they went, townspeople ran out to greet and welcome them. "We felt as though we were movie stars," Sister Suranto said. One village chief said more than anything else, his village needed copies of the Koran, as theirs had been swept away in the tsunami. A few days later, the LDS Church presented the village with 700 copies.

I say, Good for them. My question: if the shoe was on the other foot, would the Muslims have done the same with copies of the Book of Mormon?

...And So,

...and so, we made a life together. And became a FAMILY.






Our memories, too, make journeys. What is lost comes back to find us when we need to be found." --Nancy Willard

I'm a Mother!

May 25, 1965

We rented out the little house in back-- they have no furniture, so we have to buy it all. We got a mattress set for $26 and a refrigerator for $45-- both in good condition. The renters gave us a $100 dollar bill!

...The baby kicks and punches a lot, and has for quite a while. I can even see it on the outside. Usually when I'm lying down and trying to rest is when it decides to exercise. It turns around and rolls from one side to the other a lot. I've been going into the backyard to suntan some afternoons. I'll feel funny now with renters in the back. I am getting so fat. Sometimes I get so depressed, about nothing. I feel like sitting in the corner and howling, and I can't think of any reason WHY. I get lonesome sometimes.

A man just left who wants to sell us a water softener. He doesn't know we don't have any money! My washer and dryer both work good, only the water has to run out into the backyard. But it dries up fast. We still have to get so many things-- a crib mattress and pads and baby clothes, etc. Week after next I start working my 10 split trick. Only two more months to go. (I worked for Ma Bell as a telephone operator, the same job my mother worked at for twenty-five years in Inyokern).


August 20, 1965

They are getting even with me for those nice four days off. I'm working ten days in a row. Five to go. But there is one piece of good news. We're going to get our insurance after all. Some nice lady from Juvenile Hall gave us a lot of baby clothes, an infantseat, and a car bed.


(As it turned out, I didn't have to work those ten days in a row after all. Of the five days left, I only worked four. And it was a good thing the insurance kicked in when it did. The baby was born on the last day, three weeks early. Surprise, surprise. A BOY-- six pounds two ounces, 18 inches long. Marvin said he looked like Woody Woodpecker. I thought he was just beautiful! What d'you think?)

*

Windmills of Your Mind

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Like a carnival balloon
Like a carousal that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that I said
Lovers walk along the shore
Leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And a fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
WHen you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of his hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind
In the circles of your mind


(From the soundtrack to the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, words and music by Alan Bergman and Michel Legrand)

*

The Summer of Love

So. Suddenly I found myself with a husband, and I became a wife. In a small apartment on Mallul, in Anaheim, a few blocks from Disneyland. From our bedroom window every night we could view fireworks over the Matterhorn and watch Tinkerbell fly from the top peak down through the exploding darkness toward the Sleeping Beauty's Castle. And a block away, out the same window, there was a big red T rising above the ThriftiMart. Life was beautiful. I listened to folk music and wrote poetry all day. I practiced playing Marv's guitar and sang along with Joan Baez and Judy Collins and wondered with Pete Seeger Where Have All the Flowers Gone?Joan said the answer was Blowin' In the Wind. If we waited long enough, the Lord would Kumbaya. The Beatles sang that Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, lives in a dream....

It was the Summer of Love, Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency and 50,000 young soldiers would die in a far-off place called Viet Nam, which was of little concern at the time. Nobody had even heard of Viet Nam, really. We had no idea that once in, there would be no way out. Flowers were in Power.

We bought furniture--a blue couch, two end tables, a lamp, a brown plaster statue of Confucious, and somewhere along the line, another of comedian W.C. Fields. We bought dishes. Marv had one plate, one drinking glass, a knife, fork and spoon.... We bought pots and pans. Potholders (Marv's kids at Juvenile Hall made us an endless supply of yarn potholders). Bath towels.

We still went to Newport Beach often, got browner, ate bananas-on-a-stick, gathered collections of seashells. We went to old art films, Black Orpheus, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. We saw Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
and Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton in Becket,and Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek.

Rent was $40 a month, and we were happy with very little money. A lonely kid from the apartment below us came up every day to visit me. Colyer Dupont was a child actor, eleven or twelve years old, with long blond hair. My hair was long, and blond. He thought I was pretty, said I was like his sister. His mother was divorced, and carless, so when Colyer went to auditions at Disney Studios in Hollywood, I took them there in my little old DKW, which ran on a mixture of half-and half, half gas, half oil--(Janet had taught me how to drive that car in the Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena the year before). Colyer's mother and I waited, our fingers crossed for him. All of us were living on a shoestring, you know. It didn't matter.

Marvin worked as a counselor at Albert Sitton Hall (and Orange County Juvenile Hall), a place for delinquents and homeless children. I still saw myself as an aspiring actress, an eccentric bohemian, while I tried to learn to cook and clean and be a good wife. Marv and I were very much on the same wavelength--one or the other of us finishing each others sentences, or transferring identical thoughts. Often, even our dreams at night would slide from one head to the other, sharing words and images, a unique intimacy, a sort of "meeting of spirits," like Leonard Cohen wrote about in Suzanne. In the music we listened to the singers were like friends. It was a time of great happiness.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

.

I Do! I Do!

WEDDING DAY--June 19th, 1964

They played Bach's Brandenburg Concertos when Marv and I were married. My brother played a French horn solo called Romance, and a friend sang Tonight, Tonight and There's A Place For Us from WEST SIDE STORY. (This friend, who was an actor, was killed a few years later during a performance of Oliver, the villan Fagan, shot by a badly packed blank bullet. )

When Marv proposed marriage, back on Valentine's Day, 1964, he gave me a heart-shaped box of candy. Inside, in the center, one of the candies was missing, and in its paper wrapper was a diamond ring. On the previous Sunday night, February 8th, the Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Marianne thought they "looked like apes." Gaylen was impressed with their "backbeat." They sang I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and She Loves You, and Please Please Me to an audience of screaming teenagers. And I said, "Yes." Absolutely. Yes.

