Welcome to my past.
I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays on Facebook.
Before long, readers started telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea, this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color, involved in over 200 (and counting) essays. Not to mention that many of the stories included links to appropriate Internet sites.
I next considered a website, but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing about 20-30 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size and/or eccentricities in spacing as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Welcome to my past.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. JACK ALBEE: PLAYING THE FOOL
2. THE PAREIDOLIA PERPLEX: FINDING TULPIE
3. MOIST: A TALE OF TEMPTATION
4. FAMILY SKETCHES/ARTSY DNA?
5. HOWARD AND THE SYCAMORE
6. WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CENTURY MAKES
7. CALIFORNIA EPHEMERA II: ELFIN CHESS
8. BABY SURPRISE
9. SURVIVING DOWN-HOME MEDICINE IN THE FIFTIES
10. A SEVENTIES WEDDING: Or,
ROBERT AND LORENE DON’T SAY “I DO”
11. SEEING MULTIPLES: TWINSDAY IN OCCIDENTAL
12. THE SPARROW BY A NOSE
13. DOUBLY EXPOSED
14. IT’S 1896 OUT THERE!:
REMEMBERING DUNDII
15. AUTUMN PORTRAIT
16. WAITING FOR SANTA
17. HIGH SPIRITS/ANGEL FASHIONS
18. CHRISTMAS FOLLIES, Or,
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY DAY
19. THE ART OF SOLSTICE
20. VIGNETTE: A VISIT FROM THE FARRIER
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, California; Early 1970s
JACK ALBEE: PLAYING THE FOOL
In the early Seventies, soon after the Northern Faire had found a new home at Black Point, its staff carpenters built a sturdy, thatch-roofed front-gate structure, flanked by ticket windows and administrative offices, with a high stage platform for ad hoc performances by singers, orators, readers of proclamations, etc.
The Front Gate; note the Puritan haranguing Firegoers at lower right. (Photo by Michael Kotski)
One of my early duties as Mistress of Revels was to join with other performers in entertaining the crowds that always seemed to show up early and cluster at the gate, often long before the Faire was ready to open. Several of us would stand on a row of straw-bales that formed a temporary barrier, leading cheers (Huzzah! Huzzah!), teaching rounds, and bantering with the crowd.
Hapless Mistress of Revels
Once the Faire had opened (with an impressive ceremony involving beribboned ram’s horns, a giant glove, lots of exuberant costumed extras and Lord Mayor Scott Beach bellowing a welcome in his stentorian voice) a few performers would remain at the gate to welcome and entertain the stream of incoming Fairegoers.
This particular performing niche might have been custom-designed for a fellow named Jack Albee. He called himself a mime, but was more of a jester, a wild-card joker with a quick wit, a glib tongue, a flair for improvisation, and the willingness to do almost anything short of dropping his breeches for attention.
You had to admire his outsized personality; seemingly never at a loss, he could spout reams of Elizabethan-flavored nonsense, then segué into outrageous physical comedy.
If attention flagged, one surefire move would restore it: Jack would order those assembled to move more closely together and raise their hands in the air. He would then launch himself forward to crowd-surf, waving his plumed hat, whooping and exhorting, ogling female cleavages, accusing men of fondling his codpiece, and generally creating merry mayhem. (He would later claim to be the inventor of this type of diversion, which became common at raves and rock concerts.)
My Faire days were full of pre-planned ceremonial activities, so when working with Jack, I generally limited my participation to fake-laughing at his antics, flipping my beribboned and garlanded hair, and rattling my tambourine at appropriate intervals.
Jack often worked as an artist's model.
One morning, stuck with Mr. Albee on straw-bale duty, I had just turned around to see if the Lord Mayor and crew were ready to open the Faire, when I heard Jack starting to prep those gathered outside for his usual crowd-surfing tour de force. Instead of launching himself, however, he caught hold of my waist, lifted me up, and propelled me smartly out onto the sea of hands.
Oh dear.
I landed onto my back, face-up, and thus had little control over the situation, so there was nothing I could do but try to relax as I was passed along over the crowd, gamely attempting to smile festively even as I endured numerous fondlings and pinchings of my bottom.
Then the Lord Mayor and his entourage appeared, the crowd surged forward for a better look, and I abruptly ran out of hands and was dropped like a sack of potatoes, landing flat on my back at some distance from the gate.
Lord Mayor Scott Beach and entourage.
Fortunately there were several costumed Faire guards nearby. They shielded me from the passing crowd, and, once I got my breath back, helped me to my feet. As they did so, I felt a searing pain in my lower right rib cage. Mildred, the Faire Controller, who had seen all this from a ticket window, came bustling up and insisted that, for insurance reasons, I had to go to the emergency room.
The guards knew of a VW van with a mattress in the back (many Faire participants stayed overnight between the two weekend days); its owner volunteered to drive me to the ER. Due to the vehicle’s lack of shock absorbers, and the fact that even breathing hurt, the journey was a painful one.
When I arrived, the ER facility was in the midst of a somewhat frantic scene, the aftermath of a multi-vehicle collision on Highway 101. As I was clearly ambulatory and neither bleeding nor vomiting, I was left on a chair in the hallway to wait my turn. In spite of all the distraction, I attracted many curious and/or amused glances at my elaborate Mistress of Revels costume.
Eventually a ponytailed young man with a clipboard showed up to do an intake. From the beginning, as I recounted the unlikely story behind my injury, he seemed to find the whole situation quite amusing. (His state of mind might have been associated with a faint herbal scent clinging to his clothing, but he definitely had a creative sense of narration going on.)
“How’s this?” he asked, scribbling, “In the exuberance of the celebration, she flung herself onto the outstretched hands of the multitude…”
“NO!” I exclaimed, thinking of the insurance report. “I didn’t FLING; I was PUSHED.”
“Who pushed you?”
“Jack Albee. He’s a fool.”
“Well, obviously,” observed my interlocutor, raising one eyebrow.
“No,” I explained, “I mean an actual fool, like the Joker in a deck of cards.”
"OK, how about this? ‘Flung by a card-sharping fool onto the eager arms of the ravening crowd, she…’”
And so it went. Lord knows how the official version came out; it probably read like a cross between Terry Pratchett and Barbara Cartland.
After awhile, a nurse came to fetch me. I was X-rayed, poked and prodded, and finally told by a distracted but faintly amused doctor what I’d suspected all along, that I’d pulled a muscle.
Since I told the doc that I was going back to work (much head-shaking) my ribs were wrapped in an Ace bandage, I was given some Ibuprofen™ and an ice pack, and dismissed with a smile. “And stay away from fools,” he recommended.
Queen's Progress (Photo by Michael Kotski)
Back at the front gate, I collected my wreath and tambourine from the ticket office, and began the long walk to the Main Stage. To my surprise, I kept getting stopped by friends and acquaintences, with variations on: “Oh my God, how ARE you? We heard that Jack Albee threw you off of a straw-bale and you broke your leg (arm, neck, back)!”
I made it to the start of the Queen’s Progress, and performed my usual duties, albeit a little stiffly and left-handed. (There’s more than one fool in this story.)
As I was returning to the backstage area, I ran into Jack Albee himself. “Where’d you GO?” he demanded, “I had to handle that opening crowd all by myself!”
Although I didn’t exactly refuse to work with Jack again, you can bet that I was (doctor’s orders) careful to stay more than an arm’s length away from him at all times.
Fool me once….
Portrait of Jack Albee by Michael Hussar
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2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Graton, California; c. 2006
THE PAREIDOLIA PERPLEX: FINDING TULPIE
From a very early age, I’ve manifested acute pareidolia.
Needless to say, this is a rather useful syndrome for a collage artist. Take that time, for instance, that someone gave me a remarkably beautiful calendar containing the
photo below (credited to earthlovinglens.com), which at first glance depicts a flamboyantly colored parrot tulip in a Petaluma garden.
photo below (credited to earthlovinglens.com), which at first glance depicts a flamboyantly colored parrot tulip in a Petaluma garden.
Pareidolia kicked in immediately but frustratingly. I just KNEW there was another elusive image in there, but had no idea what it could be.
Calling on previous experience, I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, sure enough, there he was: Tulpie the SpaceClown, more than ready (with a little help) to make the leap from garden glory to insouciant galactic cruiser.
