Welcome to my past.
Welcome to my past.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. SIBLING REVELRY
2. ASAP; AN UNEXPECTED DECEMBER 24TH RETAIL TALE
3. A MOUSIE TALE
4. CRUISING FOR SOCKS, Or, NOT YOUR AVERAGE MUFFY
5. A MAN OF CHARACTER, Or
BILL IRWIN GETS HIS ACT TOGETHER
6. THE GENTLE ARTS OF CARICATURE AND MEMORY
7. FOR THE BIRDS
8. FEELING NO PAIN; GUiNEA PIG FOR AN ALLMAN BROTHER
9. LORE OF THE GORE, Or,
THE QUEST FOR THE DRUID CROWN; A CAUTIONARY TALE
10. HEXENKOPF REVISITED: BLACK-CLAD DEMONS WITH LONG TAILS OFFERING TEA, Or, SO YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN POWER SPOTS?
11. PROGNOSTICATION BY XEROX
12. TIME CAPSULE: JEAN’S SECOND WEDDING, Or, DANCING WITH TOM
13. THE SECRET LIFE OF MAD MAUDLEN
14. INVENTING A HOLIDAY: FOOLIN’ AROUND, FUNKY FRIARS, & A FREE LUNCH
15. IMAGES FROM THE ASHES
16. THINGS FOUND IN OLD ENVELOPES #14: THE GENTLE ART OF REJECTION
17. MY NAME IS CHRISTIAN, AND I WOULD LIKE TO BE YOUR FRIEND
18. AN UNEXPECTED LITERARY IMMERSION
19. WHO THE HELL IS STEVE RATHE?
20. THINGS FOUND IN OLD ENVELOPES #15: AWARDS NIGHT
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, San Francisco, California; early 1970s
SIBLING REVELRY
This engaging photo, from the earliest years of the Dickens Christmas Fair, features me and my younger brother David as eager flower seller and disdainful toff.
David had come to San Francisco on a visit, and since I was spending all of my weekends working at the Fair, I wangled him a job as one of the perimeter guards who politely prevented guests from venturing where they oughtn't.
Alas, his job didn’t last very long (my bro was an outsider and some other guard’s brother, cousin, or buddy needed work) but this delightful portrait of the two of us has nicely weathered the test of time.
2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California; Christmas Eve, Sometime in the mid-2000s
ASAP; AN UNEXPECTED DECEMBER 24TH RETAIL TALE
As I’ve written here before, I worked part-time for many years at my friend Lorraine’s store in Occidental as an out-of-the-house antidote to time spent at the computer.
The business was called Natural Connections, and it served as a kind of multipurpose nerve center for our little village. We sold health and beauty aids; vitamins and supplements; herbal and homeopathic remedies; greeting cards; incense and candles; minerals, crystals and fossils; aromatic and essential oils; and a broad category of objects Lorraine called ”Gifts with Nature in Mind”—animal puppets and figurines; wall hangings; woodcarvings; wildlife posters; nature-themed T-shirts; etc.
In addition, we did gift-wrapping, UPS boxing-and-shipping, and FAXing. We also gave patient explanations of the mysterious workings of the self-serve FedEx box outside, and maintained a photocopy machine—the only one in town—for public use. (As a result of many of these activities, we knew everybody’s secrets, but we never told.)
The holiday season was always a mixed blessing for Lorraine, with increased sales and longer hours vying with her filial duties, which absolutely required that she be in attendance at her family’s Central Valley ranch on Christmas Eve.
And so it came about that one December 24th, on one of our biggest shopping days of the year, I found myself, as usual, in sole charge of the store and of all its operations.
I was doing just fine (though run off my feet most of the day) until about a half-hour before closing time, when the store was empty and most of the other gift-type shops in town had already shut down for the duration.
Just as I had begun to contemplate closing up a little early, a last-minute shopper in an acute stage of holiday anxiety barged in, shortly followed by more of the same. The place gradually began to fill up with slightly stressed people looking for that final gift.
(Earlier that day, a world-renowned musician had come in, stoned to the eyeballs, and would’ve been there still, had it not been for his son, who patiently kept him on task in the process of racking up a large Visa bill.)
And then into the store rushed a frantic woman with seven gifts that she needed to have wrapped and boxed and sent via UPS to five different destinations ASAP.
She was shortly followed by another woman laden with more than a dozen shopping bags, who proceeded to sit down on the floor in the middle of the increasingly crowded store, produce scissors, tape, and rolls of glitzy paper, and start wrapping over a dozen presents, telling me anxiously that they also had to be boxed and shipped UPS, ASAP.
The noise level rose. People were milling about, lining up at the counter, jockeying for position, snapping at each other, wanting their purchases rung up and wrapped, ASAP.
It was shaping up to be the Christmas Eve from Hell (and would recur in my anxiety-based dreams for years).
So I stopped.
I climbed up on the chair we kept behind the counter, and loudly addressed the room in general:
”Excuse me?”
Everybody froze.
"You may have noticed,” I said, “that there are a lot of you and only one of me. Everything will get done, but I ask you to please be patient.”
That’s when a tiny miracle began to happen.
One of the customers said, ”I’ve been working the holiday shift at UPS and I know the shipping requirements. Show me where you keep your boxes and packing peanuts and forms and stuff.” He set to work.
A couple of women sat down on the floor with the Mad GiftWrapper and began to help her wrap, sort, label, clean up the mess she’d made, and pass items along to the UPS expert.
Three people came behind the counter and started a kind of box-wrap-ribbon production line as I rang up purchases and handed them off.
Conversations were started; advice on gift selection handed out; networking happened; people shared their holiday plans and childhood memories. The store filled with happy chatter.
And somehow it all got done: gift-selecting, ringing up. wrapping/ribboning, boxing for shipping, and form-filling-out, all with great good humor and ASAP, and eventually everyone left in a cloud of “Merry Christmas!” and “Happy Holidays!” not even too long after closing time.
As I was catching my breath and adding up receipts, I got a phone call from Lorraine: ”We’re just about to sit down to dinner,” she said, “but I just had to find out how we did today.” I told her the gratifying total; she was delighted.
“Did you have any problems?”, she asked.
I thought for a moment. ”Naah,” I said,” Enjoy your dinner; it was all fine.”
And you know, it really was.
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3. THROWBACK THURSDAY: New Hope, Pennsylvania, mid-1950s; Sebastopol, California, 2020
A MOUSIE TALE
(This story is almost too precious, but it makes me smile.)
One day, in the mid-1950s when I was 10 or 11, my mother and I went on a girls’ road trip together for the first time.
This was a rare occasion—when we traveled, it was usually as a family unit with my dad, sister, and brother—and I was tickled to discover that my mother on her own with me seemed both more relaxed and more inclined be spontaneous.
We headed for the historic town of New Hope, PA, with its beautifully preserved 18th-century buildings and artsy expensive shopping district. We couldn’t really afford to buy anything, even at 1950s prices, but had a lot of fun looking and imagining that we could.
Thus, when I was enchanted by a little life-sized mouse figurine and picked it up, I couldn’t believe the price that was written in pencil on the bottom: only one dollar! My mother was so happy to be able to buy it for me, and it became a prized possession, following me around to various living situations over the years.
In the course of many moves and general wear and tear, my little mouse friend got broken in no less than seven places—a chipped ear, a snapped- off paw, several breaks in his delicate tail—but each time I was able to glue him back together almost invisibly.