This was my third visit to the L.A. Temple. The first time was when I attended its dedication, as a teenager; the second was on September 10th, 1957, when Gaylen and I were sealed to Mama and Daddy after their marriage for Time and Eternity. Marv's best friend (and Best Man) Richard Barbieri and his wife Eileen were there for us, and Gaylen and Marianne. Janet was mad that she wasn't allowed inside the Temple for the ceremony, but she and beautiful Cindy Moller (who took time off from her job as a topless dancer at the Dunes in Las Vegas) made up for it by providing a huge bottle of champagne (which we kept in the closet, unopened, for years and years....), painting "Just Married" signs in lipstick, and tying tin cans to the back bumper of the car.

Janet was my Matron of Honor, my sister-in-law, Marianne, andMarv's little sister Jean were my Bridesmaids. I wore Janet's wedding dress, that filled both the "something old" and "something borrowed" requirements. The "something new" was my veil, with a sparkly little decoration in the front. Two of my old boyfriends were there. (There. I have survived. Do you see? I am happier than I ever was! Do you see?)

"Hey," one of them said. "You look great!"

I smiled, knowing I looked terrific. Marv and I had been to the beach often. We were both thin and sun-tanned and golden. My hair was blonde and he had hair! I'd say now, looking back from a distance of forty-plus years, that we were perfectly perfect people. Almost.

Some wedding pictures: Marv cutting our cake with a pancake turner. Why didn't we have a knife? I have forgotten. Janet and me, smiling. "You be good to her now," she warned him. No one ever said to me, "You be good to him." At least, I don't remember it if they did. Claude Gillham, a friend whose lap I used to sit on as a five-year-old while I rubbed his bald head, gave me a hug. Mama used to tell me not to rub his wonderfully smooth head, because it would hurt his feelings. FOr the life of me I could not imagine why it would ever hurt his feelings. But this night, I did not rub his head. I held two of my cousins little girls for photographs. And I may have been thin, but my corset was so tight I could not breathe, and I thought the night would never end.

Tonight, tonight. won't be just any night.
Tonight there will be no morning star.
Tonight, tonight, I'll see my love tonight,
And for us, stars will stop where they are....

But it did. And we drove from the desert back to the city, where Marv's room-mate, a cop we called Sweet William was sleeping in the bedroom. So, at three in the morning, we threw a mattress on the front room floor, and we slept.

We honeymooned in Ensenada, Mexico. We stayed at a little motel just out of town, on the beach, called Cabanas Monte Carlo, run by some people from Lebanon, who gave us a calendar with Hernan Cortez carrying off some voluptuous black-haired, half-dressed woman. We ate tacos at places who made their tortillas by hand and cooked them over big metal drums, places run by Chinese, called Fat Choi's Mexican Food. We ate Chinese at places called Pedro's, or Juan's. We ran out of money and lived for three days on corn tortillas, goat's butter, and 7-Up. At night piteros players on the street made lovely ancient music with magic flutes and drums. We took walks on the rocky beaches and watched the sun set. I wore my hair long and loose, and Marv smiled a lot. We loved each other. I'd never had so much fun in my whole life. We were poor but happy. The village idiots.

There's a place for us,
Some day a time for us.
Time together with time to spare,
Time to learn, time to care.
Someday.

There's a place for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Someday,
Somewhere.

.

Marvin Maurice Emerson Davis, Jr

vvv

vv

Marv and I had only known one another for about eight years, so it was sort of a whirlwind romance, you might say. *Smile* This is a good time to let you know you something more about Marvin Maurice Emerson Davis, Jr (besides his impetuous nature). He was born in St. John's Township, Harrison County, Iowa, in his Grandmother Stoddar's house, the first of six children. For a while they lived in Sioux City, in a quiet neighborhood called Morningside, where he fell in love with a little girl with a red sweater and had his first banana split, and crossed the Missouri River over the singing bridge, and carried a real pocket-knife in a pouch at the top of his lumberjack boots. His father worked in the slaughterhouses down by the river's edge. His mother was from a well-to-do Chicago family. She had taken dancing lessons, and wore ribbons in her hair. When she moved to California with her family she had a real future in Hollywood. Everybody thought so. And the California air would be healthful, a cure for her mother's consumption. The Stoddar's (Marv's mother's people) were from old seafarer's, ship's captains, Master Mariners, and such. His father's ancestors can be traced back to a Black Irish lad named Roe and an Indian medicine woman named Dancing Sun, and to a President of the United States and a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.) When he was still a little boy, the family moved to Alhambra,California. On the way, at Grand Canyon, he had a nosebleed. Once there, Marv fell in love with a little girl in a yellow dress, tried a couple of times to burn down his house, blew up seagulls with carbide-laced bread, and endeared himself to his sisters by hanging their paper dolls by the neck until they were dead or chopping them into pieces with his scissors. He wasn't always that violent. He camped overnight at Tin Can beach with his friends, and stargazed. He peddled newspapers, and --out of embarrassment, or fear-- those he didn't sell he bought with his own money and threw away down the rain gutter, rather than return the unsold papers to the manager. In school, he was required to memorize "Invictus," by William Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

"Invictus" was the motto of the United States Naval Academy, class of 2001, (the year the Trade Towers in NYC went down), hurling defiance into the teeth of the storm.

He joined the Navy when he was just seventeen, and spent most of the next four years as a radioman on Guam, an island paradise he would dream about for the rest of his life. The Navy taught him to drink and smoke cigars, and saved his life. Once, he almost drowned himself swimming alone in off-limit waters, out past the coral reefs. When he found himself exhausted, he decided to give it up, and just let himself go under. When he ran out of air, he changed his mind and resurfaced. He gave up, went under, and came up again for air several times before they hauled him in, his legs raw and bleeding from the knife-edged coral. I guess I owe the Navy for that.

When he wasn't on the island, he was on the USS Chandler, where he sat alone on the deck at night and wrote poetry, sang songs to himself, and smoked cigars-- a vice he overcame, thanks to his conversion to the LDS Church. I guess I owe the Church for that.