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3. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California; October 1973
MOIST: A TALE OF TEMPTATION
Recently, as I was sorting donated greeting cards at the Home Hospice Thrift Store where I volunteer, I received a bit of a shock.
There, amidst the images of lovely endangered landcapes; exotic animals; wide-eyed children of all races (many card donations are freebies sent to patrons of worthy charities); somber or flowery messages of sympathy; adorable kittens and puppies evidently spending all their time “Thinking of You;” exhortations to “Get Well Soon” and “Hang In There!;” classic art reproductions; and birthday cards ranging from effusive to insulting, was the first image below, depicting three champagne-lubricated French persons in gleefully acrobatic flagrente. (I‘ve tastefully Bowdlerized it for obvious reasons.)
Startled, I looked inside, to find, in tiny print: “International Museum of Erotica, 450 Powell St., San Francisco, California,” and an intense early-1970s memory came flooding back.
Although some Google sources give the dates of the museum’s existence as 1970-1973, the poster below celebrates the event about which I write, a grand opening on October 18, 1973.
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At that time people who worked at ROLLING STONE often received invitations and free tickets to a variety of events. A fellow writer drew my attention to this particular bash, and asked if I wanted to attend. What could I say but: “Ummm……sure?”
When we arrived at an upper floor of 450 Powell, (along with a stream of San Francisco society’s Daring Young Liberals, hip intellectuals, and journalists sensing a double-entendre coup), we were greeted by the de facto owners of the art on display, Doctors Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen. These mavens of erotica, dressed in middle–aged drab, were probably the least sexy-looking people in the place.
The Drs. Kronhausen
Next to them in the receiving line, reflecting the couple’s recent dawning of interest in New Age Philosophy, was none other than Shirley MacLaine, who had wisely chosen not to go glam, emphasizing that this was a Serious Cultural Event.
(For a rundown on the entirety of the Kronhausens’ strange and unpredictable career, go to:
The art itself, though (ahem) tastefully hung or otherwise displayed, was quite explicitly disconcerting. What captured my attention, however, was its effect on the gathering crowd.
Wide-eyed observer
To begin with, the room was almost uncomfortably warm, and the cheap champagne on offer was being guzzled like water. Inhibitions and buttons were loosening right and left. I noticed several distinct behaviors manifesting:
1. Staring rigidly down at one’s drink, or at a fixed spot on the floor, ignoring one’s date’s attempts to interest one in the art.
2. Standing in front of a piece of artwork while staring determinedly at it and pontificating on its deeper meaning to a group of uncomfortable-appearing friends with apparently no idea where to look.
3. A general moistness: licking and/or loosening of lips, glazed eyes, brow perspiration, often accompanied by an uneasy shifting of position.
4. As the evening wore on, a great many wandering hands, almost unconsciously petting, stroking, touching nearby body parts (or one’s own).
While observing all this, I had been drinking tonic water to keep cool, and eventually felt the need for a restroom. The facility on the exhibit floor was fairly mobbed, so I decided to take a stair exit and look for one on another floor.
I headed downwards, finding each door to the inside locked, until I ran out of stairs in the basement. I turned around to re-trace my steps, and came up against what was obviously the primary lighting board of the building. In the center of it was a large switch marked “Main,” switched to the “on” position.
Oh, was I tempted. The image of that moistly incipient orgy on the upper floor flashed into my mind, along with the thought of what would happen if the lights were to suddenly go out. It would, I thought, go down in the annals of San Francisco history (and Herb Caen’s column) as the highlight of the 1973 social season.
Fortunately for all concerned, I was interrupted by the arrival of a cleaning lady, who kindly allowed me to use an employee restroom around the corner.
I found my way back to the museum floor and to my companion, who was determinedly staring at a blank area on the wall. “This is so weird,” he said, “Can we just get out of here?”
Oh my dear, I thought, If you only knew how much weirder it might have gotten.
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Bibliography
Unless otherwise noted, all titles are by Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen.
• Pornography and the Law: The psychology of erotic realism and pornography, Ballantine Books, 1959; revised edition 1964.
• Sex Histories of American College Men: A Study in Detail of the Sex Life of American College Men Showing the Cultural and Psychological Influences On Sexual Development, 1959
• The Sexually Responsive Woman, Grove Press, 1964 (with a foreword by Simone de Beauvoir)• Sexual Response in Women, 1965
• Walter: the English Casanova, Ballantine Books 1967• [as editors] Walter, “My Secret Life": the unique memoirs of England’s most uninhibited lover, 3 volumes, Polybooks London 1967
• Erotic Art: a Survey of Erotic Fact and Fancy in the Fine Arts, Grove Press, 1968• Erotic Art vol. 2, Grove Press, 1969
• Erotic Fantasies, a Study of Sexual Imagination. New York: Grove Press, 1969.
• Erotic Book Plates, Bell, 1970.• The International Museum of Erotic Art, 1973
• The Sex People: Erotic Performers and Their Bold New Worlds, 1975
• The Complete Book of Erotic Art, [compiles Erotic Art vols. 1 and 2], Bell Publishing Company, 1978. ("This book is dedicated to the people of Sweden and Denmark without whose maturity and dedication to democratic freedom the first international exhibition of erotic art would not have been possible.")
• Robin Schwartz and Phyllis Kronhausen, Behind Closed Doors : A Marriage Manual, with nearly 2000 photographs. Materia Medica, 1979.
• [with Harry B. Demopoulos, M.D.] Formula for Life. The Definitive Book on Correct Nutrition, Anti-Oxidants and Vitamins, Disease Prevention, and Longevity. William Morrow and Company, 1989. (Revised edition, 1999)
• Staying Sane in a Crazy World, 2008
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4. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bangor, Pennsylvania; Easton and Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; 1920s-2000s
FAMILY SKETCHES/ARTSY DNA?
I was asked recently if I’d inherited my artsy inclinations from one or both parents; I could only reply: “sort of.”
My mother, for instance, produced the winsome portraits below at age 11 and age 13, with a decided improvement in quality between the two.
My mother as a pre-teen
When I was growing up, however, I never saw her draw or paint, busy as she was with housework, raising three children, cooking and sewing, church activities, reading, bridge club, figure skating, and traveling the world with my dad once we kids were out of the nest. She did have a lovely sense of style, and was always beautifully dressed.
In her early teens
Visiting home in later years, I’d occasionally come upon a tentative watercolor or page of sketches tucked away on a closet shelf or in a little-used drawer.
Why did she never explore this talent more fully? Somehow I could never bring myself to ask.
My dad produced the three time-darkened sketches below as a college student, and even won an award for that depiction of an old barn.
College man
Once he acquired his first camera, however, that was it for his drawing career. A tech-head before his time, he was born before lightbulbs were seriously marketed, but would desktop-publish his memoirs on an iMac 88 years later.
Dad embraced every new photographic innovation, including 3-D photography. He produced memorable shots and slideshow travelogues, but I never saw him draw, except for the occasional illustrative diagram on a napkin or the back of an old envelope.
Both of my parents were excellent at making things more beautiful and/or more interesting. My sister turned out to be a fine photographer. My brother designs wonderful one-of-a-kind houses.
Me, I do my best to enjoy my perhaps-inherited artsy DNA.
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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; 1940s-1960s
HOWARD AND THE SYCAMORE
When I was a child in the late 1940s, it was simply a fact of life that my dad couldn’t hear very well. He wore a big clunky hearing aid in his pocket, with a button-on-a-wire that he stuck in his ear. This contraption seemed to have a mind of its own, occasionally fading out or erupting in annoying feedback squeals.
Me and my dad in 1945. His hearing aid never appeared in any family photos.
He bore all of this so matter-of-factly that we kids just thought of it as how things were in our family, and talked louder. We know now that he was suffering from otosclerosis, one of the most common causes of progressive hearing loss in young adults.
Otosclerosis is caused by an abnormal growth of bone on the stapes (Latin for stirrup), one of the three small bones in the middle ear named for their hammer, anvil, and stirrup-like shapes.
These tiny bones are vital for transmitting sound waves from the outer ear into the inner ear. In otosclerosis, slow bone growth on the stapes eventually prevents it from vibrating normally in response to sound.