When I moved to my current house in Sebastopol, he joined a collection of tiny figures about the same size, now sitting at the feet of a lovely ceramic figure of Kwan Yin, Chinese symbol of compassion.
During the recent holiday season, I was working a volunteer stint at the Home Hospice Thrift Store in Sebastopol, and happened to walk by a table where my friend Michele was pricing bric-a-brac. I noticed that she was intently studying a small object in her hand.
”Look at this!” she said indignantly, ”Somebody just tossed it into a bin of old miscellaneous metal parts headed for the trashcan.”
My jaw dropped. Sitting on her palm was the exact twin of my little brown mouse, except rendered in glossy white with pink eyes. I'd never before, in all my travels, seen such another mouse.
I explained my surprised expression to Michele and told her the story of how I had acquired Mousie Brown.
”Here, take him,” she said, handing me the little white mouse, “He’s obviously meant to be yours.”
I carried Mousie White home and introduced the two little rodents. They didn’t say much, but I think it just might have been love at first sight.
Or at very least, a precious little family reunion.
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4. THROWBAC K THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania (located in the Lehigh Valley); c, 1959
CRUISING FOR SOCKS, Or, NOT YOUR AVERAGE MUFFY
One day, when I was about 15, I was shopping in downtown Easton, casually looking for knee socks in a particular shade of cranberry red.
Not having any luck at the stores I usually frequented, I decided to try my luck at a tony shoppe called “Junior Colony,” which I generally avoided because its prices were high, and because it seemed to me that it catered mostly to preppy girls with names like Muffy and Bitsy.
(My high school was predominantly blue-collar, and at that point I was spending a lot of time cleaning out horse stalls, so, not so preppy.)
As soon as I walked through the door, I realized something unusual was happening. The place was full of primping girls, twittering mothers, and solicitous saleswomen rushing about trailing the latest teen-girl fashions on hangers, while a photographer posed each little fashionista prettily against a makeshift background and snapped away.
Questioning someone on the sidelines, I learned that I‘d walked into the midst of a new in-house manufactured event: a contest to select a ”Miss Valley Teen” on the basis of photographs of contestants modeling—of course—Junior Colony fashions.
I was about to make a strategic retreat when one of the saleswomen spotted me, with my un-primped haircut, lack of makeup, and complete absence of girlishness.
”Oh look!” she cried, “Here’s someone PERFECT for the Knickerbocker Ensemble!” From the slight desperation in her voice I gathered that every Muffy and Bitsy in the room had soundly rejected said outfit on sight. When I said I wasn’t interested, she pointed out that all contestants were receiving a 20% discount on purchases that day.
Having spotted some knee socks in the exact color I’d been looking for, I finally agreed to sign a release and to model the scorned Ensemble, with the results you see below.
I had no illusions that anybody so attired would be selected from the crowd of fashionable and feminine young lasses as Miss Valley Teen, and this turned out to be the case.
But really, I did get a great deal on those socks.
5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Great Dickens Christmas Fair; San Francisco, California; New York City 1971-Present
A MAN OF CHARACTER, Or
BILL IRWIN GETS HIS ACT TOGETHER
Portrait of an unorthodox Pierrot.
On the opening day of the 1971 Dickens Christmas Fair, I encountered Bill Irwin sitting disconsolately in a backstage corner. "Hey Bill,” I said, "what’s the matter?"
“Oh,” he replied glumly ”the fire marshals just shut down my act.” He had been performing, clad in a skimpy vest and red-and-gold striped harem pants, as a fire-eater, calling himself “Carno, the Magnificent Salamander,” (Being cold-blooded and clammy. Salamanders were, even as late as Victorian times, thought to be impervious to fire.)
Apparently, safety regulations for the fair venue, a repurposed warehouse on Fisherman’s Wharf, prohibited the flourishing about of, let alone ingesting of, open flames.
“So what will you do now?” I inquired.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’ll think of something.”
Although I had every confidence in Bill’s ingenuity, the next day I nevertheless found myself wincing in dismay as, still in his skimpy vest/ harem-pants ensemble, Bill lay braced between two chairs while a burly assistant used a sledgehammer to demolish slabs of concrete placed on his (admittedly impressive but—OMG—bare!) abs.
So, afterwards, I ran across Bill again, in another backstage corner, gingerly dabbing alcohol onto a nasty scrape running down his rib cage.
“Bill, honey,” I said (at that point, just out of his teens, he was still so boyish and fresh-faced that you couldn’t help but mother him a little),”You have got to get yourself a new act!”
The next time I saw him, he’d morphed completely, into a black-clad, frock-coated, buttoned-up and straight-laced street-corner preacher whose spontaneous homilies were as hilariously surreal as they were poker-faced. This was just one early example of Bill Irwin’s astonishing capacity for reinventing himself.
He would proceed to do this over and over again, his pale, mobile, regular features (which he sometimes describes as ”Sunny Jim, The Boy Next Door”) serving as a kind of blank canvas for all the expressions of his agile mind’s creations and activities.
Raised in a family of theater enthusiasts, Bill Irwin graduated from Oberlin College In the mid-1970s, became a star student at the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus’s Clown College, and created an awesome Everyclown named Willie, in which persona he would go on to co-found and -star in the Pickle Family Circus from 1975 to 1979, bringing live performances and teaching circus arts in schools throughout San Francisco’s Bay Area.
To the noble designation of Clown (and salamander), he’s since added a few more titles: mime; acrobat; juggler; dancer; singer; stage, film, and voiceover actor; vaudevillian; puppeteer; scriptwriter; playwright; director; and inspiration to a whole new young generation of clowns and fools.
of Bill Irwin’s talent is to look at a (partial) list of his co-stars and co-conspirators: Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Paul Mazursky; Liza Minelli, Bobby McFerrin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Whoopi Goldberg; Bill Cosby; Sam Shepard, Angela Lansbury, M, Night Shyamalan; F. Murray Abraham; im Carrey, Sally Field, Jonathan Pryce, Rick Moranis, Charlie Sheen, Kathleen Turner, Anne Hathaway Sandy Duncan, Kermit the Frog; Woody Allen, Bette Midler, and, oh yes, the Cadets Drum And Bugle Corps (of which more later).
Bill's range seems endless: he’s appeared in numerous episodes of Sesame Street and as a recurring character called “Mr. Noodles” in its spinoff, Elmo's World. He’s played a serial killer in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; showed up as a mythical pilot in Northern Exposure; held a recurring role as a therapist on Law and Order; Special Victims Unit; tap-danced his way through a movie called Stepping Out with Liza Minneli; appeared as “Pickles”(a dog from the home planet) in Third Rock From the Sun; and portrayed a brooding loner in M, Night Shyamalan’s film Lady in the Water.
He's played baseball player Eddie Cochran in the movie Eight Men Out; opening-monologued the Tony Awards; voiced the robot TARS on Interstellar (and acted as puppeteer for its non-CGI scenes). He’s done Shakespeare (King Lear, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream); Brecht (A Man's a Man); Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Texts for Nothing); Moliere (Scapin) and Dr. Seuss (How the Grinch Stole Christmas).
His television career (which includes two PBS Great Performances specials: The Regard of Flight and Bill Irwin; Clown Prince), began in 1979; by 1980 he was appearing on Saturday Night Live. His small-screen career is still going strong, with guest appearances on a multitude of newer shows, including a role on Star Trek; Discovery in 2020 as a character named Su’kal.