It was while he was in the Navy that he became converted to the Church. I met him in 1957 while I was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse. He was working as a counselor at Hathaway House, a home for abandoned and emotionally disturbed and abused children. He had a great love and sensitivity for those children. Later he worked at Albert Sitton Hall in Orange County. We had a lot of fun together. When he held my hand it just seemed to fit. We spent lots of time at the beach, or at Pershing Square in LA (which used to be a fantastic place populated by schizophrenics, street preachers, drunks, dope fiends, and Salvation Army revivals). We went people-watching at Boorman's, a market in Pasadena which specialized in packaged pig-snouts and pig-tails and pig-feet, and it was purely awful, --but fun. We had unusual dates, and he fell in love with me.

We went our separate ways for a while, while I went out on the road with the theater company, and he almost married somebody else, a girl named Jane, heiress to the riches of the Tappen Stovetop Ranges fortune. He might have had millions and lived comfortably ever after, but, as it happened... it seemed like every time I went to visit my friend Janet, for some reason Marv would always show up with his skis, or on his motorcycle. Fate seemed to be throwing us together. Anyway, I finally proposed, and he accepted, and we were married, and I'm glad, because I do love him. Penniless though I was, he thought I was "a fairy princess," and loved me back.

He had a terrible temper. He had the soul of a poet. He loved opera, Lily Pons and Enrico Caruso, and folk music-- Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he loved Johann Sebastian Bach, and took me to the LA County Library where, listening with one shared headphone, each of us with one speaker, he introduced me to the Brandenburg Concertos. I owe him for that.

He's been a good father to our five sons. He's a good grandfather. He loves John Wayne westerns and old war movies (if they have no blood, and star John Wayne). He likes his poetry to rhyme. His favorite movies are The Wizard of Oz and Brigadoon. He loves to watch football on television, and his favorite color is yellow. He's an insomniac. He still loves opera. And he still holds my hand.

What else?

Saul Bellow (who won a Nobel Prize for literature) said: "I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevski remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace things,
scratch around in it long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous. I tend to believe that, at least most of the time." And H.G. Wells said that "Man must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind him to the fact that each moment of his life is a miracle and a mystery." Each moment of my life has been a miracle and a mystery. The love I have for Marvin, the birth of each one of our children, our grandchildren, have surely been miracles and mysteries. Johnny Carson asked singer Helen Reddy once what she'd do if her success would all end tomorrow. And she said, "If it should all end tomorrow-- well, I've had one heck of a ride, and enjoyed every minute of it!"

Me, too. It's all marvelous! I've had one heck of a ride, and I guess I owe my Father in Heaven big time for that.


.

The University of Utah

The U of U was on the hillside across from my brother Gaylen's house on Sunnyside Avenue. The Zoo was only a little farther up the hill. I walked to the University and back home every afternoon, and the fields behind the National Guard Armory were empty except for meadow larks and sparrows. I lived in the basement of Gaylen and Marianne's little house until their new house on Orchard Drive in Bountiful was built. Mom and Daddy were building a new house on the lot just to the west, and were getting ready to move from California. Every morning after the move to Bountiful, Gaylen and I would climb into his Volkswagen and chug off to school together. He had his new PhD in Music, and was teaching several classes in music theory and composition, and French Horn. I took Music 101 from him, and felt obligated to get an "A" because I really didn't want him to think I was stupid. I loved the class, and he was an awesome teacher. I spent much of my free time between classes in the listening library of the music building listening to Palestrina Masses. My friend Janet wrote, warning me that this was a terrible place to meet men, and she worried that I would become an old maid.

I loved my Physics and Astronomy classes. I barely made it through a year of French. Paris est dans le Sud de la France. Le Seine traverse Paris. The new Pioneer Memorial Theater had just been completed, and most of my classes were there, or in Kingsbury Hall, next to the music building. I loved to sit under the trees between the two buildings, listening to the hodgepodge of sounds coming from the windows of the various practice rooms: piano scales, violins, horns, voices.... When Kingsbury became the home of the Ballet and Dance Department, I began to live my life, from dawn until dark, in the basement of the Theater building.

My theater classes were fine. The University accepted most of my Playhouse credits, so I had all upper level classes. I wrote home:

May 25, 1961

Dear Folks, Thanks for the dress and sweater. They're very nice, and fit fine. Gaylen's house is really going up fast. The basement and floor are in. Marianne is so excited-- she's been planning paint colors and decorating and such. The kitchen is all built in. Gaylen has been trimming all the trees on their lot and yours.

Do you know who the happiest motorcyclist is? The guy with the bugs all over his teeth! And have you seen the new Helen Keller doll? Wind it up, and it walks into the wall! (Not very funny?)

I have a rehearsal at 2 this afternoon. We open on Wednesday. I got my name in the paper this morning-- spelled wrong. We have been having late run thru's lasting until after one a.m. I play Dunyasha Thursday night. One performance out of four. Amy E. plays opening night and the week-end. So Byron took me aside after rehearsal & told me why I was playing just one night. He said he was sorry I wasn't playing more, but that there were "a lot of things involved," such as the fact that Amy has been here three years, and this is the first good part she's had. Mrs. McGrath (Byron's wife, Grace) was there when he was talking to me. She said she liked my Dunyasha, and that when she looks at me she thinks of 25 plays I could do! That was nice.

I met John Jory last night (Victor Jory's son). We talked for a long time. He came again tonight, and asked where in California I lived, & how come I was here, & how I liked the Playhouse, etc. He's done a lot of shows there, since he was a little boy.

Maybe I'll just enroll in the Writer's Conference this summer, and save my money for the Fall quarter. There aren't a lot of classes offered in summer. I'll just concentrate on the Conference, and maybe some of the summer shows. I'll have to get a manuscript together-- don't know what....

Wednesday

Opening night's over. The show ran 20 minutes late. Amy felt very bad about it, she was in tears. It will be me in tears tomorrow. John Jory told me he's coming tomorrow night. And Gaylen and Marianne will both be there. So there will be at lest three people in the audience. There was a full house tonight. More later.