Hearing aid like Dad's
The condition is most often inherited (fortunately, none of us kids or grandkids developed it); if left untreated, hearing loss typically worsens until late middle age, when complete deafness occurs. (The most well-known otosclerosis victim was Beethoven.)
This was the future my dad faced squarely, as he did most obstacles. In college, he had had enough hearing left to do OK in his studies, play team sports, and even, incredibly, rid himself of the Arkansas accent that he thought made him sound like a hick to his Yankee classmates. (When I first met my grandmother and uncles, I was surprised that they all spoke with a pronounced southern drawl.)
They called him the "Silent Son of the Southwest" because he spent all of his time listening.
When Howard took a post-college job, he worked his way up through company ranks from soda-jerk to marketing research executive, probably combining the use of his hearing aid with residual hearing, lip-reading and his strong intuition.
Then, in the late 1960s, as Dad approached his fifties, ear specialists perfected a procedure called a stapendectomy, in which the ossified bone was removed and replaced with a tiny wire connected to the other two bones.
The executive, not long before surgery.
Dad signed up immediately. After surgery on one ear, if he aimed it in the right direction, he no longer needed the hearing aid. (I remember that he had to take niacin tablets to promote blood flow to his head; he and my mother joked that they “were both taking hot-flash pills.”) For a while, whenever a sound seemed too loud to him, he would grab at his missing hearing aid to turn it down.
Some months later, he had the second surgery; this time the bone was replaced by a tiny stapes-shaped bit of plastic. And, utterly miraculously, he could now hear as well as anyone. It was remarkable how little time it took before most people forgot that he’d ever been deaf at all.
Some years later, during a picnic reunion of my mother’s large family at our place, I drifted over to where a bunch of adults, including my dad, were comfortably ensconced on lawn chairs in the shade.
They were talking about favorite sounds, in tropes (“rain on the roof”) and anecdotes (“I was watching the sunset one evening, and this mockingbird started singing…”
I noticed that my dad had gotten kind of a faraway look on his face, just as one of the aunts said: “What about you, Howard?”
This is how he responded:
“When I walked out of the hospital after my second ear surgery, it was an absolutely perfect late-October day. I was just standing there, enjoying the sun on my face, when the most amazing thing happened.
“One of the dried leaves of a big old sycamore next to the path detached itself from the top of the tree, and I actually HEARD it hit half-a-dozen branches on the way down.
Sycamore
“It was one of the most beautiful moments of my entire life.”
He looked away, a little embarrassed that his eyes were welling up a little. That was OK; the rest of us were busy blinking back our own tears.
Such a simple thing; such a complex little miracle.
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6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bangor, Pennsylvania, c. 1908; Somewhere in France, c. 2010
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A CENTURY MAKES
My maternal grandmother Clara was born in 1890 (Queen Victoria still ruled the British Empire).
In the year or so before her marriage at age 19, Clara worked with other girls around her age at the Dennis Millinery Company in Bangor, PA. One day a photographer was brought in (I’ve no clue why), and took shots of Clara and her young fellow workers in informal lighthearted poses.
Clara is on the right...
My niece Morgan, Clara’s great-granddaughter, was born in 1993. A little over a century after the millinery photos, she and her friends (she was an exchange student in France at the time) posed saucily for classmates' cameras.
Morgan is the limber beauty on the left...
...and in the center.
OMD! (Oh, Mon Dieu!)
Quelle difference!
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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Graton, California Sometime in the 2000s
CALIFORNIA EPHEMERA II: ELFIN CHESS
One day about 20 years ago, I walked into the living room of my shared house in Graton, and came upon the scene in the photo below.
“We’re playing Elfin Chess,” replied Kathleen and Judith.
Go ahead and Google it; all you’ll get are links to something called “Elven Chess” (a hybrid between orthodox Chess and a historical Japanese game called Chu Shogi), and to a site selling a “collaborative robot” named “Elfin™,” which looks a bit like a desk lamp, and will, yes, play chess with you.
The only written evidence I’ve ever seen that the game actually exists was years ago, in the form of a smudgy photocopied sheet decorated with sketchy-looking elves and setting out the (non)rules of play.
From this I was able to puzzle out that Elfin Chess is actually less of a competition than a collaborative communion of mutual creativity. Players take turns, but there’s usually no set definition of what constitutes a “turn.”
Many Elfin Chess aficionados like to assemble their own sets of game pieces. Mine, for instance, in addition to common items like crystals, seashells, pebbles, buttons, beads, and feathers, contains an antique thimble, a wee brass Buddha, the leg of a tiny porcelain doll, Mexican “milagros,” and a toe-ring that my Uncle Dus brought back from India after WW II. Some players, like Judith and Kathleen in the photo, like to use a background cloth to set off the game.
To begin, one player lays down one or more pieces, setting a tone for the proceedings. Other players then add to and build onto the contents of the board, linking objects by any of a number of criteria: shape, size, color, material, relationship, significance, even humor and/or improbability, always with reference to the whole.
It's a game. It's a philosophy. Play continues until the players run out of space, get distracted, or decide it’s time for lunch. If you don’t have any pieces, other players will happily lend or gift you some. Nobody loses; everybody wins; anyone can play.
How ephemerally Californian can you get?
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8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan's Hill, Pennsylvania, c. 1945
BABY SURPRISE
As I've demonstrated here before, my dad took up photography in the 1930s and never looked back. Naturally two of his favorite early subjects (before we—or at least I—got bratty enough to dodge the camera) were his two little daughters.
Every time I see this photo, I wonder what my mother must have been doing off-camera to evoke this reaction.
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9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; 1950s
SURVIVING DOWN-HOME MEDICINE IN THE FIFTIES
When I was a kid, rural medicine was pretty much a do-it-yourself proposition. Outside of a yearly pediatric checkup (I absolutely loathed our pediatrician, and I suspect the feeling was mutual), you didn’t get taken to the doctor or the hospital unless you had broken a bone, or, in my case, had accidentally stuck a pitchfork into your foot, or shoved your hand bloodily through a pane of glass.
What doctoring we received was mostly of the at-home variety. I’m not talking picturesque folk medicine, here, unless you count a Pennsylvania Dutch incantation passed down on my mother’s side of the family. It went:
Heilige, heilige hinkel dreck
Morgen wirt es alles wek
Which translates as:
Holy, holy chicken poop
Tomorrow it’ll be all better
Although my sister and brother and I predictably caught and swapped measles, mumps, and chicken pox, my chief memory of these afflictions was hours of lying on the couch happily reading, getting to wear my mother’s topaz bracelet, and memorizing “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which I can reel off to this day. On Mammy Morgan’s Hill, we were fairly isolated from the very real concern of polio before the Salk vaccine appeared around 1955, and somehow none of us got around to whooping cough.
If you skinned a knee or cut your foot back then, you got doctored either with a bright red-orange concoction called Mercurochrome™ (which was later determined to contain a dangerously high amount of mercury, and was replaced with a safer version called Merthiolate™), or with the dreaded iodine. (Bactine™ was so new, it hadn’t reached us yet).
In his memoirs, my dad writes of the time he punctured his knee with a rusty nail. His family couldn’t afford the doctor, nor the crude treatments of the times, so to avert the terrifying possibility of “lockjaw,” my grandfather decided to flood Dad’s wound with iodine from a bottle which had sat around for years getting more and more concentrated. Dad carried the blister scar and the agony-filled memory for the rest of his life, but never developed tetanus.
In our family, we often soaked a cut or scrape in a solution of Neko™ carbolic “blue soap.” It was deemed so dangerous to ingest that each bar was elaborately stamped POISON, although apparently dunking an open wound in it was fine.
There was Campho-Phenique™ for insect bites, bee-stings, and cold sores; boric-acid solution for eye problems; “pink medicine” (Pepto-Bismol™) for upset stomachs; Fels-Naptha™ soap for scrubbing after poison-ivy exposure; Vaseline™ (and occasionally butter) for minor burns; Milk of Magnesia for constipation; and Kaopectate™ for what a friend of mine used to refer to as the “dire rear.”
My dad, who got the occasional boil, used something called “drawing ointment” to treat them. For general health we gagged down spoonfuls of cod liver oil, and popped red-dye-coated One-a-Day™ vitamins.