His film career kicked off about the same time, with his appearance in Robert Altman’s Popeye with Robin Williams, and he now has more than 20 films to his credit, mostly—no surprise—in character parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxc-Wo4be9o (Stairs)
Onstage (his first love), Bill’s original works and one-man shows have been enlivening Broadway stages and winning awards since 1984, with occasional forays into OffBroadwayland, where he won an Obie (in 1992 for Texts for Nothing , and shared the stage with Robin Williams and Steve Martin in a Lincoln Center-sponsored production of Waiting for Godot.
He’s stepped out on the legitimate musical stage in the 2009 Broadway revival of Bye-Bye Birdie; joined the San Francisco Opera for a featured role in Showboat; and created chaos in the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as the hapless drum major of the aforementioned drum and bugle corps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCbzpYuvnE (Olympics Chaos)
With all these offbeat shenanigans, it’s fairly amusing that Bill’s second Tony Award (for Best Actor in a Play) was earned in a relatively straight dramatic role, in the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In fact, the “Awards & Honors” section of his Wikipedia page could almost serve as a roadmap of his theatrical career:
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“Irwin was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship in 1981 and 1983. In 1984, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow and was the first performance artist to be awarded a five-year MacArthur Genius Fellowship.
For Largely New York, he won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Special Citation in 1988, and an Outer Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk Award in 1989. This show also received five nominations for Tony Awards.
In 1992, he won an Obie Award for his performance in Texts for Nothing. Together with David Shiner, he won a special Tony Award for Live Theatrical Presentation in 1999 for their show Fool Moon. In 1993, this show had already won a Drama Desk Award for "Unique Theatrical Experience" and an Outer Critics Circle "Special Achievement" Award.
In 2000, the Jazz Tap Ensemble in Los Angeles received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) "for a commission of a new work by Bill Irwin." In 2004, the Signature Theatre Company, New York, received a $40,000 NEA grant for "the world premiere production of Mr Fox: a Rumination, by Bill Irwin”
In 2005, he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his appearance as George in the revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.[
Irwin received a 2008 CFCA Award nomination for "Best Supporting Actor" for his role in the film Rachel Getting Married.
In 2010, The New Victory Theater presented Irwin with the first-ever New Victory Arts Award. His 2007 theater piece, The Happiness Lectures, was commissioned by, and staged for, the Philadelphia Theater Company.
In 2013, his Old Hats won a Drama Desk Award as “Outstanding Review.”
In 2010, he was honored by The New 42nd Street, Inc. for "bringing the arts to kids and kids to the arts." Nathan Lane and Jonathan Demme spoke at the ceremony. Irwin is also on the board of the organization.”
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From interviews and conversations, it’s often difficult to believe that this pleasant and quietly unassuming fellow contains such a multitude of characters and talents. It’s almost as if he’s created so many alter egos that he feels no particular need to inflate his own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkBb4FWHxhI (Brief Lecture on the Art of Clowning)
And at nearly age 70, he’s still bright and agile, putting together Zoomcasts and technodramas in the age of Covid, still teaching his craft to upcoming generations; and still actively exploring the possibilities of performance.
And I’ll just say this: when you tell Bill Irwin that he needs to get a new act, stand back, because he jolly well doesn’t fool around.
(Or if he does, it’s pure genius.)
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6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: 1939 World’s Fair; flushing Meadows, Borough of Queens, New York
THE GENTLE ARTS OF CARICATURE AND MEMORY
From 1937, when they got married, until 1941, when my older sister Sue came along, my parents loved spontaneously taking to the road and exploring interesting places.
They didn’t have a lot of spare cash for hotels and restaurants—it was, after all, the post-Depression era—so their adventures usually took the form of inexpensive day trips.
One such excursion was a train trip via the Lehigh Valley Railroad to the 1939 World’s Fair.
From Wikipedia: ”The 1939–40 New York World's Fair was held at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York, United States. It was the second-most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day," and it allowed all visitors to take a look at ‘the World of Tomorrow.’" (The site was recycled for the 1964-65 World's Fair.)
As they strolled about, my dad’s attention was drawn to a fellow turning out caricatures for fairgoers who posed and clowned for him. Dad had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but felt he lacked the necessary skills and flair. Fascinated, he shelled out for drawings of the two of them.
The 1939 World’s Fair pretty much fell apart when World War II broke out (so much for world peace and amity between nations), but these drawings, preserved by sister Sue, remain to provide a sweet memory of two happy young (and child-free) gadabouts and their day at the fair.
(Shortly after my dad retired in 1975, they took off for Greece, and henceforth went venturing in the US and abroad for at least part of each year until they were well into their 80s.)
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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Santa Rosa, California, c. 2010
FOR THE BIRDS
As I’ve written here before, my friend Lorraine McKenzie and I worked together in her store, Natural Connections, in the little town of Occidental from 1994 to 2009, with barely a harsh word between us.
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| With Lorraine |
We accomplished this feat in part by humoring each other’s enthusiasms. For instance, Lorraine was an avid birder, and I was not, but I could always enjoy listening to her avian-related comments and anecdotes and finding questions for her to answer.
If I encountered a bird I’d never seen before near my woodsy cabin, I knew that I could always describe it to Lorraine, and she would whip her Audubon Guide out from under the counter, and pretty much unfailingly turn the page to the feathered friend in question.
Her knowledge definitely came in handy at times, as, for instance, on the memorable day that a full-grown Cooper’s Hawk, obviously having lost control of its GPS, came blasting through the front door of the store, and smacked into the large mirror on our back wall.
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| Cooper's Hawk |
On other occasions, hummingbirds, attracted by the bright colors in our deep store window, would occasionally zoom in and get trapped there. No problem; Lorraine had mastered the knack of coaxing them to sit on her finger and allow themselves to be carried outside.
One day, she asked if I would go to Santa Rosa with her. “What for?” I asked. “It’s a surprise,” she said, “Bring your camera.”
We drove through the busy streets of the city until we got to Ninth St., where Lorraine turned in and parked. It appeared to be a typical well-traveled residential block, with the difference that a long park-like strip of very large trees ran between the rows of houses.
As we got out of the car, I noticed that there were some orange cones and barriers lining the edges of the strip. Still wondering what we were doing there, I asked, “So, what’s the surprise?”
“Look up,” she said.
Once I got over my astonishment, I put my camera to work, photographing these birds remarkably going about their natural lives in the heart of a busy city. It was a foggy day, and the lacy foliage of budding trees gives a Japanese-print quality to some of these shots. (One I included here as a game of how-many-can-you-see.)
8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, c. 1971
FEELING NO PAIN; GUiNEA PIG FOR AN ALLMAN BROTHER
The blurred abstract rose below is a Lyle Tuttle tattoo that I wear on a highly sensitive part of my anatomy (the back of my right knee).
My acupuncturist Ed, who knows from needles, recently spotted it for the first time when he was treating a nearby point. “Ouch!” he said, “That must’ve hurt like hell!” “Well, actually, no,” I replied, and told him the story behind it.
In the early 1970s, a Lyle Tuttle tattoo had become an “in” fashion accessory for certain circles of the hip, young, and kind of famous. By the time of which I write, he’d needled celebrities from Joan Baez to Janis Joplin, Cher to Jo Baker to Peter Fonda, not to mention members of Kiss, the Grateful Dead, and the Allman Brothers Band.
