The First Movie I Was In

When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine was taking a filmmaking class at SF State. He asked me and another friend if we would be in the movie he had to make for a class project, and of course we said yes. He promised to show us the film when it was finished and graded by the instructor at the university.


It took us only one day to shoot the movie, on 16mm film. It was a silent film about a young woman, played by me, dreaming - or not dreaming - about being in the '60's. I pulled my mom's Marimekko blue and white dress out of the closet, and our other friend showed up in what he usually wore, blue jeans and a denim jacket. I imagine other people were in the movie too, but I had such a crush on the other guy in the movie with me that I don't remember.


The filmmaker set up lights in my bedroom while I put on some pajamas. We had reset my clock to show 10pm and put a 49ers calendar on the wall next to the clock. Then I got into bed and pretended to sleep while the filmmaker pointed the camera at me.


After that part of the film was shot, we went to the big room downstairs and this time I changed into the blue dress and tied a bandanna around my head while the lights were set up again. My other friend rolled oregano (really) into Zig-Zag papers and we put the Rolling Stones on the record player. Then we sat on the floor and "smoked" the oregano joints while the filmmaker filmed us talking - which was, for lack of any need for a script, about all the clues to Paul's death.


We went back up to my room, I put my pajamas back on and got back into bed. The filmmaker filmed me waking up and smacking the alarm clock, and then quickly checking the 49ers calendar to see if it reflected the present, 1985, which it did. I mimed relief by rubbing my eyes and jumped out of bed. The filmmaker shot a close-up of the bandanna on the pillow.


We never did see that movie.

Faith Fishbowl

In September of 2001 I was working at Saint Mary's College, a small residential college. Zirpu called me on the morning of the 11th to tell me to turn on the TV; I watched images on the only station I could receive at the house and listened to NPR simultaneously. I continued to listen to the radio during my bucolic drive through county parks to get to work. I specifically remember Bob Edwards saying there had been a plane crash in Pennsylvania that, it was believed, had nothing to do with the World Trade Center planes.


Of course, once at the university, there was not a lot of work going on, for anyone. People hung out in each other's offices, talking, listening to online news broadcasts, trying to check CNN's website, which was crashing all day, for news updates. Everyone made and received "How are you? I'm just checking in" calls. Very few calls came in regarding financial aid, and I couldn't really concentrate on processing loans that day. I spent a lot of time looking out the window and listening to NPR online.


The college, which is Catholic and at that time had a lot of practicing Catholics in the student body, scrambled to put something together for the students to take comfort in. Directors of departments had been instructed to allow staff to attend, if any staff member wished to do so. Mass was held in the chapel, followed by a less-formal gathering in the courtyard in front. I attended part of this second event, which included the recitation of the Kaddish and of the Hail Mary.


After awhile I went back to my office to continue looking out the window. The field across from my office was green even in September - the college's intramural rugby teams played there - and the sky was blue, without any clouds. I felt like the faith of the youth in the courtyard had created a dome over the college, which is in a natural bowl, and that their god was looking over us all - even those of us who didn't believe.

The Ultimate Cookie

The summer before my senior year in high school, I worked at a cookie store on Haight Street that was in a former bank (and that is now a clothing store). This was in the '80s when Mrs. Field's were everywhere, the snack food of the times. It was late summer when I started, and I expected to have a pretty light senior year - not to mention that we got out of school around 2:30 anyway, and said so in the interview. I was hired despite the fact that the manager, as she told me, didn't usually hire teenagers because we were unreliable.


I worked a couple days a week as a baker in the back of the shop with two other people. The dough came in tubs and we scooped it out with ice cream dishers onto parchment-lined cookie sheets. After baking and cooling, we wrapped most of the cookies in paper and boxes to be delivered elsewhere. The back room was the "wholesale operation."


There was a "retail operation" in the front of the shop, and the cookies to be sold in-house were slightly larger than those packed for delivery. I worked behind the counter on Sunday evenings, playing the Dr. Demento Show on the radio and goofing around with my coworkers. There were two of them, both of whom I thought were at least ten years older than I (but I was only 16 that summer), and one was older than the other.