Thursday

We had another full house-- even had to turn people away. MY night is over. Byron patted my cheek, called me "Angel," and said it was "Swell." Who knows? Since I have just one night, there's not much use for criticism. Marianne and her mother came. Gaylen has been writing a philosophy paper all day and all night. Her mother is mad at me, I think. See, we had this weird-looking bug on the wall, it could run like hell, boy. Gaylen was after him with a piece of paper and a Kleenex. Marianne was shrieking and her mother was on his tail with her shoe, stomping and shouting, "WELL MY GODFREY, GAYLEN, KILL IT!" (That's the nearest to swearing I've ever heard from her).

"My sister'll be mad at me if I do," he said. Up to now I was just an innocent bystander. "He won't kill it," said Marianne.

"WELL I'LL KILL IT!" And Mrs. J. runs at it with her shoe again. So I took Gaylen's Kleenex & picked up the bug & put him outside. My cat was running wild by this time, rolling up all the rugs, with her eyes big and her ears back flat-- Hot damn! Quite a fun little episode, huh? The cat's all lovey now tonight. Goodnight.

Saturday

Tonight is the last night of "Cherry Orchard." Grace McGrath told me I was "just wonderful." I heard a lot of good things from a lot of people. She said I was the best Dunyasha she'd ever seen. I wish I could do it again tonight, even if Byron does feel obligated to Amy because she's been around for so long....

After last night's show my ride decided to go with the rest to a little bar called the Blue Angel. I felt awkward and out of place because everyone was getting drunk but me. Joyce the Stick. Gaylen and Marianne will begin to wonder-- I'm always bringing half-crocked people in to use the bathroom at one or two a.m.... Byron and Grace are having a cast party after the show tonight. Full house again, with people standing, crammed in every aisle. I wish you could see it.

Gaylen's going to plant a couple of little apple trees on your lot. I told him I thought Mrs. J. was mad at me. He said, "Well, she makes ME mad, quoting the Bible about the Lord sending things to torment man! The world is full of bugs-- every drop of water is full of little bugs, and most of them are harmless, if she only knew it!"
He's a good brother. XOXO

So that's how things went, generally. I went to the Writer's Conference that summer. Robie McCauley talked with me about my manuscript of stories (for 20 minutes and 6 dollars). He said my stories were too short and unfinished, and too grotesque.

Well. I got to do "Look Homeward, Angel" on the mainstage. Actually, I went to read for the understudy for Mercedes McCambridge, the actress coming from Hollywood to play Mrs. Gant. I only went along because my friend was trying out for one of the roles, and I read just because I was there, not because I expected to get the role. I was already involved in another show. Allen Somebody was doing "The Rainmaker," and I was doing Lizzy. We had several performances in Salt Lake and were taking the show to Moab in a few weeks. I could have had the understudy role. The director, Robert Hyde Wilson (we called him "Rawhide") said I read it perfectly, and he seemed disappointed and angry when I apologized and told him I couldn't do it....but he gave me a smaller part. In theater lingo, "Break A Leg" is a good-luck wish. As it happened, Ms. McCambridge actually broke her leg and was unable to come, so they hired an actress from New York, Leora Dana. She inspired me. She was a wonderful actress, absolutely awesome. Every night. I wrote home: I would love to keep trying for professional theater. If I am too old (by the time I finally get out of school) to play charming young things, then I'll play character and mother roles. After seeing Miss Dana in "Look Homeward Angel." She has played mother roles her whole career. I'm not a very charming young thing anyway!

Well. We took "Rainmaker" to Moab. And it was fun! I was Lizzie! Gene Pack, who hosted a classical music show on KUER for many years after, played my brother Noah. Steve Somebody-- I've forgotten his last name-- (he was a dead ringer for James Dean) played Starbuck. We took publicity photos in an old barn. Steve What's-his-name, standing up in the hayloft emptied the flashbulbs out of his camera down onto the bald head of Gene Pack, standing unaware below him. The flashbulbs bounced off like ping pong balls. I laughed and rolled around in the hay until I thought I would die of laughter. No one else seemed to think it was THAT funny.... Steve and I had a love scene in the "tack room." I discovered that I really liked kissing! I mean, it was 1963, I was almost 24 years old. I had certainly kissed, and been kissed before. But here, in the middle of "Rainmaker," I discovered that I really really liked kissing! And I can't even remember his last name!

Kim Hunter, who I had admired greatly since I was a teen-ager for her role as Stella in "Streetcar Named Desire," (she won an Academy Award for that), came to the U. to do G.B. Shaw's "Major Barbara." I wrote home: "I saw "Major Barbara" between rehearsals Saturday. It's a great show. I am very impressed with Kim Hunter. I sneaked into a symposium here this afternoon sort of by accident. The Theater Guild was listening to a discussion of Shaw, and "Major Barbara," and Kim Hunter was on the panel. I sat in the back with the newspapermen. (This was an accident, too, as I just walked in and sat down, uninvited. I didn't know then what, or who, was happening). Anyway, it was the most interesting hour of the day.

Anyway. I took a directing class from "Rawhide." I decided to do Christopher Fry's "A Sleep of Prisoners," which we had done when I was on the road. I cast a very good friend, Victor Gordon, a fine actor who was also Black, as God. In the 60's, people were marching for equality, and bombing churches, and killing civil right's workers and burying their young bodies in landfills. Our performance would be in a church in Bountiful, in my Ward on Orchard Drive. There were a few raised eyebrows at our rehearsals, but the show went very well. Rawhide gave me an "A". Years later, Time Magazine wrote a piece on the status of Blacks in Utah, and they interviewed Victor Gordon, who apparently felt like a 2nd class citizen among Mormons. I've always regretted that I never wrote a letter to the editor of Time, wondering if Victor remembered the time when he played God in a Mormon church?