As Cher was currently dating Gregg Allman, it was she who introduced him to Lyle, and to the mysteries of tattooing. Gregg promptly became slightly addicted to the needle, and the members of the band began to follow suit, with variations on a mushroom-tattoo theme becoming kind of a badge of band solidarity. Soon fans of the group were also coming to Lyle for reproductions of their fave band’s tats.
It turned out that said dentist had been experimenting with a new and powerful liquid anesthetic that numbed on contact, and was convinced by the band member to part with a small vial of it, with the suggestion that it could be mixed with tattoo ink.
The musician brought the vial to Lyle, made an appointment for the next day, and intimated hesitantly that it might be good if it was tried out on someone else first.
Enter moi, later that same day, having decided that I’d like a nice little rose tattoo on the back of my knee.
“Say,” said Lyle, after explaining the situation, “How’d you like to be my guinea pig?"
After the first tiny sting of the needle, the whole area behind my knee went pleasantly numb, and Lyle might as well have been drawing the rose with a Sharpie for all that I felt it.
No side effects and one free tattoo later, I was a happy guinea pig, and the sensitive Allman Brother eventually got to strut his new tat, with his bandmates none the wiser.
Later on, I asked Lyle if he planned to get a supply of the anesthetic and offer it to customers as an alternative. “Are you kidding?” he replied, “Most people need the sting; it’s part of the ritual.”
While Lyle was more good ol’ boy than new-age hippie, in his own way he was a powerful shaman. Back then. tattoos were serious statements. They were emblems of unity; religious and spiritual affirmations; ritual markings; protective images, images of fidelity, loyalty, and defiance. Lyle used to say they were like the stickers and decals that used to be put on luggage in the old days of travel, to show where you’d been.
He often referred to tattooing as “Mother Art” or “the second oldest profession,” and once told me this: “When someone comes in and wants a tattoo that I can tell is very important to them, as soon as I pick up my needle, I feel a thousand previous generations of tattooists click into place right behind me, all the way back to the Stone Age.”
Lyle Tuttle, philosopher, artist, and mystic. The world is literally a less colorful place without him.
LORE OF THE GORE, Or,
THE QUEST FOR THE DRUID CROWN; A CAUTIONARY TALE
This strange story rightfully begins in the early 18th Century, when the Colony of New Hampshire was parceled out into counties and townships. In this process, odd triangular snippets of land were occasionally left over, and, because of their spear-like shape, became known as “gores” (after “gar,” the word for “spear” in Old English).
In the mid-1700s, one such parcel, which included the spillway of a good-sized lake, became the property of an enterprising fellow named John Campbell, and became known as “Campbell’s Gore.”
Campbell founded a settlement he called Windsor, based around the operation of several water-driven mills for processing lumber from pine logs cut from the surrounding virgin forest and floated down the lake, with the remnants thriftily lathe-turned into clothespins.
Incorporated as a town in 1798, Windsor once had two hotels, two stores, a church, and two schools, but by 1885, a townsman wrote: “We now have no church, no minister, no lawyer, no trouble, no doctor, no hotel, no drunkards, no post-office, no store, no voice in legislation, no paupers, and no prospect of having any. Taxes are very light, being this year a little above the average, but still bring only $6.30 on one thousand dollars. There has never been a settled minister, a post-office or public library in town.”
The reason for Windsor’s decline was quite probably the “Great New England Sheep Rush,” which began about 1810, as embargoes on English wool and the import and breeding of fine-wooled Merino sheep resulted in the denuding of about three-quarters of the state’s forestland to create pastures for the valuable ungulates.
By the late 1980s, and the time of which I write, however, the Town of Windsor had essentially melted away into nothing, and the majority of the surrounding land had reverted to second-growth forests, with the stone walls of former pastures snaking oddly through them.
The woods were punctuated by stone-lined cellar-holes, the remains of homes summarily abandoned after 1840 when the bottom fell out the American wool market (and presumably the clothespin market), and the majority of former sheep ranchers, presumably having had their fill of New Hampshire’s rocky soil and hard winters, packed up and headed west toward better opportunities.
The land of Campbell’s Gore was, however, entirely suited to the foundation of summer camps, of which, by the 1960s, it had accumulated three, of which one was The Interlocken International Summer Camp.
From the first, the ISC was known for the maturity and diversity of its staff, who tended to be working professionals—teachers, coaches, artists, craftspeople, actors, musicians, and just plain interesting adults rather than just college kids.
Also from its beginnings, the camp manifested a large amount of what Interlocken co-founder Richard Herman called “the crazy quotient”—a mindset that embraced the unusual, individual, and fantastical as part of and in the midst of a solid curriculum of experiential learning.
One summer in the 1980s, a group of energetic and whimsical staff members learned the history of the area and began spinning tales to the campers about this mysterious land of Campbell’s Gore, which soon acquired its own legend (the Lore of the Gore), presiding spirit (the “Well Being”), and eventually even its own language and script (Gorish).
The last two were the work of Richard Herman’s nephew, Peter Jackson Herman (now a prominent Boston architect), who was one of several prime movers of this mythology, as was New Hampshire State Storyteller John “Odds” Bodkin.
Of the following summer, Richard Herman recalls:
“With Odds here for the summer, we wanted to come up with a story or an idea that would plant seeds at the beginning of the season that could grow into something the kids could relate to and carry forward all summer.
“We came up with an adventure that was irresistible to anyone’s imagination, and which involved preparation and intellectual challenge and physical activity, and built up momentum on its own which didn’t have to be artificially primed or fed. There was a certain amount of archaeology, a certain amount of history, and a lot of ingenuity and learning involved.”
The amount of preparation for this ongoing event during staff orientation was somewhat astounding. Peter Herman, who had become somewhat of a pied piper to brilliant future tech-heads, was detailed to offer a class called “Windsor Archaeology” during the first week of camp, with the supposed goal of investigating the many abandoned cellar-holes in the woods near the camp. He and other staff members plotted out the tale, and scoured nearby antique and junk shops for likely materials.
Odds Bodkin relates how it all unfolded:
“I remember an amazing and wonderful group of staff people from all over the world sitting in the meeting house and talking for hours, coming up with ideas that would just add to the whole adventure that summer.
“We put together the most extraordinary map and aged it with coffee and smoke, then tore it into pieces and hid them in the woods and caves all around Windsor. To go with them, we concocted a story about a pirate captain and his crew landing on the New Hampshire coast and sailing up an underground river to what was then Campbell’s Gore, and is now the Township of Windsor.
“Amie 'penmanshipped' the account into an old book with burned edges [note: this, and rendering the story into diary form were my sole contributions], as if the tale had been written down there by a surviving crew member.
“One day Peter Herman and his Windsor Archaeology class had stopped in for refreshments at Williams’ store down the road, and Bill, the owner, pretended that he’d found the book somewhere in the back of the shop, and nonchalantly plopped it down on the counter in front of them, saying they might find it interesting. The kids took it and began to discover a story, a diary written in the margins in what appeared to be antique script.
“The actual treasure was a crown, the “Oak King’s Crown,” that [stonemason and metalsmith] Peter Jordan made out of raw iron and a great blood-red stone, and we put it in a wooden chest that had been beaten and burned and aged, and dropped into the bottom of an 18th-century well near the [older campers’] Tent Unit before the kids arrived.
“And once it had been placed, we began to lay down the trail of clues. My wife Mil and I climbed up into the skunk caves on Windsor Mountain and chiseled Druids’ marks way in the back, and cut more of them on stones in the middle of Bagley Pond, and buried all kinds of containers —old rusty tin boxes, old-fashioned bottles, a monocular brass telescope—with pieces of the map inside. along with odd bits like antique spectacles and buckles.