It was at our one-room rural schoolhouses that we kids received more exotic forms of medical attention—smallpox and polio vaccinations, and something called a “Schick Test” for acquired immunity to diphtheria.
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| Hopewell School |
Periodically a buxom nurse in a white uniform and winged cap would show up to check our little heads for lice and ringworm. Oddly enough, even though a number of the kids came from homes with inadequate washing facilities, I don’t remember hearing about a single case of either pest, perhaps because of the community’s isolation.
The nurse also reported on the apparent state of our dental health. This was a cause of great annoyance for me, because we were actually graded on our report cards (right under subjects like arithmetic, reading, and geography) for our “Cleanliness of Teeth.”
I was quite unfairly handicapped in this area, having prematurely knocked out a lower front baby tooth at about age three when I overbalanced while carrying a meat-grinder up the cellar steps (don’t ask), causing nerve damage that caused my second tooth to grow in a dull grayish color.
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| Here I am at age seven, keeping my mouth shut so as mot to show my "dirty" tooth. |
For several years after I started school, my report card bore a shiny row of As, followed, no matter how diligently I brushed, with a B in Cleanliness of Teeth. Finally, when I was about eight, the gum abcessed and the offending tooth had to be pulled. I scarcely minded the gap (which has since closed up), in my lower incisors, because henceforth I received triumphant As in the C.O.T category.
Other afflictions included pinworms (found mostly in thumb-suckers), and the dreaded Impetigo, a highly contagious Class-A staph infection common to the nose-pickers among us. The only known treatment at the time was a slightly antiseptic dye called gentian violet, a plant extract painted directly onto the affected area, its beautiful but telltale color causing one’s classmates to treat one precisely like a leper.
Equally visible were the pinkish-white blotches of Calamine™ lotion (a remedy that, according to Wikipedia, goes back to 1500 BC) plastered onto poison ivy sufferers, but not, happily, in our family; my dad had discovered or invented a mixture of rubbing alcohol and tannic-acid powder that we called “Snake Oil,” which dried up the blisters invisibly and effectively.
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| Calamine Kid |
Although the boys in our school mixed it up regularly in rough-and-tumble games, we girls were off-limits for actual hitting and/or rock-throwing. I suffered nothing worse than a slushball to the face one winter day, which gave me a nice shiner and deposited a piece of gravel (luckily water-smoothed), in my eye. This foreign object was unreachable without causing further injury, but slid out of its own accord the next day.
I also recall the occasion when Harry Walters clocked his brother Francis on the head with a rock, knocking the latter unconscious, with an alarming amount of bleeding. When Francis was brought inside and laid out on the art table, Carol Koose, a sensitive child, went into hysterics. I was detailed to calm her down, and took her outside to sit on the pump platform.
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| Francis |
“Carol,” I remember saying reasonably, “Calm down! It’s 1955! We have all kinds of modern medicine! He’s not going to die.” I confess I rather spoiled the calming effect of this naïve assertion by adding: “You don’t even LIKE Francis, anyway.”
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| Carol Koose |
Francis did recover, and was even perky enough two days later to put a worm down Carol’s dress, whereupon she smacked him a good one in the head and opened the wound. More hysterics, but I managed to convince her she wasn’t going to hell.
Other than that, I clearly recall the occasion when, at a precocious age, I put a pussywillow bud up my nose, where it lodged beyond tweezer range. Following a phone call with the loathed pediatrician, it was decided to let it be and see what happened. After a day or two, it reappeared. Asked why I did such a thing, I replied: “It was furry.”
Heilige, heilige hinkel dreck.
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Move on to one fall day, years later, in the late 1990s, I was working at a store in Occidental called Natural Connections. Among many health-and-nature-related items was a line of stuffed animals and puppets that acted as natural kid magnets.
An hour or so later, I was somewhat amazed when another set of wee look-alikes, the delightful Sienna and Sierra, bounced in. Again with permission, I took their photo, their dad holding their jackets so they could show off their near-matching pink and lilac ensembles.
After a bit, I wandered outside with my camera, and what should I see but two MORE identical kidlets coming down the street with their mom. This was nuts.
I hadn't thought that I needed glasses, but multiple vision was certainly the order of that day.
That was 60 years ago, but just recently David sent me this photo of the well-worn shirt, with a reminder of how it came to be, and two words I’ll cherish:
Outside of these events, he was “Dundii of Hollywood,” running his own costume shop there and working with noted designers/costumers like Elizabeth Courtney and Bob Mackie on TV, film and stage productions.
CODA: To my delight, fellow 1970s actor Sylvia McRae contributed the following link, in which the life and work of Dundii and many others are lavishly chronicled:
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My own innovation was the addition of a small pocket inside the neckline, filled with gold glitter that I would disperse, with an airy wave of my hand, in shining clouds that billowed and twinkled under the lights (first making sure that no one was standing near me wide-eyed and open-mouthed in wonder).
The third photo shows the full-on blinginess of my augmented staff and halo. And, yes, I’m carrying a cockatoo, whose owner requested the photo op, and presented me with the results a week later.
Tom Wagner, of the memorable singing trio Oak, Ash, and Thorn, took the final pic, in which, sans wig and halo, I’m perched on the aforementioned high cabinet, crumpling my pleats and flanked by Bret on the left and Greg on the right. One of my stilts can be seen at my shoulder. I haven’t a clue what was going on. Tom?
Oddly, in none of these shots are my ornate gold-and-white gauzy wings very visible, except as a pale shadow beneath my arm in the “popeyed angel” photo.
The first "Christmas Pantomime" 1970. From left: Marque Siebenthal as Harlequin; me pushing "Jack" (Billy Scudder) back into his box, John Murphy in the background; Keny Milliken turning the crank; J. Paul Moore as the Master of Ceremonies; and someone I can't identify.
Oh, at times, when there was enough of a crowd to generate some warmth and sop up the echoes, the Fair could be actually jolly. Nonetheless, many of my memories of it include: feet numb with cold; some kind of crud passing around that produced high fevers and laryngitis; frigid dressing rooms; and the justified complaints of artisans and vendors exiled to a remote hard-to-find courtyard open to the elements.
This was not to say that there weren’t many wonderful and even delightful moments that presaged a (so far) 53-year history of de-bugged and magical Dickens events. Much of the success of Dickens 1970 was due to a core group of performers, chosen for their ability to create memorable characters, adept at improvisation and able to light up a room by sheer force of talent and/or personality.
There was, for instance, Robert Shields, just out of his teens, mesmerizing as an automaton dandy; robust J. Paul Moore as magician and Master of Ceremonies in the Victoria and Albert Music Hall; adorable Susie Marceau (now Susan Philips) as the first “Princess Mistletoe;” James Kahlo as a cantankerous but amazingly picturesque Father Christmas; the amazing Judy Kory (now Judy Beatrice) as alehouse proprietress Mad Sal, belting out bawdy songs, keeping it all together and never putting a foot wrong.
Then there was exquisite songbird Annie Lore (was Julie Meredith onstage hitting the high notes as well?); and lovable actor-mimes Billy Scudder and Marque Siebenthal, turning up one minute as toy-box Harlequins, the next as rascally chimney sweeps (Ron and Phyllis Patterson’s son Kevin, then 10 years old, recalls them making an entrance by descending three stories from the warehouse ceiling).
There was a nutmeg-grater salesman named Michael, adept at cornering Fair patrons with hilarious improvised monologues; Keny (not a misprint) Milliken, stalwart in a variety of necessary roles; John Murphy as sundry villains; and the inimitable Therl Ryan blusteringly sinister as Ebenezer Scrooge.
Phyllis and Ron Patterson, with sons Kevin (top) and Brian. Kevin is now the Fair's executive producer.
“These ladies drove here all the way from Sacramento,” their guide explained, “and they’re really disappointed that we’re not open. Could you maybe do a few songs or something for them?”
10. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Union Square, San Francisco; October 27th, 1972
A SEVENTIES WEDDING: Or,
ROBERT AND LORENE DON’T SAY “I DO”
I first met Robert Shields when we were both performing at the 1969 Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire.
