or else i’m making it all up, which i’m beginning to believe just may be the case.

this evening i stumbled on, well, a time machine.  i know i’ve stumbled on this kind of thing before, but this one, this one...i don’t even remember what i was looking for or what i clicked on to get it but suffice it to say, and suffice is hardly the word, i fell into something embodying my earliest role model--is that right?  yes, i think she was.

30, um, 33 years ago i first went to osfa and that was the trip caused me to run away from the university, where i had been wandering around looking for the ladies room for a year or more, and join what i call the circus.  the next year i was working at osfa myself and then bouncing around awhile and then moved back to l.a. a year after that and that was when i finally completed the break from home and hearth.  it took all that long time, a couple of years anyway.  but what began it was..i know!

i wasn’t consciously looking, but now i remember that last night i was looking at the pitiable local sca site, out of desperation more than anything as i’ve never been interested in the sca, but now i realize that it was while working at the dickens faire and then attending the original ren faire c 1973 or so, both sca affiliated productions, that i signed up for the course in ashland that eventually led me to osfa myself.  in 1974, i guess it was i enrolled in a summer course via ucsb, four weeks in ashland studying renaissance theater.  and it was awful.  truly awful.  in order to escape its awfulness i made sure i attended every possible performance at the shakespeare festival, at least every night, so i wouldn’t have to be around the pretentious cliquey frat house atmosphere that was the dorm.  that was the summer, sitting in the front row of the elizabethan stage, that i saw titus andronicus 23 times.  I also spent a lot of time needlepointing, and making a quilt square for the manadatory communal banner, and my work was seen by some of the visiting artists from the festival itself which, the next year, helped me break in as a hand sewer when i landed fresh off the bus on billy’s doorstep.  but i am ahead of myself.

i spent a lot of time alone that summer in the renaissance, and it was an enchanted summer--of course it was the beginning of my recurring renaissance fixations (it was renaissance philosophy i studied in my 40s.) most of the people i did know were in the company and therefore busy much of the time.  i remember i wrote a lot. and i wrote huge long letters to michael, which he had no idea what to make of.  it was an enchanted summer all around.  but the most influential thing had to have been liz.

liz is an astoundingly striking actor who lived in our dorm as an artist in residence of some sort and hated every minute of it, being treated like a celebrity and picked at all the time.  but she is so charismatic it would have been impossible for it to have been otherwise.  she spoke to us as a class, i remember, although i don’t remember what the class was on.  i still can recall a sketch i did in my notebook of her telling us about seagull.  she became, then and there, the chief influence on my then-forming persona, a true role model for who i was struggling to become. this was long years before art school, before any thought of art school, before jack, even, before the ballet, liz cole.  (she soon changed her name for sag reasons, but she was liz cole when i knew her and so she remains to me; plus she’s less googleable as liz cole.)

so last night i was puttering around sca sites, today i was thinking about model making for the stage, this afternoon i was checking out some ballet sites (gelsey just did carabosse!) and tonight i don’t remember what led me to wherever she is now, but i clicked on something and she came up.  i was intrigued to see if there was anything recent and clicked around some more.

and then i found it.  seattle television, a 90 minute streaming video, 90 minutes of liz cole in 2006 speaking about her life.  90 minutes of liz cole at what, 65?

i am speechless.  speechless.  there she is.  she’s still my role model; i never left, i just forgot.  but i click a few buttons and there she is, live, again, talking to me.  astounding.  i don’t think there’s any further back that i can go, is there?  kurtwood, after all, is there for the world to see, he doesn’t feel like he ever left.  brooks is gone (you knew that, didn’t you, pat?  joe ratto, who didn’t remember me, nonetheless told me some years ago that brooks had been hit by a car, i think i even sent marilyn condolences, but maybe not.) no, liz cole has to be my earliest touchstone and there she is, again again, on my laptop for a full 90 minutes, talking about what happened next.  what happens next.