“The map slowly came together over the summer as the kids found and deciphered the clues, many of which were written in Celtic Runes or an antiquated English, or Old French.
“They had to use all of their scholarship and research capabilities to figure these things out, which they did with remarkable speed. There was a cadre of kids who got totally involved and it became the focal point of their summer.”
But toward the end of the summer, all this willing suspension of disbelief unexpectedly became somewhat of a problem. Peter Herman recalls:
“I remember the quest for the crown as a magical time of running through the backwoods of Windsor with a bunch of kids. I was completely aware of the fact that we were chasing a fictitious history, but as it evolved, I became more and more convinced that I was actually uncovering something real—the playing became so vivid.
“A lot of the kids got diverted to other activities, or were only peripherally involved, but I had a crew who were completely taken by the whole endeavor. And the deeper we got into the apparent realism of the Quest, the more difficult it became for me to reveal to them that it wasn’t true.
“We got to the end of the summer, and found the crown, but it wasn’t until that point that the kids learned that they weren’t finding real artifacts. They were SO excited and wanted to call the Boston Museum about this wonderful archaeological find, so we had to bring them back down to earth.
“This is where experiential learning became a dicey matter. Some of the kids were fine with it, but some felt betrayed and manipulated, and lied to, and embarrassed that they been taken in by the whole thing.”
Odds Bodkin: “I suppose if we had said: “This isn’t really real,” and told them that they were playing a kind of on-the-ground Dungeons & Dragons game, they might have participated, but I don’t know whether it would’ve resulted in such excitement, or in such things as the underground newspaper that the two-month kids created for the July kids who had gone home, to keep them informed about the progress of the search.
“The year afterwards we did a Riddle Festival, kind of another treasure hunt, but as nifty an intellectual conceit as it was, it wasn’t nearly as effective as the Quest for the Crown. It just didn’t have the grip.”
So was the Quest for the Druid Crown a brilliant experiential- education technique or a slightly embarrassing misstep?
You know, over a quarter of a century later, we still haven’t figured that out.
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10. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, Pre-Cambrian Era-Present
HEXENKOPF REVISITED: BLACK-CLAD DEMONS WITH LONG TAILS OFFERING TEA, Or,
SO YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN POWER SPOTS?
About two years ago, I wrote a Throwback Thursday essay entitled "Everyone Should Grow Up Near a Haunted Mountain," concerning our family's annual fall pilgrimage to Hexenkopf, a geographical feature located about two miles and a crow-spit from our house in rural Williams Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania.
Although as little kids we thought of it as a mountain, Hexenkkopf is most properly labeled a “crag,” or, if you’re feeling generous, a “hill.” It's really just a raw chunk of crazed pre-Cambrian gneiss thrust out of the earth by some long-ago geological hiccup.
Although its bowl-like summit is actually 646 feet above sea level, Hexenkopf is strangely located, a pimple on top of an elevation inside a circular depression created by other, higher hills of no particular distinction, lurking in the ass-end of a minor Appalachian prong.
Its name, German for “Witch Head,” was almost surely derived from the jagged face-like profile that juts from one side of it. Given its modest size (if you reduced the entire thing to gravel, it wouldn’t take all that many dump-truck loads to cart it away) and its remote location (out in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, surrounded by woodland and half a mile from the nearest country road) Hexenkopf should rightfully be out of sight, out of mind, and beneath notice.
There are no trails leading to it, no signs pointing it out. You can’t see it from the road. You can’t see it from anywhere until you’re nearly on top of it. It’s that obscure.
So why, in the 18th Century, and probably long before that, did the Lenape Indians consider it sacred, using it both as a burial ground (supposedly in caves hidden beneath it) and in medicine ceremonies, as a focus for the transference of sickness or evil?
And why did it become so important to German immigrants from the Harz Mountains who practiced the quasi-mystical quasi-medical white-magic practice now known as “Pow-Wow” that they skirmished with the Lenape over the right to use it for ceremonial purposes? (They eventually learned to share.)
Pow-Wow (its German name is “Braucherei”), is still practiced today, a heady combination of herbalism, laying on of hands, hypnotism, psychology, and the power of suggestion. Its Bible is a text called The Long Lost Friend, compiled of elements gleaned from the Hebrew Kabbalah, Egyptian hieroglyphics, German mysticism, and both Druid and Gypsy magical practices.
This pastiche was assembled in 1820 by the Rev. Johan Georg Hohman, and, incredibly, has not been out of print for 200 years. These days, you can even order it on Amazon. (I am not making this up; Google it.)
The Pow-Wow doctors assimilated the Lenape practice of trapping evil or illness in the rock itself or using it as a kind of lightning rod to direct the bad stuff harmlessly into the ground beneath it. At this time, the now-forested land around the crag was more open, and it must’ve been a significant landmark, what with its witchy head and its tendency to glow in the light of full moons (high mica content).
Without much effort, you can find several hundred years’ worth of spooky stories about Hexenkopf, ranging from vague sightings of odd lights and strange shapes on its hollowed-out cauldron-like summit (especially on Wiccan or Pagan holidays such as Walpurgisnacht/Beltain, Lughnasa, and of course, Samhain/Halloween)—to actual recorded court cases involving witchcraft.
My very favorite of these cases involved a divorce suit brought in the 1920s by a Williams Township man who, unable to sleep one full-moon night, saw his wife leave their bed, smear her face with a “magical ointment,” hop on her broom, and fly out the window.
He followed suit (ointment, broom, etc.) And flew after her to Hexenkopf, which, he said was full of dancing witches and “black-clad demons with long tails offering tea.” He drank the tea, suffered dreadful visions, fell down unconscious, and woke up the next morning in his neighbor’s pigpen. Divorce granted.
(It’s notable that, although such court cases weren't that uncommon in Williams Township, there are no records of witches being burned, hanged, stoned, or otherwise maltreated. After all, many township residents depended on Pow-Wow doctors for their medical needs.)
Aside from our family excursions, I was only vaguely aware of all this while growing up, though I do remember when the barely surfaced lane running past the woods was renamed Hexenkopf Road. I have no idea who owned the property back then, but in 1967 it was bought by noted chemist Ned D. Heindel and his wife Linda, both professors at Lehigh University. They purchased the land, however, without a clue that they were about to become proprietors of a centuries-old power spot and locus for pilgrimage.
It was only when polite collections of folks in odd attire began to show up at their door on certain nights of the year, requesting permission to use the rock for ceremonies, that they became aware of its strange history. (Their reaction? ...uh...OK; just clean up after yourselves.")
The Heindels became experts on the subject, and in 2002, Ned authored a book called Hexenkopf: History, Healing and Hexerei. (He also gives, dressed as a 19th-century "Braucher," presentations on Williams Township witchcraft history to various organizations.) https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/.../witchcraft_in...
There have since emerged a number of short documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly treatises, travelers’ tips, isn’t-this-weird videos, and other on-page and online manifestations concerning this homely chunk of granite.
Hexenkopf has its own Wikipedia page, is the subject of a number of recurring Facebook conversations, and is now laced liberally through social media and YouTube.
And, in October of 2020, when the Heindels donated the land around it to form part of the 128-acre Hexenkopf Ridge Nature Preserve, Hexenkopf acquired, not just a road named after it, not just a book and social-media presence, not just centuries of legends, but its very own chunk of real estate.