Graduation was a blur. Forty-plus years later, I discover that the Baccalaureate Address was given by Neal A. Maxwell, "...but speaking the truth in love..." He said: "It is they to whom we look for concern with justice, whether this concern is held in spite of the fact that we live on a planet that someday will blink, quiver, and die or whether the concern is held because life on this planet is part of a continuum in which we strive for proximate justice; it is they to whom we look for some shared realism about the nature of man and for assurance and reassurance that man is sufficiently rational and good that, therefore, we need not despair. It is they to whom we look for shared concern about freedom....It is they to whom we look to place a premium upon knowledge as essential to survival in a changing world.... If all of us cannot link arms for the task of dealing with conflict by communicating the truth...we shall be a crippled culture-- a pathetic huddle of the timid, the apathetic, and the fearful-- a society likely to end as Eliot said, 'not with a bang, but a whimper.'"

*

ACT THREE: On the Road

I went "on the road" with the Bishop's Company, American Repertory Players, in the summer of 1960. A fellow I knew from the Playhouse, Mark Rawson, was one of their 22 actors. I was number 23. Mark was from Glen Falls, NY, and had done three seasons of summer stock there before coming to Pasadena. He was a member of the Oregon Shakespearian Festival. He Left the Company almost as soon as I arrived, to do summer theater in Cripple Creek, Colorado. My first show was in Denver. I'd had two days to prepare. The pay was ten dollars a week, and the Company provided our meals and a roof over our head.

My mother thought it was a big mistake. She thought it was a bad idea for me to go "bumming around the country" with a bunch of actors, and tried to talk me out of it. As it turned out, she was wrong.

I was excited. The Bishop's Company was a group of professional actors dedicated to performing plays they thought were socially significant, in churches, at universities, sometimes in prisons. It began as the dream of a young and ambitious woman named Phyllis Benbow Beardsley, who I never met, but her young son wrote a poem about her I've never forgotten: There is no other mother, either far or near, who needs so much her girdle, and uses so much her brassiere. She was a tall red-head who "took courage in both hands and made the dream a reality." I believe Christopher Fry's The Boy with a Cart was their first play, a gentle, lyric poem of a shepherd boy who packs his old, nagging mother into a cart he has made, making himself a harness of willow shoots to pull it. They set out across the hills of SOuthern England. The boy believes that when the shoots break it will be the place where he will realize God's purpose. They performed this around Los Angeles, along with another called Thor, with Angels, and Herman Melville's Billy Budd for a while before their cross-country tours began. Variety wrote: "The theatre has gone back to the church after a lapse of about 400 years. And it has gone back with all the embellishments that modern theatrical techniques and modern ways of playwriting can muster." And again, "The prodigal son has returned to the bosom of the family and may well turn out to be one of the fair-haired boys. In other words, the theatre, after wandering into some devious pathways during the past 400 years [has] returned. The return of the 'bad boy' of the arts to its cradle is not only a healthy sign, but an indication that the deliquent has grown up...." All that was said way back in 1947. In July of 1954, the Los Angeles TImes ran an article that said: "Bishop's Company Booked at Churches Coast to Coast.
Los Angeles' own drama-in-the-church troupe of professional actors, The Bishop's Company, has shoved off on its first nationwide tour...." Anyway, by the time I joined them, they had four units, two that remained in the Los Angeles area and two that criss-crossed the United States and Canada. THey had BIG plans. We will have a ship! The ports of the world will be its harbor! I don't know if they ever reached that goal, but after I left, they toured Hawaii.

Alan Paton gave his permission for the Company to adapt his novel Cry, the Beloved Country as a play. Also in the repertoire were C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, Steven Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, and another of Christopher Fry's poetic plays, Sleep of Prisoners. And after all those years, we still did Boy With A Cart. The 'home' units did A.A Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh, as well as The Diary of Anne Frank.

I loved travelling. I loved the other actors. At first, as new people came into the group they were simply called "Newgirl," or Newboy." Whenever someone left, or went to join another unit, and new people came, we were given our name, and the newcomers became "Newgirl" or "Newboy."

I genuinely loved theater, and was grateful to be given this opportunity to work at something I had been preparing myself to do. While I was on the road, my best friend Janet was knocking on doors in Hollywood. I knew even then that my chances of working in Hollywood, or on Broadway in New York were remote at best--something akin to being abducted by space aliens. And with the Company, I did make it to New York, and I was a working actor!

In fact, one chilly Thanksgiving in New York City, when I was buying chestnuts from a street vendor (the wonderful perfume of roasting chestnuts is the BEST!), he went for coffee, asking me to "take over the cart," for a few minutes-- so, I also sold chestnuts on the sidewalk in New York City for a few minutes....

I wrote disgustingly long letters home, describing every cornfield and bird and Burma Shave sign we passed. Some others slept, some read, some studied lines. I remember Jim and Judy laughing hysterically over a book of Fractured Fairy Tales: Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers, and Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, and Center Alley Enter Ladle Gloss Slobbers.

I wrote: "Hello from one of the Dirty Dozen in their Travelling Tenement! We're going to write Sleaze, Inc. on the side of the trailer. Our trash bags are overflowing with old show programs, candy wrappers, banana skins, etc. More mosquitos. It's raining again. We're thinking of calling ourselves The Jolly Consumptives. Cough, cough...."

"...We drove to Bowman, North Dakota last night. Up at seven and drive all day and most of the night. Then we'll be in Winnipeg tomorrow. Are you following me on the map? I love this!"

"...Spent last night in a hotel in Muskegon. The water wouldn't run out of the sink, and the plug in the bathtub didn't fit. I had to plug up the drain with my heel to keep the water in. Somebody's baby cried all night and a drunk talked to himself for hours outside our door. This place smells like Muskegon sounds. Yucch."

"Did you know I'm insured by Lloyds of London?"

"CHICAGO!--we have a necklace of dandelions hanging from the rear-view mirror. Yesterday I met a little girl who was overcome by standing next to a real actress! She said, "Gee, can I touch you?" SHe said she thought I was "the prettiest one" in the show! I could really get to like this. Lots of kids and old ladies ask us for autographs."