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| The 1969 Faire. I'm at the left, in the striped skirt. Robert is at right in the black cloak. |
We quickly became friends and co-conspirators. On Friday nights during the run of the 1970 Northern Faire, Robert would often make his way from his home base in Los Angeles to my house in San Francisco, and the next morning the two of us would hitchhike to the Fairesite together
In 1971, when he was contemplating a move to San Francisco, Robert consulted me about possibilities for earning a living. I had recently done an article on SF street performers for CALIFORNIA LIVING magazine, and suggested that that might be a natural move for him.
He was a bit shy (hard to imagine), but I convinced him to at least give it a try. He got into his natty black-and-white uniform, applied whiteface, and off we went, attracting startled glances on the streetcar as Robert interacted gently and naturally with kids and elderly ladies.
From the research I’d done for the CALIFORNIA LIVING article, I already knew which of the prime sites had been staked out by other performers. None of these, however, were in the city’s downtown area.
Market Street was out, being in the final throes of construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, but I remembered a spot near the financial district where the sidewalk had been extended back to provide a seating area. It looked promising, and there was lots of foot traffic, so Robert put out his hat and started in on his then-one-of-a-kind “mechanical mime” routine.
Whoa. Within minutes, the gathering crowd was spilling dangerously out onto the street, obstructing traffic. I saw a cop car in the distance, signaled Robert to stop, and we managed to sneak away under cover of the dispersing throng. (This would not be the last police encounter in Robert’s career.)
A bit discouraged, we trudged up Stockton St., past the lower end of Union Square. Almost casually, I glanced up at the historic park, with its broad expanse of sidewalk flanked with benches, lawns and flower plantings, full of walkers and loungers, and totally free of automobile traffic.
I stopped cold. “Robert…” I said.
That was the beginning of Robert’s reign over Union Square. The following is from a Throwback Thursday I wrote some years later:
“And thus it happened that one day I cajoled Robert into costume and makeup and turned him loose in historic Union Square, the only place in downtown SF that I realized would be large enough to contain the crowds attracted by his larger-than-life-and-still-growing talent. It was, but just barely.
I'm at left in the white sweater and glasses.
"To get an idea of the raw energy of those times, check out this teaser for a long-awaited documentary film by Mark Bonn and Christine Siebert Bonn, with footage of Robert in his Union Square days, being outrageous, occasionally outside the law, and working the little-bit-of-jerkitude necessary for holding his own on the street. (The film’s title has since been changed to “My Life as a Robot.”)
“Introducing Robert to the Square was, in retrospect, kind of like lighting the fuse of a skyrocket. As the 'Union Square Mime' (and probably the first street mime in the country, though he never meant to start a trend) he became a tourist attraction, a celebrity, and an official city treasure.
"Although he wore whiteface, his act—a mixture of improvisation, clowning, dance, gymnastics, parody, mimicry, and impersonation—was hardly the standard insipid street-mime fare that would come along after him in imitation.
"Jobs poured in. Robert became a regular in Herb Caen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning SF CHRONICLE column. He opened at Winterland for the Rolling Stones. I wrote about him in CALIFORNIA LIVING, then in ROLLING STONE (with photos by a young Annie Liebovitz), and collaborated with photographer Robert Scheu on a book about the Shields phenomenon: ROBERT SHIELDS: MIME IN OUR TIME.”
Fast-forward to the fall of 1972. While filming a TV show (his first) in LA, Robert had met sensational dancer Lorene Yarnell, and they began to perform together. Alone, each was brilliant; together, they were extraordinary.
It was also a love-match, and on October 27th, 1972, Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell were wed at a lovely big bash in Union Square. Officiating was another San Francisco legend, Scott Beach, imposing in whiteface and his Faire Lord Mayor’s outfit.
I was delighted and honored to be one of the wedding party. There I am at the right in the screenshot below, as Robert and Lorene exchange flowers, and then caught in full-orange mode at the post-wedding celebration. San Francisco’s KPIX-TV aired this recently rediscovered three-minute segment:
https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/239598... (KPIX-San Francisco coverage of the Union Square wedding of Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell/October 27th, 1972/3:00)
Robert and Lorene would go on to have their own variety show on CBS; do 14 TV specials; appear on major TV programs with a host of stars; frolic with the Muppets; win an Emmy; be named Las Vegas Entertainers of the Year; win dual awards as "Rising Stars of the Year" and "Special Attraction of the Year" from the American Guild of Variety Artists; perform for two American Presidents and Queen Elizabeth II; and tour China with Bob Hope.
But first, a memorable Union Square wedding.
The official wedding photo
The full Throwback Thursday on Robert’s amazing career can be read at:THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Seven https://a-miehilltbt7.blogspot.com/
(It’s #3 in the Table of Contents)
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11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, 1950s; Occidental, California, mid-1990s
SEEING MULTIPLES: TWINSDAY IN OCCIDENTAL
I’ve always been a bit fascinated by twins.
This might have something to do with the fact that the tiny local library on Mammy Morgan’s Hill—a cinder-block structure tacked onto a little general store maintained by our neighbors—contained, along with complete collections of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and their ilk, the entire Bobbsey Twins oeuvre to date.
As a little kid, I was enthralled by the anodyne adventures of 12-year-old Bert and Nan Bobbsey and their seven-year-old twin siblings, Freddie and Flossie. (I wasn’t alone; the Bobbsey Twins books first appeared in 1904, and hung in for 75 years.)
When I was a bit older, I was delighted to learn that not only had my paternal grandmother (born Clara Maud Elkins) had a twin brother, Claud, but also, like the Bobbseys, a younger set of double siblings, Vance and Vera. When my mother was expecting my younger brother David in the years before ultrasound reveals, I was secretly rooting for twins.
Clara and Claud are second and third from left in top row. Vera and Vance are at opposite ends of the seated row.
Move on to one fall day, years later, in the late 1990s, I was working at a store in Occidental called Natural Connections. Among many health-and-nature-related items was a line of stuffed animals and puppets that acted as natural kid magnets.
I had just gotten my first digital camera, and enjoyed taking photos of children, so I was delighted when two identical little girls (Luz and Esperanza, I seem to remember) showed up. With their mother’s permission, I took the first twinshot below.
An hour or so later, I was somewhat amazed when another set of wee look-alikes, the delightful Sienna and Sierra, bounced in. Again with permission, I took their photo, their dad holding their jackets so they could show off their near-matching pink and lilac ensembles.
After a bit, I wandered outside with my camera, and what should I see but two MORE identical kidlets coming down the street with their mom. This was nuts.
I asked, of course, if I could take a photo, and the mother replied cheerfully: “Sure, but don’t you want ALL of them?”
She called out, and, lo and behold, a second pair of look-alikes emerged from the shop next door. The quadruplets, obviously used to this kind of attention, lined up and posed like veterans.
I hadn't thought that I needed glasses, but multiple vision was certainly the order of that day.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill and Wilson Borough, Pennsylvania; 1963-2023
THE SPARROW BY A NOSE
People in my family tend to have what you might call decided noses.
Mother and Dad noses
While they’re not aquiline beaks, or Jimmy Durante-like schnozzolas, nobody would call them snub or retroussé or pert; they just tend to be a little long, and a bit pointy, nothing to be bothered about.
Sister noses.
Oh, except for that one time…
As I’ve written here before, my younger brother David was a precociously good athlete as a kid. So good that he often got more playing time in team sports than some of the older guys.
This was the case when he was a gangly eighth-grader playing on a baseball team. His prowess irked a clutch of his older teammates to the extent that they decided to indulge in a little low-rent bullying.
David's teenaged nose.
It should be mentioned that at this time, David was still growing into his handsome Hill sniffer. With the predictable level of sophistication to be found in 14-year-olds, the 9th-graders began addressing him as “Sparrow-nose,” or referring to him as “The Sparrow” (which they pronounced “Sparrel”).
Well, sticks and stones, of course, but on one of my visits home from college, David told me about this, and I could see that it was kind of getting to him.
I don’t recall whose idea it was, but I asked him for one of his plain white T-shirts, and used a permanent marker to draw the clunky cartoon shown in the photo below. David wore this garment proudly to his next baseball practice, and the 9th-grade jerks were effectively silenced by his owning of their taunt.
