This was a huge day for me – literally, the first dollar I ever earned from my writing. It was thrilling to hear my name called and walk onto the Villa Montalvo stage/podium to accept my prize – even better when the lady who read my poem sobbed. In retrospect, though, she was a pretty soft touch when it came to tears. Misty hasn’t stood the test of time quite as well as I might have hoped.
(In the interest of full disclosure, the beautiful white cat pictured is not Misty – there never was an actual Misty although Whitey and Calico were real cats (such clever names!) The picture is of the beautiful and much missed Skywhys.)
Three days before she died, I received a letter from Natalie. Uncharacteristically, I wrote back immediately. I don’t remember what I said but at least I wrote back. Her brother found my letter, unopened, on the kitchen counter, when he arrived in Ukiah after she was dead. My name was on the return address. That’s how he knew where to contact me and let me know she was gone.
Fall, 1961. “A family with a daughter your age is joining our church,” my father says. Natalie is short and round with blue eyes and blonde hair in a Prince Valiant cut. I’m the fourth grade giraffe, tall and skinny with wavy brown hair. She’s an outdoor-oriented extrovert, a born entertainer. I’m a sullen sedentary introvert longing for center stage despite my lack of talent.
Obviously, we’re destined to be best friends.
Natalie far left. Me next to her. Probably.y at Mount Cross Bible Camp.
January, 1967. Natalie and I are sophomores at different high schools. We claim to be cousins and people believe us despite how little we have in common. Natalie’s in Choir and Pep Squad. She’s secretary of the Future Teacher’s Club and wins a speaking role in the school play. The Beatles reign on my stereo while she remains loyal to the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean.
We graduate from our respective high schools in 1969. She and her future first husband Bobby are voted Cutest Couple and featured on a full page in Fremont’s yearbook. I leave Wilcox as anonymously as I served my time. She goes north to college, first Pacific Lutheran in Washington and then Chico State. I head south to UCLA. Natalie majors in PE and Education, I choose Film Writing. We get together briefly every summer but during the school year we forge new friendships.
Natalie and Bobby divorce. The next time I hear from her, she’s engaged to the man of her dreams. She doesn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid in either of her weddings. The outdoor ceremony takes place on a blistering August day at the Ukiah ranch where they live
Summer, 1988. Natalie, her husband and their daughter spend two days with my family on their way home from Disneyland. Natalie’s jumpy, a restless bundle of uneven edges and darting eyes, nothing like the laughing Natalie I remember from childhood. She smells the same, a summer collage of rose-scented soap, saltwater or tears, sunblock, healthy sweat and new mown grass. She tries to hide the small scaly patches engraved on the skin on back of her hands and elbows. She isn’t any smaller, but in some profound way she is fading before my eyes.
JOYCE AND NATALiE DOING RECORD ACTS LIKE IN THE OLD DAYS
Not long after, she gets divorced again. In the spring of 1994, Natalie’s mother – in many ways her anchor – dies. Natalie spirals down, then goes into freefall.
NATALIE AND I WITH HER MOTHER AND HER DAUGHTER
While at work as a kindergarten teacher, she passes out, drunk, in the ladies room. She’s fired from her dream job. Next, she loses her driver’s license. After that she loses custody of her daughter.
Fall, 1995. I hate it when she calls late at night. She rambles, repeats herself and slurs her words. I make excuses to get off the phone.
March 26, 1996. I open Natalie’s last letter. She never learned to type so it’s handwritten like all the others. The round, precise cursive lines of blue ink on the first page remind me of the tight, controlled perfection of her record acts.
Her writing deteriorated with every line, crazily sloping out of control by the time she signed her name. I wanted to believe her but I didn’t. Even so, I never thought alcohol would kill her at 44.
I hope she knew I loved her. I know you can’t save people who don’t want to be saved but I wish I’d tried harder. Whenever her name is mentioned, I still tell people she was my cousin. She’s buried next to her mother in Massachusetts instead of Ukiah. I’ve never been to Massachusetts but one of these days I’ll go.
Transplanted Midwestern sisters in Santa Clara Valley
I’m guessing the end of the year picnic at Blackberry Farm was to celebrate our graduation from 6th grade. (When did Blackberry Farm vanish from Santa Clara? And what about Frontier Village, another hot spot from yesteryear?) The diary entry suggests Blackberry Farm featured a swimming pool but not much else. Does anybody else remember? Please comment if you do! As I realize every time I do one of these diary blogs, if I didn’t write it down, I have zero chance of remembering it.