So you don’t believe in power spots?
Can you say Hexenkopf?
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12. THROWBaCK THURSDAY: Somewhere on the East Coast; Sometime in the Late 1970s
TIME CAPSULE: JEAN’S SECOND WEDDING, Or, DANCING WITH TOM
Of all of my mother’s eight sisters, my Aunt Jean, who came along somewhere in the middle of the bevy, was perhaps the liveliest and most adventurous. Graduating from high school during WWII, she upped and joined the Marines.
For her two-year stint, she was stationed in Arlington, Virginia. I once asked her what she did there, and she said: “I helped throw a lot of parties.” (Whether this was in an official capacity, I’m not sure.)
She also told me: “The Army had the the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) and the Navy had the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), but we didn’t have an acronym, so the guys called us the BAMS.”
“What did that stand for?” I asked.
“Broad-Assed Marines,” she said, matter-of-factly.
During her stretch as a BAM, she met a lively and resourceful Cape Cod native named Stuart “Wick” Wixon. They were married not long after, and moved to a Cape Cod town called Dennisport.
After that, I didn’t see as much of Jean as I did the other aunts, but she and Wick were amazingly open to having her sisters and their families descend on them in shifts each summer—I recall glorious days of jumping waves and playing in the sand with my cousins Scott, Jan, and Kathy Wixon.
Sadly, Wick passed on in 1973; some years later, Jean re-married. I was mostly living in California at that time, but happened to be visiting my parents at the time of their wedding. The groom was a shy-seeming and reserved gentleman named Tom Fleming, and, not knowing him well, I thought that he seemed an unlikely mate for my outgoing aunt.
“Do they have anything in common?” I asked my mother. “Well,” she said, “They both like to go out dancing.” Oh, I thought, OK.
My next visit to my parents happened to coincide with another family wedding. At the reception, an old-fashioned orchestra played ballroom tunes, and Tom Fleming politely asked me to dance.
Well, Tom on the dance floor was a man transformed: light on his feet, assured, and perfectly attuned to the music, he led beautifully—not a bit pushy, flirty, or show-offy. One circuit of the floor, and I was half in love with him myself.
When this group photo showed up on Facebook last year, It was a lovely reminder of how well we all got along, how happy we were for Jean, and how a good dance partner is jolly well worth holding onto.
13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, California, 1970s
THE SECRET LIFE OF MAD MAUDLEN
Of the many people who caught a glimpse of Mad Maudlen wandering through the Faires of the 1970s, how many wondered how she spent the rest of the year?
14, THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California; Late 1970s
INVENTING A HOLIDAY: FOOLIN’ AROUND, FUNKY FRIARS, and a FREE LUNCH
One March 31st in the late 1970s, I received a phone call from my friend and fellow Renaissance Pleasure Faire performer, Drew Letchworth, actor and clown of no mean talents.
“Hey,” said Drew (who often appeared with a zany Commedia Dell' Arte Troop called “La Famiglia Bologna”), “A bunch of the Bolognas are gonna do a thing down in the Financial District tomorrow; wanna come along?"
Always game for a romp in those days, on April 1st I donned colorful gypsy-like attire and met up with Drew, clad as Pulcinella, the rascally fool he portrayed at Faires.
Long inured to being gawked at by civilians, we took public transit downtown, where we met up with half a dozen or so Bologna boys costumed as raggedy monks (aka “Bishop Joey and the Deep-Fat Friars”).* This was, we were informed by prime instigator Ed Holmes, the very first event celebrating “St. Stupid’s Day.”
(*For younger readers: Joey Bishop was a fabled 1950s-60s comic and talk-show host, and a founding member of Hollywood’s notorious “Rat Pack.” The Friars' Club was and is a New York City-based association of comedians, comics, and actors, famed for its roasts of prominent showbiz figures. To pile pun upon pun, “Joey” was also a time-honored circus synonym for clown, the name derived from the brilliant 19th-century comic actor Joseph Grimaldi.)
After Drew and I were duly inducted into membership in the “First Church of the Last Laugh,” we were instructed in the Gregorian-style “Fat Chants” (say it aloud), the only one of which I remember was:
“That’s the way Saint Stupid would have wanted it…had he thought about it.”
I don’t remember many of the details of that day—it was mostly a dozen or so costumed nutballs larking about the financial District, startling and teasing its denizens and—oh yes—pelting the portico of the stock exchange with handfuls of pennies.
I was also in on the next year’s St, Stupid celebration, my favorite. Word had gotten around, and perhaps 100 communicants showed up, as instructed by posters and flyers, at the vast and sterile Bank of America Plaza. The invitations had not only promised a” free lunch,” but had instructed all would-be participants to bring a small wind-up or battery-powered toy.
The sight of an unsuspecting and hapless crowd of bankers, bean-counters, secretaries, etc. emerging from the B of A building for their lunch hour, only to be confronted with a foot-tangling array of chattering, quacking, wind-up toys and a crowd of wildly dressed hooting ragamuffins is one I’ll never forget. (Most of the suits were good sports.)
As for the free-lunch aspect of the proceedings, whoever showed up asking about it was met with an ever-increasing chorus of (all together now):
“There is no such thing as a free lunch!”
The next St. Stupid’s Day happened to fall on a Saturday; instead of a mere hundred participants, celebrants showed up in such numbers that the entire event was spontaneously converted into a giant parade of costumed crazies and gawking spectators all the way to North Beach’s Washington Square Park.
By the next April, I’d moved to Sonoma County (where I was also present for the very first Occidental Foolsday parade in the mid-2000s). Meanwhile, back in the City, St. Stupid and friends had by this time achieved a near-unstoppable momentum.
According to Ed Holmes, still Bishop Joey, still large and in charge of the event, were it not for the Covid epidemic, the 2020 and 2021 parades would have been the 42nd and 43rd celebrations of the good saint.
And although my presence as a founding participant of this august event has gone largely unrecorded, I guess that’s the way I would’ve wanted it.
… had I thought about it.
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PS: And the Bolognas?
From Wikipedia:
Fratelli Bologna is a business theater company based in San Francisco.
The group brings their theater skills to the business world through engaging trade show presentations, creativity training, improv training, meeting facilitation and theatrical interventions during conferences. Fratelli Bologna combines scripted material, original music, improvisation, and dramatic visual imagery to convey complex messages to a wide range of audiences including the leaders of major corporations in the United States and Europe. Clients include Dow Corning Corporation, Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent), CHRISTUS Health.,[1] Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation, Round Table Pizza, and Disneyland.[2] They won the Drama-Logue Award for best ensemble in 1987.
From 1998 – 2002, Fratelli Bologna was the theater in residence for San Francisco’s Idea Factory founded by John Kao, author of "Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back." The group was fundamental in the founding of BATS Improv[6] and its approach is based on the work of Keith Johnstone, author of "Improv" and "Improv for Storytellers."
History
In 1979 a group of ten men and women performed the Italian masked comedies of the Commedia dell'Arte on the main stage of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, California.[3] Called La Famiglia Bologna (the Bologna Family), they performed together for two years.
Richard Dupell[4] founded Fratelli Bologna (originally i Fratelli Bologna) in 1981 with four other actors from the original troupe: John X. Heart, Christopher Beale, Jack Tate and William Hall. Fratelli Bologna, with two additional members of La Famiglia Bologna, Ed Holmes and Drew Letchworth, was cast as the wacky Press Corps in Philip Kaufman's movie The Right Stuff[5]
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15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Peterkin Hill, South Woodstock, Vermont; April 1995-present
IMAGES FROM THE ASHES
On April 24, 1995, one day before my brother’s 45th birthday, hIs newly restored 18th-19th-century farmhouse burned to the ground.