"...I feel--something I can't find words for. Like time is so short and things go by so quickly, and that frightens me...."

"Tonight we play a huge old barn of a building. I can hardly see the back wall from the stage. They've got eight baskets of flowers up there. If they don't move them, we'll all be hidden in the foliage! We went through Minneapolis and St. Paul early this morning. Can't remember much, but neither can I remember sleeping--just being tired and uncomfortable, and having my leg or my hand or arm go numb at close intervals...."

"THere was so much I wanted to tell you, but I'm too tired. About New York City, and the fly in my jello. About midnight rehearsals in hotel rooms. About all the company jokes (mostly dirty). About being so tired you think you're going to be verrry sick. And about all the beautiful people I've met."

I did, actually, meet and shake hands with Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb. I didn't really know how famous (and infamous) he was, at the time. I only knew the people who introduced us told me, "Harry Truman called him before dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and said, Ed? What d'ya think?" Ed suffered a heart attack in 1979, which he blamed on Jane Fonda, for promoting her latest movie, The China Syndrome. Everybody said he was the "real" Dr. Strangelove. He seemed like an old man when I met him, but he lived until 2003!

I loved the people in my unit. Jeanne Needham was pretty, and funny when she didn't mean to be funny. Don Crail was a preacher who ran away with the circus. Dan Barrows had been in radio and TV in Cincinatti before joining the company. Chris Elm was easy to talk to, and Jim and Judy were good buddies. Jim's mother owned Brigham Young's "wine snifter," and Judy was a great horse-woman from Kentucky. She and I once rowed a little boat out on a big lake in a storm, with thunder and lightning crashing all around us. Gasping and sweating, we took turns rowing back to the dock, and when we finally got back, she said, "Thank you very much for the ride, Miss Earheart!" Frank Herold was Judy's "significant other." I once rolled Frank a cigarette made of weeds, when he ran out of his own brand. He said it was "very mild." Everybody sort of paired off--Frank and Judy, Jeanne and Clyde Phillips, and Jim and Marilyn. Freddy Goff and I were "an item" but he always smelled and tasted like cigarettes. He was good to me, wanted me to come to his home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and promised to take me to New Orleans, to the Mardi Gras.
Ummm. Never happened. WHen I left the road to go back to school at the University of Utah, he married Carol Sunde, a sweet Lutheran girl from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Maybe they are still married, if she hasn't passed on from breathing too much secondhand cigarette smoke. They were all truly like family.Jim Wheaton, one of the original eight, writes in his book Masks Before the Altar, "For me, each person was still an island that needed to be free...There are means of escape." For all our closeness, emotional, physically packed into the car like sardines in a can, as a "unit," each time we stopped, in every city, we were islands entire unto ourselves. Always.

I wrote: "One of the guys gave me a bouquet of scaggy wildflowers and a real hawk feather to brighten up our otherwise drab hotel room. He found somebody's falsie as we were about to leave Chicago, and he was embarrassed to ask who it belonged to. "Nobody would admit it if it was theirs anyway," he said. It didn't belong to me!"

CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO, TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. If Daisies Are...Your Favorite Flower...Keep Pushing Up...Those Miles Per Hour...Burma Shave. Kokomo. 14 miles. Eat. Budweiser, King of Beers. 4:24 P.M.

I wrote to Marvin: "Hope I don't have to be nice to anybody tonight. Hope they just leave me alone. I get so tired of being nice to people, saying the same things over and over. I'll be glad to get home. We'll have taquitos on Olvera Street."

Marv replied: "Looking forward to having 'Taquitos for Two,'(a new song I just wrote). Sorry this is such a short letter, but you must remember I am a short man. Although I am an intellectual giant."


I sent him one last letter from the road: "I miss you so much I could go out and eat worms. But you know how I hate to eat alone."

I had one standing ovation for a performance as Olivia in An Episode of Sparrows. And that one will have to last the rest of my life. I needed to stop. I was tired of waking up every morning wondering Where am I?, like an amnesiac from some old 1940's film. I needed a place to put things. I needed to go home. But sometimes at night I still have dreams about finding the company again, and I take off with them again, on another tour. Again. And it's almost like I've never left.

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Yes, M'am.

That would pretty much be it!

ACT TWO: No Business Like Show Business!

I. Loved. Theater. I REALLY LOVED THEATER! I loved the idea of theater~from the masks and robes of the ancient Greeks to the early Medieval and Renaissance Mystery and Morality plays and pageants, I loved Commedia Dell'Arte and Shakespeare. I loved Antigone andMother Courage. I loved Sarah Bernhardt and Maude Adams, Helen Hayes and Ellen Terry. I loved theater for eternally examining the questions of human existense, for letting us see ourselves as we were, and are.

There were plays other than these, whose titles I've forgotten, and no pictures were taken to remember them by.

Teahouse of the August Moon featured Clark Howat as the young soldier, Lisa Liu as his Japanese sweetheart, and Jerry Oddo as Sakini, the narrator. I played one of the Japanese children. I wore latex eyelids, and dyed my hair black and went barefoot. The play ran for eight or nine weeks, and when it was over, the black hair-dye wouldn't wash out, and turned my blonde hair green.

Aria Da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay: A lovely play with an anti-war sentiment. One of the lines I remember: "Columbine, your mind is like an escallop of oysters--first a layer of oysters, then a layer of crumbs...." I was Columbine. Still am.

I played the Prioress in Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra's The Cradle Song, a "perfect gem of a play," a "wonderfully touching piece of theater" in which an unwanted infant girl is left on the doorstep of a convent and is raised by Dominican nuns. We actually went to a convent, where the sisters taught us how to move, what to do with our hands, the melodies of their chants, the beads of the Rosary...they let us wear their clothes. This is a beautifully-written, delicate play I did twice, playing different roles: at the University of Utah a few years later I played Joanna of the Cross.