Hanging out with them was confusing. Sometimes it felt like they were both "kind of" flirting with me and that they were in competition for my attention. I wasn't used to this sort of attention being paid to me and I didn't really know what to think about it. I was flattered, but I wasn't attracted to either of them - and the fact that both of them were way off limits (since I was 16) did not make them more attractive either. It was exciting, though.


When school started the guys started making plans to be my senior prom date. First one, then the other, both in full hearing of each other, would talk about going out to dinner, renting a limo, and all that prom stuff. Eventually they agreed they would both escort me to the prom, and that the African-American guy would wear a white tuxedo and the white guy would wear a black one. It was totally silly, and yet it was fun to imagine people's reactions to my a) showing up with two dates who b) no one knew.


I quit about a month into the fall semester. I had found myself in three AP classes, and wasn't really interested in working at the cookie store anymore. When I gave my notice, the manager said that she had never really expected anything else, and that she had been planning to fire me anyway. I never even went into that cookie store again after that.


I went to the prom with a friend who had graduated the year before. He wore a black tuxedo.

From A Meatloaf-Deprived Childhood

Mom didn't make meatloaf very often - thank goodness. I ate pretty much everything when I was a kid, and No did too. But the meatloaf was thick and tough and pretty boring, as far as flavor went, and even though I didn't like ketchup very much when I was a kid, I often poured a lot of the stuff on my slice. I realized later that Mom made meatloaf the way she made hamburgers, which would make sense: Mom makes the best hamburgers of anyone. But take an enormous burger and put it in a casserole dish, and allow it to bake in its own grease, and it's not a very good hamburger anymore.

I thought Mom made the worst meatloaf in the world until I had Denver D's mom's meatloaf. Phil and I were dropping Denver D off in Denver on our way to Colorado Springs, having driven from Tacoma. His folks had already eaten, but we were offered some leftovers to make the last 90 minutes of our two-day drive. Phil had had food poisoning the whole trip, so he got chicken broth, and Denver D and I got meatloaf.

His mom's meatloaf was like a piece of plywood in consistency and color. It was the kind of food that you have to drink some water after very bite to get it to slide down your throat. I remembered the ketchup trick from my childhood, and went to the fridge to get some. They had no ketchup! They did have some barbecue sauce, and I poured it all over my slice of meatloaf. I never remember the brand, but I always recognize the bottle in the grocery store, and am loyal to it because it made that meatloaf edible.

I did not eat anyone's meatloaf for years after that. When I was working at the Women's Daytime Drop-In Center in Berkeley, a place for homeless women with children to hang out during the day when the overnight shelters were closed, it happened that there were clients who were fantastic cooks. Each morning a few clients would volunteer to cook lunch for everyone, and I would hang out in the kitchen sometimes and watch. I told a couple of them that I came from a meatloaf-deprived background; while I knew from books that meatloaf could be good, my mom and my mother-out-law made terrible meatloaf and I hadn't had anyone who could teach me by positive example how to make it.

They laughed and bid me watch while they made a couple big meatloaves with ground beef, oatmeal, eggs, sauteed onions and peppers, grated cheese, ketchup, and seasonings. They formed the meat into loaves and placed them on cookie trays - not casseroles, much to my surprise: You cook bread in loaf pans, so I figured you had to cook meatloaf in loaf pans too. It was explained to me that this way the grease runs off and doesn't poach the meat, so you get a nice crust. At some point one of them pulled the trays out and, using a spoon, painted the loaves with ketchup.

Needless to say, this was the only meatloaf I had ever had that I liked. Eventually I got around to making my own, following their example exactly. I collected meatloaf recipes for awhile, but I've gotten enough practice that I make it different ways depending on what vegetables are in the fridge, if and how much cheese we have, and usually with ground turkey and pork sausage.