David was away at work, and his wife Susan and their toddler Morgan got out in plenty of time, but in less than two hours, under the influence of a strong wind, their home and all of its contents were reduced to a pancake of smoldering ruins.
Since David, before his retirement, was by trade a designer and builder of custom houses, and Susan a brilliant interior decorator/designer, once all the insurance and financial issues were wrangled out, they set about building a new home.
Larger, full of conveniences, and better sited, it would serve for years not only as a demonstration of their skills but as an office for their company, David Anderson Hill, Inc. It also included a retirement plan, with the attached barn being converted several years ago into The Loft, a luxurious country B&B.
Recently, with some time on his hands, David began looking through a small collection of photographic slides that had somehow miraculously escaped the conflagration. He emailed me four images, two of them quite amazingly colored.
“It’s a new PhotoShop app,” he wrote, “I call it ‘House Fire.’”
16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1962
THINGS FOUND IN OLD ENVELOPES #14: THE GENTLE ART OF REJECTION
In the course of my long writing career, I’ve only received one letter of rejection, and it was a pleasure. Here’s how it came about.
My dad always wanted us kids to do well, and when I started showing a talent for stringing words together, he encouraged it enthusiastically.
Around the time that I graduated from high school (the yearbook photo below is from the 1962 edition of Les Memoirs—at our school, often pronounced as “Less Ma-MOOR-ees”), Dad started hinting (and he was a champion hinter) that I might want to start looking beyond yearbook and school-newspaper writing, and try to get published in—wait for it—the Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic was merely the pre-eminent literary/cultural-commentary magazine of the time, but Dad seemed to think that this was an entirely reasonable proposition. Eventually I gave in, and submitted an article, the topic and substance of which I’ve entirely (and appropriately) forgotten.
1
Whoever wrote it was a class act, and I keep it now as a reminder of a time when the publishing business was a human and personal matter. When I received this note back in 1962, I remember saying to myself: “That'’s who I want to be.”
17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bad Godesberg, Bonn, and Berlin, Germany; San Francisco and Sonoma County. California; 1961-2015
MY NAME IS CHRISTIAN, AND I WOULD LIKE TO BE YOUR FRIEND
Soon after I arrived in Germany as an exchange student in the fall of 1961, I was spotted in a dance class at school by the boys’ gymnastics coach. He asked if I’d be willing to perform as a kind of terpsichorean centerpiece in a Busby Berkeley-like boys’ gymnastics routine for an upcoming Parents’ Day exhibition. (Yep, just me and 40 sweaty guys in tiny shorts; it went off quite well.)
During rehearsals, I’d noticed one of the smallest boys, a dark-haired, dark-eyed sprite who threw himself into the routine with enthusiasm and skill. A few days later, as I left the school after a chorus rehearsal, I noticed this same lad sitting on the steps outside of the school entrance. He leapt to his feet and came bouncing up to me.
“My name is Christian,” he announced, smiling irresistibly, “and I would like to be your friend.”
Although he was just 12 years old, and I was a lofty almost-16 (he barely came up to my chin), there was no question from that moment that he and I were soulmates.
He invited me to tea with his mother, a sweetly placid older woman who obviously doted on her late-life only child. We went for long walks, toured castles and ruins, talking about anything and everything—he was a brilliant kid with many interests—alternating German and English, so we both could practice. (He’d gone to grammar school in England, so, no contest.)
When I left Germany to return to the US, it was with a promise on my part that I would always answer his letters, which came thick and fast. Through our pre-Internet correspondence, we got Christian through high school, final exams, and a number of adolescent crises.
The most epistolary of these occurred when he realized that he was gay (and I still have his longest letter on the subject, which ran 52 pages). Once he accepted the fact of his sexuality, he adopted what was to be his lifelong attitude: don’t flaunt, but also don’t hide.
He studied at the Universities of Bonn and Munich, emerging with an honors degree in economics. He studied ballet. There were several boyfriends, and some minor heartbreaks. As soon as he finished his degree, he made a beeline for San Francisco.
The City, then in the throes of Flower Power, growing environmental awareness, human rights agitation and other startling changes, was nothing short of a revelation to Christian, one that would shape his entire life from that point on.
I was then living in the Haight-Ashbury, performing in the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and working for Rolling Stone; Christian was mesmerized by the un-German-like freedom of thought and lifestyle he encountered everywhere.
He happily slept on my floor at night, explored all of my favorite parts of SF with me by day, charmed all of my friends—I’ve never before or since met anyone whom so many people liked so immediately—and made friends of his own, in all strata of society, from panhandling hippies to Nob Hill socialites. We went to see the electrifying original production of Hair, and he declared his mind officially blown.
Christian also loved to go out in the evenings to the gay bars, not for sex, but for conversation, to make new friends, and for the novel and giddy experience of being openly gay within his tribe.
He would return to San Francisco again and again. On his second visit, someone decided to get him thoroughly stoned, and, reeking of herb, he slipped into my room and collapsed on his floor pallet at about 2AM. I went back to sleep. About an hour later, I was suddenly awakened by Christian sitting abruptly upright and asserting fiercely at the top of his voice: “POLITIK IST DOCH NUR EIN KINDERSPIEL!” (Politics is really only a children’s game!)
Armed with this bolt-from-the-green realization, not to mention his formidable charm, he began his political ascent in Germany, implementing Green policies and technical advances (he would actually introduce email into the country) as he went.
He began as a councilman in the small village where he was living, and soon became its mayor. Then, characteristically, instead of joining the emerging Green movement, he tackled the then-quite-conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), to this day one of the most powerful parties in the country.
He worked within the CDU from 1974 to 1995, first as a consultant in their planning group, then as a public-relations consultant and arts liason, but he was definitely not your standard buttoned-up CDU suit.
He impishly tucked marijuana plants into the atrium planter boxes in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament building), not for his own use—revelation or not, he never got much into recreational drugs—but for the sheer mischief of it. He wore a small tasteful earring. He associated, not only with sober conservatives, but with radicals, artists, and other flamboyant free spirits.
He got away with all this simply because he was who he was, his winning combination of brilliance, charm, humor, and his instinctive impulse to reconcile opposing views leavening the heavy world of German politics. In 1990 he was elected Press Secretary of the CDU.
This was somewhat incredible, given his don’t-hide-don’t-flaunt approach to both his gay identity and to his conversion to Islam in 1988. (Before taking this step, he made a special trip to San Francisco to discuss his experience of revelation and decision with me and with other friends.)
After becoming a Muslim, he changed not one bit in relating to others, and never seemed to be touched by the harsher realities of extremism. If anything, he became more all-embracing, and began to work within the government to secure better conditions for Germany’s many Muslim “guest-workers,” and for better understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim groups.
He still came to San Francisco regularly (occasionally bringing his mother, who loved bus tours) to visit and play, still happily slept on my floor, but back in Germany he was becoming a man of importance, often interviewed on TV and in newspapers, lecturing at universities, and publishing books and articles on what was becoming known in Germany as “The Muslim Question.”