That was 60 years ago, but just recently David sent me this photo of the well-worn shirt, with a reminder of how it came to be, and two words I’ll cherish:
“Thanks, sister.”
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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Vietnam, 1967; Occidental, California, late 1990s; Sebastopol California, 2020
My friend Roger Steffens, in addition to being a musicologist, actor, radio personality, lecturer, author, showman, and the world’s greatest authority on Bob Marley, is a marvelous photographer.
Roger
This sub-career began in Vietnam in 1967, when Roger was drafted into the US Army’s PsyOps (Psychological Operations) Corps. In the course of his duties, he was given a camera, as well as unlimited film and developing facilities, and told to photograph anything he found “of interest.”
In Vietnam
(One of those items of interest was the plight of thousands of refugees displaced by the fighting. Roger organized a massive relief effort that earned him a Bronze Star.)
It was in the act of teaching himself to use a camera that Roger accidentally discovered the joys of that photographic flub of film-camera days, the double-exposure. Like most photographers, he discovered it by accident, but unlike most, he taught himself to do it intentionally and to great artistic effect.
On a family visit to Occidental in the late 1990s, Roger showed off his double-exposure technique by producing a portrait of me superimposed (or vice-versa) on a flowering rhododendron. Then on another visit in 2020, using a specially adapted digital camera, he double-exposed me onto myself.
About 10 years ago, Roger’s son and daughter, Devon and Kate, discovered their dad’s stash of about 400,000 photos, and began posting them on an ongoing Instagram site called THE FAMILY ACID
This collection has not only attracted thousands of followers and spun off gallery shows nationwide, but has also produced four books, in several of which my image pops up here and there, though never doubled so far.
Yet.
Here, for your enjoyment, is a selection of pics from Roger’s half-century of double-exposing.
Roger's son Devon
Neon art by Brian Coleman
Giant duck
Actor John Ritter
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14. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Renaissance Pleasure Faires and Dickens Christmas Fairs; Late 1960s-1980
IT’S 1896 OUT THERE!:
REMEMBERING DUNDII
In my ten years of performing in the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires and Dickens Christmas Fairs, I encountered many remarkable people. One of the most extraordinary of these was a towering polymath who called himself “Dundii.”
Dundii as Faust (Photo by Carolie Tarble)
The guy was literally larger than life, one of a kind, and grand in every sense of the word. Born Johann Christian Huhn von Huhn, scion of an aristocratic German family that arrived in this country at the dawn of the 19th century and settled in Galveston, Texas, he was so physically king-sized that I always felt like a Hobbit in comparison.
At 6’9” (which he frequently bumped up to seven-plus feet with lifts or platform shoes), he could easily dominate any stage, any room, any crowd. Built like a linebacker and graceful as a giant jungle cat, with the face of an Arabian Nights genie, a genial Mephistopheles, or one of the pirate ancestors he claimed, Dundii could turn his hand to infinite aspects of theatricality.
Dundii dominates the stage as Zeus. I'm to his right, in burgundy with white drape.
He could act, sing, dance, write, direct, choreograph, design sets and costumes, and elicit gasps just by appearing onstage in one of his outrageous creations. His IQ was probably off the charts, his creativity as extravagant as it was detailed, his talent vast, his sense of humor wicked and delicious, his kindness legendary.
As a pantomime dame
In spite of his intimidating size, Children adored him, and it was mutual. Christa Bates, a child actor in early Dickens Fair Christmas Pantomimes, remembers:
“Dundii was truly one of the kindest people I've ever met… He was flawless as Queen Elizabeth and we kids loved him more than anything. I’ll never forget our first Christmas Pantomime; for the finale, he let us little sprites come out from under his skirt. We were all so giddy & jumped out with more enthusiasm than any child has a right to have.
The first Christmas Pantomime. Dundii is at center back; Christa Bates is at right in second row.
“He was so incredibly kind to us kids—we were new to the the Fair world, just soaking up the culture, and we wanted to spend every minute with him. Those were the best two Christmases of my life, and Dundii will always have a soft spot in my heart.”
Dundii first appeared on the RenFaire scene in one of the earliest Southern Faires, at a time when they were still a fairly new invention and things were being made up on the spot. Faire producers Ron and Phyllis Patterson sorely needed a noble court to surround Queen Elizabeth I, and, as if conjured up, along came Dundii’s Renaissance dance troupe, Pro Delicto Antiquo, correctly garbed and performance-ready as a result of Society for Creative Anachronism activities.
Two handsome courtiers in Dundii-created costumes. (Photo by Carolie Tarble)
After that, as with many other creative people of that era, the Faires opened vast improvisational vistas for Dundii’s talents.
When the Dickens Christmas Fairs began in 1970, he got his own turn as Queen Liz in the traditional pantomimes (for which he, along with Richard Beard, designed and constructed many of the costumes).
Wearing the highest of heels and a flaming red wig, his goatee (which he refused to shave) peroxided into near-invisibility, he gleefully loomed and vogued his way through the part to the delight of all.
I had the pleasure of wearing one of Dundii’s original Pantomime costumes, as one of a pair of “Blueberry Fairies.” Yards of ombre-dyed tulle skirt, Victorian bodice, great puffy sleeves, and light plexiglass wings that looked great onstage but were a real pain in bathroom stalls.
Pantomime curtain call
I can still hear him saying matter-of-factly to my counterpart fairy Debbie, who was balking at having “little piggy-curl” hair extensions added to her short shag cut: “Listen, honey: it’s 1896 out there, and if you want to be a fairy, you have to look like a GIRL!”
At RenFaires, when not staging pageants and/or stealing the show in them as outsized kings and deities, Dundii could generally be found in his caftan booth, airily draped in nothing but one of his beautifully designed creations (while the rest of us sweltered in Renaissance layers of wool and velvet), looking the very picture of a Middle-Eastern merchant.
Dundii in one of his creations (Photo by Carolie Tarble)
Outside of these events, he was “Dundii of Hollywood,” running his own costume shop there and working with noted designers/costumers like Elizabeth Courtney and Bob Mackie on TV, film and stage productions.
Roy Johns and Nathan Stein juggle as Dundii-designed Wookiee toys in a STAR WARS TV special.
When my friends Nathan Stein and Roy Johns (aka The Mum Brothers) needed memorable costumes for their appearance on the final Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Dundii came up with their distinctive “French Clown” outfits.
With part of their $1,000 winnings, the jugglers commissioned him to produce a striking and edgy modern look. He did not disappoint.
Nathan Stein (top) and Roy Johns by Dundii
So here’s a thing: go (as I did) to the Internet and Google “Dundii” or “Dundii of Hollywood,” and you get
…nothing. Crickets. Nada.
How can this be? I thought. How could someone so large, colorful, vibrant and prolific not even register as a blip online?
Timing. Dundii’s most productive years were the pre-online 1970s. My last Dickens Faire, before I headed for an east-coast job, was in 1979, with Dundii alive and well. By 1981, he was gone, felled in the first wave of the epidemic that was to carry off entire generations of the bright and talented.
Scanning my computer screen, I was saddened by the thought that nobody in the future would, outside of a scattering of photos, have a clue that Dundii ever existed—most of his work was so beautifully ephemeral.
Then I heard of a Facebook site called “Remembering Dundii,” searched for it, and found an astonishing outpouring of love, appreciation, and celebration of this extraordinary man.
(Screenshot)
Everybody who took part in the Faire(s) of that era seems to have a Dundii story. On the site there are references to many of the things he loved —countertenors, puns, The Goon Show, Salvador Dali, Yiddish, Florence Foster Jenkins, P.D.Q. Bach, fractured nursery rhymes, songs from Shakespeare’s plays, Madame de Pompadour, Tom Swifties, etc.—along with many of his memorable bon mots, items of his personal history, and celebrations of his creativity and eccentricities. (The Christa Bates quote about Dundii and kids came from this site, and here are a few more:)
(From the site administrator, the late John Green Tree Murphy:)
“During WW II, his family dropped the ‘von’ in ‘von Huhn’ because of anti-German sentiment. Dundii told me that there were riots in front of their house protesting against the ‘Germans.’ It was one of the things that forged his psyche.