Easter Song was the West Coast Premiere. I was Sarah Brute, a sort of Medieval witch who believed that sacrificing little girls would insure good crops. My roomate Janet was in this one with me, playing Kie, the wife of Soren. (She later named her first little girl, Kie--pronounded key-a). Johnny Mercer's daughter Mandy played one of the children. Her big line was, "I hate oak bark soup!" And her famous dad came all the way from Hollywood to hear her say it! During one performance, the back set wall began to fall down, and I was so "into it" I never noticed. Janet thought it was a lot funnier than it did. I hope that was not the night Johnny Mercer was in the audience.

Idiot's Delight was set in a lavish hotel in Switzerland just before the onset of WWII. Harry Van, a two-bit American entertainer is stranded there with his travelling all-girl troup, Les Blondes. I chewed a huge wad of gum and carried a stuffed dog. One performance, one of Les Blondes zipper snapped while we were dancing our stuff, and she did all the bumps and grinds with one hand behind her back, holding her costume together. But she was a real dancer, and knew what she was doing.... The play was filmed in 1939, with Clark Gable doing Harry and Norma Shearer doing Irene (E-rain-a). It ended with the bombing of the hotel, and my friend Edmund Guerrero played Wagner's Flight of the Valkuries on the piano while the bombs exploded all around us. Off the set, he taught me how to play it, but it never sounded as good. My favorite line, said by Irene: "O-ma-ha? Vere dat? Persia?"

Oedipus Rex: I am lamenting, "Where did you get the courage to put out your eyes?" Backstage, we ripped off our chitons and changed costumes without dressing rooms. Nobody seemed to notice that we were all half-naked back there.... I changed with Paul Price, who later earned some fame as one of The Village People, and on Sesame Street.

Summer and Smoke was written by Tennessee Williams. I played Nellie. In Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, I played Dolly Levi. The Purification was a dark play written in poetry by John Steinbeck. Three Men on a Horse was a comedy, in which I was Mable, a sort of Gun-Moll, here with Gary Necessary (who I had a crush on). I used to see Gary's name on television credits once in a while. He worked on one of the Olympics. Paul Price is shown here with Edith somebody, who lived next door in the dorm. One night I accidently locked myself in the bathroom. I could hear her singing away next door, our windows were practically on top of each other. I yelled for help for the better part of an hour--she never heard me--so I wrote poetry on the toilet paper until midnight, when Janet finally came home. She saved the toilet paper, saying, "Someday you'll be famous, and I'll have an original!" Poor Edith. She once had to cry on stage and carried an onion wrapped in a handkerchief to help her out. Everyone kept saying, "What's that smell?"

Roses for Johnny Johnson was an allegorical anti-war play. Johnny was Everyman.

And, there's Janet, doing Italian Straw Hat. I can hear her yet, wailing "But Papa, I don't want to get married!" And beautiful Myrna Fahey, who I dressed, in Holiday for Lovers. Myrna was a graduate of the Playhouse, and was in several movies and television shows. SHe did The Fall of the House of Usher with Vincent Price, the TV series Father of the Bride and in TV's Batman, she was False-Face's assistent, Blaze, among many other roles. SHe died of cancer, at 40.

There are other plays, for which I have no pictures: Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, The Sandbox, The Cherry Orchard, Bus Stop, Of Mice and Men, Glass Menagerie, Look Homeward Angel.

I loved the amber magic of the lights, the make-up, the costumes...and the applause. And if I live to be a hundred I will never fill that void.

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ACT ONE: Ordinary People

"There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron."


-- Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid


Bill Bryson writes: In 1951, when the averge American ate 50% more than the average European, Americans owned 80% of the world's electrical goods, produced more than 40% of its electricity, 60% of its oil, and 66% of its steel. America's 5% of the world's population had more wealth than the other 95%. In fact, 99.93% of new cars sold in 1954 were U.S. brands. By the end of the 50's, GM was a bigger entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia -- cars for a gadget-smitten people, cars with Strato-Streak engines, Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions and Torsion-Aire suspensions. The 1958 Lincoln Continental was 19 feet long. And before television arrived (in 1950, 40% of Americans had never seen a television program; by May 1953 Boston had more televisions than bathtubs).

Consider what was new or not invented then: ballpoint pens, contact lenses, credit cards, power steering, dish-washers, garbage-disposals. In 1951, a Tennessee youth was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. The brown powder was a new product--instant coffee.

Unlike today, when everything edible, from milk to bad spinach and mad cows, has its moment as a menace to health, in the 50's everything was good for you. Cigarettes? Healthful. Advertisments, often featuring doctors, said smoking soothed jangled nerves and sharpened minds. (What WERE we THINKING?) X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed them to measure foot sizes. In Las Vegas, downwind from atomic weapons tests, government technicians used Geiger counters to measure fallout. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun! What a joy it was to be indestructible.

And indestructible we were then. "People knew, without a warning lable," Bryson notes dryly, "that bleach was not a refreshing drink."

White House security precautions were so lax that on April 3, 1956, a disoriented woman from Michigan detached herself from a tour group and wandered around the White House setting little fires. When found, she was taken to the kitchen and given a cup of tea. No charges were filed. The 50's did have worries. You could get 14 years in an Indiana prison for instigating anyone under age 21 to "commit masturbation." And to get a New York fishing license, you had to swear a loyalty oath.

But yes, we were still indestructible.

In September of 1957 I met my very best friend (who remains to this day my very best friend) Janet Lane. We loved each other enourmously from the start. We shared a small upstairs room at the Playhouse Women's Dorm, with ugly orange furniture and a view of the Playhouse, three blocks away. She was 19, a year older than I was. Her hair was red, her eyes dark brown, and her cheeks had dimples. I thought she was very beautiful and very sophisticated. She thought her nose was too large. "It's
my father's nose," she used to wail. SHe smoked. Sometimes we talked all night long, whispered to each other things we had never told anyone else. She swore, and taught me to swear. (I don't swear anymore--much--but I still know how). She informed me which of our fellow students were "gay," and what being "gay" was. (I was dumbfounded and amazed. What an incredible and inconceivable revelation this was!) She gave me sisterly advice: "For Heaven's sake, fix yourself up a little bit, use some more make-up. Eye shadow. And don't wear pink! You look like Alice in Wonderland in pink."