To some in the CDU, all of this activity was eventually seen as a conflict with his party responsibilities. The question of whether a Muslim could act as a responsible representative of a Christian party became a matter of heated public discussion (especially given the irony that he was directly descended from one of Martin Luther’s prominent Reformation henchmen). Deciding that the schism between his avocation and his job was widening too radically, Christian resigned from the CDU in 1995.
Subsequently, he worked as a specialist in political communication, first for an avant-garde media company that represented entire marginalized nations like Bosnia and Uzbekistan, then going free-lance—advising organizations such as the Society for International Cooperation, UNICEF and the World Bank on projects in Muslim countries. He also advised Muslim philanthropists on the development of charitable projects, and participated in the advisory board for the Islamic pavilion at EXPO2000 in Hanover. By this time he had become fluent in several strains of Arabic.
Then he met Yusuf.
Yusuf, the wayward younger son of a staggeringly oil-rich Saudi Arabian family, had somehow negotiated a vast sum of money from them in exchange for his ceasing to agitate for human rights and environmental awareness in their oil company.
Yusuf had plenty of grand ideas about what to do with these funds, but no idea how to begin implementing his ambitions. What he needed, he decided, was his own personal genie.
Enter Christian.
For many years, Christian carried with him a tiny cellphone keyed to receive only calls from Yusuf, which could come at any time of the day or night.
“Herr Hoffmann,” Yusuf would say, “ I wish to establish a school in Kabul where artisans can teach the young people the old arts and crafts, with the goal of restoring the Old City; make it so.”
Or: “Herr Hoffmann, I want to establish scholarships at Cambridge University for young Muslim women to study medicine there; make it so.”
Or: “Herr Hoffmann, I have discovered that the Bodleian Museum at Oxford University has many Islamic and Oriental treasures that they have no room to display. I wish to have all of them professionally photographed and historical descriptions written, and post them on the Internet to be available to all; make it so.”
And whatever the request, Christian would somehow make it so, traveling the world, hiring and supervising teams of workers, artists, teachers, experts, and facilitators, mingling easily with everyone from Afghani street urchins to the British Royal Family to Oxbridge academics to the Sultan of Brunei.
All this time, he continued to “drop out of the sky” several times a year to visit me wherever I happened to be living, our relationship as easy and loving as ever. In his later years, Christian found his heart in San Francisco—his husband Andre—and they divided their non-traveling time between SF, where Andre had his design business, and Berlin, where Christian looked out for his aging father, who lived independently nearby until passing on at the age of 101.
Somehow, in addition to books and papers on Muslim-Western relations, Christian found time to write his memoirs, which he titled, tellingly, Wanderer am Weltenrand (Wanderer at the Edge of the World). On its cover was an illustration he’d first seen on my bulletin board, and I found myself in its pages.
In 2013, having accomplished a multitude of seemingly impossible tasks for Yusuf, Christian retired at 65, ready for a life of living and loving and traveling with Andre. It was not to be.
Shortly after a visit to me in Sonoma County, I received the news that Christian been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Over the next months, we kept in touch by phone and email. When chemo took his hair, I crocheted him a bright-blue wool hat, and received a tongue-in-cheek note thanking me for the “lovely tea-cozy.”
At his request, we seldom mentioned his illness, but rather, as so many years ago, discussed anything and everything else, including, more and more frequently, matters of the spirit.
On January 19th, 2015, at about 2 AM California time, , I was awakened by a phone call from Andre, saying that Christian had just died at their Berlin home. We talked for a while, reminiscing and sharing our sorrow, both of us somewhat in shock, unbelieving that such a bright spirit had been extinguished.
Toward dawn, I managed to get to sleep again, and Christian, considerate to the last, showed up in a dream, looking rested and healthy.
“I’m just fine,” he assured me, “What an adventure this is!”
Sixty years ago, a small boy told me that he wanted to be my friend.
I had no idea.
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CHRISTIAN HELGE ABDUL HADI HOFFMANN (1948-2015)
18. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Somewhere on Cape Cod; Sometime in the 1970s
AN UNEXPECTED LITERARY IMMERSION
I’ve written several times here about my friend Ray Jason—juggler extraordinaire (catch the short video below), world traveler, pool champion, philosopher, essayist, and showman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F37_ShiQmNs (Ray Jason juggling dangerous objects; intro by Scott Beach)
Ray is also a great reader, and, back in the 1970s, his two favorite writers were: 1) Tom Robbins, author of (among other fine novels) Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; and 2) the great Kurt Vonnegut.
Once, when he was near Robbins’ house in the Seattle, area, Ray paid a visit to the author (previous correspondence may have been involved—he wrote great fan letters). Sadly, my only recollection of Mr. Jason’s enthusiastic retelling of the encounter was that Robbins really did fit his own self-description of looking like "Doris Day with a mustache.”
A few summers later, Ray was juggling his way around the country, living out of his “Trome” (truck/home) Prince Boffo. (He started out with $4000 road-trip money, came home with $4500.)
Stopping for gas in a small Cape Cod town, Ray was electrified to learn from a local character that Kurt Vonnegut actually lived nearby. He somehow discovered the great man’s address, and decided to drive by, just to catch a glimpse of his idol’s home.
Having done so, however, he couldn’t resist stopping, and then was unable to keep himself from going up and knocking on the front door.
“If he answered,” recalled Ray, “I was just going to tell him how much I admired his work, maybe get to shake his hand, and leave.”
Somewhat tentatively, he tapped on the door, which, to his great surprise, was suddenly flung open by none other than Kurt Vonnegut himself, big as life.
“Come on in!” Vonnegut boomed, “you’re just in time; we’re about to start!”
Baffled, and not quite believing his luck, Ray followed obediently, desperately attempting to keep his cool while taking mental notes of the house’s interior for future contemplation.
With Ray close behind, Vonnegut went bursting out of his back door into a spacious yard crowded with people of all ages and sizes, some in bathing suits, others in obviously old clothing.
"Let's go!" the Maestro yelled. Without pausing, and followed closely by all the others, he charged on through the crowd, loped down to the bottom of the sloping yard, and splashed into a very large swamp or bog that had its beginnings there.
Ray, swept up lemming-like into the surge of bodies, soon found himself— fully dressed—flopping, groping, wading and wallowing through sucking mud, swamp-grass, duckweed, and other bog-dwelling flora and fauna, surrounded by folks hooting and yelling and laughing up a storm; the more able-bodied assisting the less so; kids piggy-backing; mud flying everywhere; and everybody apparently having the time of their Cape Cod lives.
Ray, as he soon discovered, had arrived serendipitously at the exact date and time of a rousing local event known as “The Annual Kurt Vonnegut Swamp Tromp.”
When everyone had reached the other side of the bog, some took an alternate route, while others gamely wallowed their way back to Vonnegut’s yard. There, happily caked with mud and garlanded with duckweed, all participants chowed down on a enormous barbecue feast.
Ray actually got to have a short conversation with his celebrated host, and for a guy used to being the center of attention wherever he went, managed to keep his presence remarkably low-key and reverent.
It was an experience, he recalled with an appreciative sigh, entirely worth the destruction of his best running shoes, his last clean shirt, and everything non-laminated in his wallet.
I guess that sometimes, in the proximity of greatness, you just have to suck it up.
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19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Woodstock Festival, Bethel, New York; All Over the Country, 1969-Present
and for giving us all the needle
when we need it"
The seal reads: SEWUS MENDUS PATCHUS FIXUS
and compassion, and for her strong resemblance to a giant chicken at cerain times of the year..."