The von Huhn coat of arms
“These memories of the angry mobs motivated Dundii to learn about Jewish culture. He was an avid fan of Yiddish and used Yiddish terms throughout his conversation. He liked the knowledge of human nature and psychology that's imbedded in the language. Because of his knowledge of Jewish culture he became almost like an honorary Jew, if one may put it that way.
"A vendor of fabrics Dundii used to buy from became convinced that Dundii was Jewish and pretending to be a Goy in order to "pass." The vendor insisted that it was OK; Dundii 'didn’t need to pretend with him,' So, not to disappoint, when he was doing business with that gentleman, Dundii assumed the personna of ‘Irving Rabinowitz.’ I kid you not. The old gentleman gave Irving VERY GOOD discounts, by the way...
(From Fair(e) co-designer Richard Beard:)
“After the Faire years, Dundii fulfilled his Texas heritage and took up western dancing. OK. Start with 6'9", add boot heels, western suits and hats, and a ragtop caddy with longhorns on the hood! You see where he was going with this.”
(From Nathan Stein:)
"Dundii had a tiff with Pearl Bailey. I learned this after we opened for her husband Louie Bellson's big band....she had allegedly stiffed him for a costume he had made her.
Zeus and nymphs (Photo by Carolie Tarble)
"His Hollywood railroad apt on Seward St. was located between the Walter Lanz Studio that produced the “Woody Woodpecker “ cartoons and a manufactory of plastic sex toys. He used to say: ‘Look for me between the pecker factories.’”
The entries go on and on, tenderly and hilariously. I was delighted to find that Dundii still lived so vividly in the memories of many who knew him.
And perhaps, I thought, a few decades from now, when most of us who remember him are gone, Dundii, like the ancient gods he so often portrayed, might just begin to slide gently from memory into myth.
Oh, he’d LOVE that.
Dundii as "clairvoyant" Professor Djinn Ewan-phraud (say it out loud). (Photo by Carolie Tarble)
CODA: To my delight, fellow 1970s actor Sylvia McRae contributed the following link, in which the life and work of Dundii and many others are lavishly chronicled:
And recently I came across this:
Huhn Name Meaning
German:: (also Hühn): nickname for a tall man from Middle High German hiune ‘giant monster bogeyman’ from Hiune ‘Hun’ a word probably ultimately of Turkic origin. (also Hühn): from an old personal name derived from the ancient Germanic element hūn ‘bear cub’. metonymic occupational name for a poultry keeper from Middle High German huon‘hen’.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names 2nd edition, 2022
15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan's Hill, Pennsylvania; c. 1947
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
This winsome photo of two little country kids (me and my sister Susan) perched atop a neighbor's sturdy garden table was taken by my dad.
One thing about this photo puzzles me: that's an oak tree on the left, but what can the object on the right be?
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16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania; late November; c.1953
WAITING FOR SANTA
This little slice of Americana was captured on film by my dad as we waited for Santa to arrive in downtown Easton.
There I am at lower left, sweetly geeky in pigtails and glasses. I’ve got a good restraining hold on my little brother David, natty in matching jacket and cap. Next to us, in the windowpane-plaid coat, is our neighbor, Kathy Mayberry, which means that her sister Peggy and my sister Sue were probably in the vicinity.
As I recall, there wasn’t any kind of parade, just a Santa in a false beard, sitting in a sleigh oddly mounted on the back of a truck, whizzing by with a wave on his way to alight at a local department store (Orr’s? Laubach’s?), there to enchant/terrify small children forced to pose for photos with him.
Fortunately, Santa’s lap was never one of our family’s holiday traditions. I’m pretty sure David still believed at that point (though neither he nor Sue recall this occasion). I, however, having long since been recruited by my busy mother to wrap everyone’s gifts but my own, was no longer prey to that particular illusion.
I love the gallery of faces—Easton at that point was populated by the descendants of English, German, and Italian settlers, with a smattering of Syrians.
I especially admire the confident lady with the umbrella, the perfect centerpiece to this classic bygone scene.
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17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Great Dickens Christmas Fair, San Francisco, California, 1970s
HIGH SPIRITS/ANGEL FASHIONS
The first two photos below were taken by Carolie Tarble, beloved Faire/Fair costumer of the 1970s.
One of them was shot in full color under fluorescent lights, backstage at the Dickens Fair in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. It showcases three wonderful costume creations, including an exquisitely spangled and pleated white garment copied from the garb of a Byzantine angel on a Christmas card.
As is obvious, I wore this getup while walking on stilts, along with Bret Kuhne (in green) and a lovely youth named Greg Davies (in red, on shorter stilts). We all wore our costumes over hoopskirts that showed them off while keeping them from tangling with our lower extremities.
(An interesting side note: before Bret and Greg joined me, I was frequently plagued by “staff brats” and other kids who would try to sneak up on me, lift the hoop and yell triumphantly: “She’s not REALLY that tall; she’s walking on STICKS!” The costume department rose to the occasion and clothed the bottom half of my stilts in lacy pantalets over a pair of boots that just cleared the floor. I just loved watching the little darlings’ bewilderment.)
I can be glimpsed here at lower left as a crowd surrounds a juggler.
My own innovation was the addition of a small pocket inside the neckline, filled with gold glitter that I would disperse, with an airy wave of my hand, in shining clouds that billowed and twinkled under the lights (first making sure that no one was standing near me wide-eyed and open-mouthed in wonder).
The angel suit was quite easy to move around in, but a challenge to get on and off without soiling it on the CP’s grimy floor. (All three of us "high spirits" perched atop tall cabinets to don and doff our stilts and finery.) It was also a challenge to iron—the pleats tended to crumple when sat down upon.
The second photo, which captures Bret and me out on the floor in full glitz mode in 1977, is mostly remarkable for the startled and quite un-angelic look on my face. Although I still had long hair at that point, it was decided that the short curly gold wig would catch the light more efficiently. It did, and also itched like crazy.
The third photo shows the full-on blinginess of my augmented staff and halo. And, yes, I’m carrying a cockatoo, whose owner requested the photo op, and presented me with the results a week later.
Tom Wagner, of the memorable singing trio Oak, Ash, and Thorn, took the final pic, in which, sans wig and halo, I’m perched on the aforementioned high cabinet, crumpling my pleats and flanked by Bret on the left and Greg on the right. One of my stilts can be seen at my shoulder. I haven’t a clue what was going on. Tom?
Tom's comment: "As I recall, you were taking a richly deserved break from the sugarplum sweetness and light of the Christmas Angel to explore Lady Macbeth—'𝘐 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘦𝘰𝘯 𝘨𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦...𝘏𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘺 𝘠𝘶𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘥𝘦!'"
Oddly, in none of these shots are my ornate gold-and-white gauzy wings very visible, except as a pale shadow beneath my arm in the “popeyed angel” photo.
Perhaps I was still in the act of earning them?
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18. THROWBACK THURSDAY Great Dickens Christmas Fair, San Francisco, California, December, 1970
A history of the Dickens Fair's many locations. It's been at the Cow Palace since 2000.
CHRISTMAS FOLLIES, Or,
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY DAY
Although the Dickens Fair is now a San Francisco tradition and a roaring success, occupying over four acres of space in SF’s venerable Cow Palace; featuring hundreds of costumed performers and vendors; and hosting visitors by the thousands; its beginnings were, shall we say, a tad shaky.
That first Fair opened for three weekends in December of 1970 at the Anchor Works, a vintage warehouse (now Levi Plaza) adjacent to San Francisco’s waterside Embarcadero district.
Possibly misled by the warm fall days of their first two Renaissance Pleasure Faires held in Marin County, Dickens Fair producers Ron and Phyllis Patterson—both southern Californians with apparently no concept of a San Francisco winter— had selected an authentically Dickensian setting: a vast, dank, echoing set of warehouse buildings with grimy pitted concrete floors, occasional puddles from ceiling leaks, and little or no heating capacity.
Left to Right: Susie Marceau (now Susan Philips) as "Princess Mistletoe;" Marque Siebenthal as Harlequin; James Kahlo as Father Christmas; and me as his loyal Brigadier.
This was not to say that there weren’t many wonderful and even delightful moments that presaged a (so far) 53-year history of de-bugged and magical Dickens events. Much of the success of Dickens 1970 was due to a core group of performers, chosen for their ability to create memorable characters, adept at improvisation and able to light up a room by sheer force of talent and/or personality.