The Family Falls Out

I met Zirpu in July of 2001, and the following June we went to Houston for his grandmother's 95th birthday. His grandmother lived with his mother and stepfather, and his dad, stepmother, sister and her boyfriend (now husband), and brother, sister in law, and nephew were all going to be there for the party. I knew that this was THE MEET, but I wasn't particularly nervous about meeting his family. I think he might have been more nervous, in fact.


When Zirpu introduced me to Nana, he spoke very loudly and in his full-on Texas accent, which he doesn't use most of the time, into her hearing aid. He told to me later that with her hearing being what it was, he wanted to use the voice Nana was used to hearing, but by then he'd been back in his accent all afternoon and evening, whoever he was speaking to.


We were all sitting at the table and Nana was having a hard time understanding what was going on. Her hearing aid wasn't working properly, and we could all hear it whistling feedback. Sissy's husband wears hearing aids and he was joking with Nana that the whistles were messages from the aliens that only he and she could receive. Nana continued to complain that she either couldn't hear anything or could only hear the whistles.


Suddenly, she cried, "These batteries are deader than HECK!" The whole family laughed and laughed. Zirpu had tears in his eyes; his mother almost laughed herself out of her chair. People were banging the table with their hands, holding their sides, laughing and laughing. Nana was giggling merrily with everyone else.I thought it was funny too, but I thought the family's reaction was kind of extreme.



Once he caught his breath, Zirpu explained into my ear that his grandmother had been married to a preacher and was a very proper lady. None of them had ever heard her use a such a strong word as "heck" before.

Our First Apartment

Zirpu and I decided to move to Hayward when we moved in together. Hayward was the midpoint of where each of us was working at the time; other than noting its location on my way to his place in Mountain View, I didn't know anything about Hayward.


We found a big yellow apartment complex tucked in on a side street near the Alameda County Courthouse. The two-bedroom apartment was on the third floor, with a tiny dining room and a little balcony, but an enormous master bedroom with a walk-in closet and two-sink bathroom. The complex had a swimming pool and hot tub. It was very close to train tracks, which we didn't realize were quite as "live" as they turned out to be when we moved in: Trains went by four times a day, at two AM, ten AM, two PM and ten PM.


HR and JR came down with Aitch while we were still getting settled. This is one of my favorite pictures of Aitch:
This is not a picture of two boxes. This is a picture of a little boy in a boat on the sea.**



**If you don't understand, read Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

One Reason People Dislike Mimes

In the spring of our freshman year, Spudwhip and I went through a little phase of being mimes. One afternoon after classes, we put on our mime get-up and wandered around campus, goofing with people. Then we decided to go out into the real world - read: off-campus - and goof with people out there. Our plan, actually, was to go to the bank in downtown Tacoma where our friend worked as a teller and mess with him. Denver D must have agreed to drive us, since he had a vehicle and we didn't.


Just before we walked into the bank, we ran into a staff person we knew from the university, who kindly put up with our antics (while Denver D took pictures. Inside the bank, we did not immediately see our friend. His bank had a fiberglass barrier between the tellers and the customers, which I had not seen before.


Needless to say we did not get to fool with him very much, and only partly because of the fiberglass barrier. Of course, since we couldn't speak, there wasn't much we could do in the bank anyway. Because everyone else we knew worked on campus, we didn't realize that he had a "real job" and had to "really work." We also underestimated how busy the bank would be - in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, we didn't think there would be any customers in the bank. We made our exit after only a few minutes.


Over dinner that evening, our friend told us that we had made everyone very nervous. Because we were in whiteface, some of the staff, including the security guard, thought our intention was to hold up the bank. He said he couldn't interact with us very much because he was working, but also because he wanted us to leave so his coworkers could relax. He didn't say so, but we probably also really embarrassed him.


The next time we put on whiteface, a few days later, we'd been asked to act as clowns at an auction to benefit the university's Alumni Fund. After dinner when the auction started and we were free to leave, Spudwhip swept up a bottle of wine from the table and we played at serving wine as we moved toward the back exit.


We drank the wine that night. With all of the things I have forgotten, I still remember that it was a Covey Run Chardonnay, my first Washington State wine.