"You glow on stage," she told me later.

The dorm, actually Hale Residence Hall, had rules. All meals must be eaten in the dining room, not in the kitchen, and on trays provided you. (Well, I always ate in my room, vegetable soup, cold spaghetti, directly from the can). The piano must be used ONLY from 7:00-8:00 p.m., the television must be turned off at 10:00 p.m., and of course, may not be played at the same time. Callers must always be out of the dorm by 10:00 p.m. (There was a ladder the girls used to climb out the windows, or to allow callers to climb in.) On SATURDAY and SUNDAY mornings, no caller is permitted in the dorm before noon...etc etc etc.

We worked hard, preparing to be famous. We rehearsed often until near midnight, and then went to "Tops" to eat French fries before going home to bed. We exchanged photo stills from whatever show were were doing. I worked with wonderful, witty, talented people: Myrna Fahey was beautiful, had done several movies, and was sweet to me. Gita Maynard thought I was lovely, and Barbara Drew signed her photo, "Joyce, you've been a darling...." Holly Harris was spectacular, Jerry Oddo, playing Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon scrawled his autograph on a program cover, and wrote: "To my personal Alice in Wonderland. My love and kisses for being so wonderful to work with. You will find your 'cricket'." Lisa Liu was was charming and graceful as the Japanese sweetheart. From another old program cover: Holiday for Lovers. "All the best, from here on to the top!" I actually shook hands with Burt Lancaster, and Bette Davis, and Piper Laurie! Burt smiled broadly and looked right past me, Bette wore a turban, and Piper was--well, really, really beautiful. Well. We were nothing if not optimistic. Alice in Wonderland. It was an image that seemed to follow me around, and when I actually had the opportunity to be Alice at the newly-opened Disneyland, I turned it down because I was homesick, and wanted to spend the summer at home. Charlotte Stewart, who lived in the room next door grabbed it, and went from there to a regular role as the schoolteacher on the Little House on the Prarie TV series. My friend Makoto Iwamatsu, "Mako," did the best "Puck" I have ever seen in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and went on to be nominated for an Academy AWard "Oscar" for his performance with Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles. Margaret O'Brien and John Drew Barrymore did Romeo and Juliet on the Mainstage. Most of us you have never heard of.

I wanted to write. I bought a bicycle for five dollars and pedaled it down the hill to Pasadena City College, where I took writing classes from my first real "mentor," Helen Hinckley Jones, a marvelous teacher and friend, who had written histories of Israel and Iran, of Utah and the railroad, and another book about Iran, A Wall and Three Willows. She liked what I wrote, and took a special interest in me. She loved me, and I loved her. Years later, when I began to publish articles and poetry, and wrote Chrysalis, she wrote me letters of congratulations and encouragement. But that's a story for another day.

My roommie Jan was going with (and later married) David Isenhart, a young artist from San Francisco, who had studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn. His paintings were large and abstract, with thick swatches of color. He made pottery, fashioned himself a necktie out of brown yarn, cat hair, and popsicle sticks. He dripped colored wax candles over the tops of wine bottles. He read books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti,Kenneth Patchen, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginzberg. I read them, too. We were birds of a feather. Janet said we were the "only true beatniks" she knew. I kind of wafted from the end of the "beat" generation into the "Flower Children," and ended up becoming a "hippie" of sorts, and stayed that way. But that's another story for another day.

I ran around with sweet Bobby Giles, who was inescapably "gay," who wanted to be a writer as well as an actor, and who, bolt out of the blue, decided he was in love with me and wanted to get married. Kissing Bobby was like kissing a plastic doll. This was an unforseen event that surprise me, but we remained good friends until his death, writing letters, sending pictures and Christmas cards and such, even had a few visits in between his visits from the Philippines and Japan. The last time I saw him we lived in Provo, Utah. I was married and had three little boys, and was about eleven months pregnant with the fourth, another boy. Another story.

I went out (for a while) with some cowboy dude whose name I can't remember, who thought he was John Wayne, and who, on a hike in the mountains, left me stranded on a huge rock because he had no idea how I should get down. I figured it out. I went out (for a while) with a fellow from Cal Tech, a true egghead rocket scientist, whose apartment walls were papered with pictures of near-naked girls torn out of Playboy Magazines. I carried on a long-distance romance with a cute sailor named Chuck, who after we broke up sent me a long letter signed with a skull and crossbones. I went with an actor, a champion fencer, who drove an Aston Martin, whose mother was an opera singer and father was a biologist who researched regeneration of tissues by cutting earthworms into pieces (another story, probably best left untold). And another with a boy named Jerry Meyers, who kept an aviary of birds in his yard, who called me "Juice," made fishing lures with peacock feathers he kept in big bright green and purple bouquets. Jerry loved photography, loved martial arts, and had a black belt in Karate. He could break bricks with his fingertips. It was while I was with Jerry that I met the love of my life, the real deal.

Marv was an idealist, a dreamer with the soul of a poet. We ate Mexican at Ernie Jr.s, we had taquitos on Olvera Street, and shared one headphone at the city library, listening to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. I think of our time together as bonfires at the beach, waterfront carnival lights reflected in the water, seen from the top basket of the ferris wheel. He was folk songs on his guitar, and collections of sea-shells. He was long walks out to the end of the pier where little boys and old men threw fishing lines out into the waves, and he was the shrill cries of seagulls. I knew what his favorite color was, and he thought I was a "fairy princess." We sat in our shallow sandstone cave and looked out at the ocean. We ate tuna fish sandwiches, and he wrote I LOVE YOU on the brown lunch bag and hid it in a hole in the rocks. Sometime, we said, we'll come back, in fifty years or so, a little wrinkled white haired lady and gentleman, holding hands, to see if it is still there. Our bodies were covered with sand and salt. We laughed and were happy and alone in
the world. I never said "I love you" to anyone else.


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