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| Robert Shields swiped my hat (from the dream sequence of An American in Paris) to pose for this arresting portrait. |
Judy Kory (now Judy Beatrice) as Mad Sal.
Then there was exquisite songbird Annie Lore (was Julie Meredith onstage hitting the high notes as well?); and lovable actor-mimes Billy Scudder and Marque Siebenthal, turning up one minute as toy-box Harlequins, the next as rascally chimney sweeps (Ron and Phyllis Patterson’s son Kevin, then 10 years old, recalls them making an entrance by descending three stories from the warehouse ceiling).
Annie Lore, who wasn't actually part of the first Fair, but arrived soon after. She was/is both a brilliant singer and a consummate comedienne. Her rendition of the music-hall classic "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow" invariably brought down the house.
There was a nutmeg-grater salesman named Michael, adept at cornering Fair patrons with hilarious improvised monologues; Keny (not a misprint) Milliken, stalwart in a variety of necessary roles; John Murphy as sundry villains; and the inimitable Therl Ryan blusteringly sinister as Ebenezer Scrooge.
(And please, it’s been over a half-century. If you were there and I’ve left you out, chime in.)
That was also the year of the “figgy pudding” meme. This holiday treat oddly dominates the lesser-known verses of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which we seemed to wind up singing almost ad nauseam.
2. Oh, bring us some figgy pudding
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding
And bring it right here!
2. We won't go until we get some
We won't go until we get some
We won't go until we get some
So bring it right here!
3. We all like our figgy pudding
We all like our figgy pudding
We all like our figgy pudding
With all its good cheer!
This humble dessert eventually wound up as part of the Christmas Pantomime (not a true Pantomime as in later years, but more like a variety show), in which an overbearing Scrooge (Therl Ryan), ordering everyone out of his warehouse, was nightly reduced to anxious compliance with threats of “NO figgy pudding, Scrooge!”
Onstage in the Victoria and Albert Music Hall: Marque Siebenthal, Robert Shields, somebody in pantalets, J. Paul Moore, Keny Milliken, my elbow and skirt,Michael the Nutmeg Grater Salesman, someone else, Susie Marceau (Susan Philips).
Oh yes, that stormy day…
It was remarkable how many of the abovementioned characters (along with a number of craftspeople and vendors) turned up in full costume on that day, ready to entertain any hardy souls attending the festivities. There were, however, many Fair folks who had too far to come to risk the weather and thus many who were absent.
Add to that the fact that by 10:30 that morning, only a small number of patrons, mostly from nearby, had shown up at the gate, so the Pattersons reluctantly decided to issue them with rain checks and close the Fair.
Most of us actors, now at loose ends, gathered in Mad Sal’s Ale House, the only space on the Fair-site with any pretentions to coziness. We were provided with hot cider, courtesy of Ron and Phyllis, and with meat pies by Narsai David (at that point not yet an award-winning San Francisco restaurateur). It was a lovely opportunity to relax and mingle.
So there we all were, many of us still in the authentically rendered costumes that had been scored by the Pattersons from an MGM Studios sellout earlier in the year, when one of the box-office people appeared, shepherding four women, middle-aged, conservatively well-dressed, and somewhat weather-bedraggled.
Well, no need to ask twice. We settled the Sacramento ladies down front and center, plied them with hot cider and meat pies, and prepared to entertain them. I seem to remember that there was a pianist, and at first various performers got up on the Ale House stage and gave of their best—this was the only occasion when many of their fellow workers would be able to see their acts in full instead of in passing.
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| Ron and Brian Patterson as "Nigel & The Nipper." |
But as act followed act, and the atmosphere began to grow more convivial, something remarkable began to happen.
These were, after all, skilled actors, many of whom had cut their teeth on the full-circle improvisational theater of the RenFaires and the hilarious bawdy serendipity of Commedia Dell’ Arte. They began to pop onto the stage with unexpected bits of schtick, Commedia-bombing each others’ acts, switching roles and props and costume pieces in a dazzling parade of vignettes, each more hilarious than the last (I remained a spectator, and I remember laughing until my stomach ached and tears were running down my face).
I won’t even try to describe the elements of that cascade of comic genius, because you absolutely had to be there. It lasted for perhaps a half-hour, and just when it seemed they couldn’t sustain it for one more minute, someone struck up “Rule, Britannia,” and the mood segued into carol-singing, ending, of course with the figgy puddingness of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
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| Ron and Phyllis Patterson |
The ladies from Sacramento were overwhelmed and enchanted, and couldn’t stop thanking us. And thus, for that brief time, we forgot about the awful weather, the chilly warehouse, the cold feet and running noses, and reveled in what was, to me at least, the exact moment that our wish for The Great Dickens Christmas Fair came true.
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, Graton, Forestville, and Sebastopol, California; 1980s-Present
THE ART OF SOLSTICE
The Winter Solstice is hands-down my favorite holiday; it’s so demonstrably and atavistically REAL
Then the Solstice arrives, and it’s like an astronomical sigh of relief, a primitive felt sense that once again, the daylight will reliably expand into spring.
I started designing and sending Solstice cards in the 1980s, passed through my primitive-computer-art-with-calligraphy period, my hand-colored-drawings period, and in 2001, burst out in full collage mode, where I’ve been ever since.
Here, beginning with the newest and working back, is a selection of a few favorites, with warm wishes for a happy Solstice.
Star Tree, 2023
Sun Up, 2023
Gotcha!, 2022
Cozmik Egg, 2022
Breakthrough, 2021
Go-Round, 2018
Here Comes the Sun, 2017
Passing, 2017
The Wow of Now, 2015
Tree of Lights, 2014
Dancing Light, 2009
Kwan Yin Light, 2006
First Solstice Collage, 2001
I was so happy to have moved into this snug cottage after years of drafts and leaks, that I wanted to celebrate it.
Sundancer, 1999
What Goes Around, 1995
1994
1993
1992
1989
1987
1987
1985
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20. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; c. 1957
VIGNETTE: A VISIT FROM THE FARRIER
To me, the photo below has an almost Norman Rockwellian feel. There I sit on the corral fence, soothing my horse Tomahawk, who REALLY dislikes the process of being shod.
Rightfully at center, bending over Tom’s hoof and the tools of his trade (note the steel-toed boots), is the farrier, Mr Eisenhard—his Pennsylvania-Dutch dialect name means, appropriately enough, “hard iron.” (The term "farrier" comes from mid-16th- century French "ferrier," which in turn comes from Latin "ferrum," meaning—and here we are again—"iron" or "horseshoe.")
Horseshoes, by the way, have been around since about 400 BCE, and were probably invented by the Romans. A horse’s hoof is the result of the evolution of the longest digit in a set of four toes belonging to a distant ancestor. Like our own nails, it’s a tough coating of dead cells protecting a tender “quick.”
Horses in the wild don’t need shoes, but equines frequently ridden over hard surfaces do, to prevent the hoof from wearing painfully down to the quick. Conversely, if shoes are left on too long, the hooves grow out into elongated “pixie feet” that can cause strain or damage to muscles and tendons.
To shoe a horse, one knife-pares each hoof to a proper length; threads long square-headed nails through the strategically placed holes in a pre-shaped and previously fitted horseshoe; nails it onto the tough outer edge of the hoof; and bends the nail-points over to hold the shoe in place. No job for a weakling.
Unlike smiths of old, who had to heat a shoe until red-hot, hammer and bend it to fit, and apply it to the hoof with a pungent sizzle, Mr. Eisenhard carries a supply of equine footwear in all shapes and sizes, from Shetland pony to Belgian draft horse.
Behind the camera, by the way, is my dad, busily taking photos and mental notes and asking the smith question after question. This photo may commemorate one of Mr. Eisenhard’s last costly visits—over $100 even back then.
Dad would eventually obtain his own set of tools, enlist our hardy octogenarian neighbor “Pappy” Helm (who was putting shoes on horses before automobiles were invented) to teach him the fine points of the process, and henceforth shoe our horses himself.
Dad loved the pioneer-like self-sufficiency of it; Tomahawk, of course, still hated it.