Politically, this entry is an embarrassment but in my defense I was thirteen and I voted for whoever my parents voted for. In their defense, they started out conservative Midwesterners who gradually became more liberal over the years – although I’d be stretching the truth to call them lefties. The hot dog refers to a Rockefeller fundraiser in the Santa Clara Valley, with free hot dogs as the draw. Free dinner for a family of five? Count us in!
My parents, being relatively open-minded, changed with the times as we all did – but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have predicted that our suburban orchard town would become Silicon Valley or that America would elect a black president and gay marriage would be legal. That’s not to infer they weren’t fine with these changes, they applauded them – I’m just reminding myself that the world we knew in 1964 might as well be another planet on an alien galaxy.
This was one of the worst days of my life. To set it up a little, I was at UC Santa Barbara for one quarter of intercampus visitation and this was the day I showed the film I made for one of the classes I took there.
First, I take full responsibility for this debacle. For some bizarre reason, I believed that if I made a complicated incomprehensible film that nobody could understand, the audience would be awed by my superior intellect and love me. If you doubt how pretentious and wrong-headed my film was, allow me to dazzle you with its full title – JOURNEY: A RITUAL IN FIVE PARTS.
So why do I consider this disaster one of the luckiest breaks of my life? First, I made the film in Santa Barbara, where no one from the UCLA Film Department would stumble upon it and it could die in peace. If I hadn’t launched this colossal misfire in Santa Barbara, I almost certainly would have made a similar film for my Project 1 at UCLA – which, at the time, was basically a thesis film worth 8 units of credit on which your entire career in the film department depended. The humiliation in Santa Barbara saved me a far greater humiliation.
Second, and more important, I learned in a visceral punch-to-the-gut way that obscure pretentious films are not the way to an audience’s heart. (Why didn’t I know this already? I must’ve been absent that day.) My value system changed, as is reflected in my subsequent writing career. I finally understood the most important aspects of any film, story or book are to be entertaining, clear and accessible.
And, when I made my Project 1 three months later at UCLA, it was one of four films that was awarded the Jim Morrison Memorial Grant.
This entry is typical of most of the teen years. Part of it was fun, exciting – the motorcycle ride with Rich – followed shortly by another blow to my ego. For the record, Erin Heinlein responded with class to the news bulletin that I liked him – he treated me exactly the same after finding out as he did before. That’s how one should handle such a situation, when the feelings aren’t reciprocal – although it’s hard to envision an adult scenario in which one of my friends plays messenger to inform the object of my desire that I have a little crush.
Life is a beautiful comedy!Life is a painful tragedy and then you die.
It’s also quite different from many of my junior high diary entries, in which the boy I liked was a closely guarded secret that I would die to keep. If one of my friends wanted to get a rise out of me, all they had to do is write “Kathy likes Jim” or whoever on my books and I’d be near coronary arrest. Why was liking a boy a cause for such mortification? I don’t know – but what a difference a couple of years makes.
I was fifteen, caught between the tail end of childhood and looming adolescence (becoming boy crazy). Sharing adventures with Vania and other girlfriends would soon give way to pining by the phone waiting for some cruel or clueless guy to call.
I was still deeply attached to my childhood nuclear family, as likely to spend my Friday nights with them as with my friends. It was family swim night at the local Y and for a time the five of us went every week. I can still smell the humid locker rooms and the chlorinated pool; it seemed primal and thrilling to swim after dark.
The last two sentences describe a state of mind – or heart – that I called “worldliness’” for lack of a better word. Between the ages of 12 and 16, I physically ached from an overload of emotions I had no way to process. Too much beauty in a sunset or the loneliness of the solitary liquid amber tree outside my window brought me to tears. I miss those tumultuous emotions. That fragile moment on the cusp of adolescence is too brief!
These photos were taken a couple years later – at her baby or wedding shower – but they’re the only ones I can find of us together. It’s surprisingly awkward to ask someone famous to have their picture taken with you, even if you know them – especially if you know them, actually – because you’re supposed to treat them like just another average person. However, when they’re at the peak of their fame and people gawk, it’s hard to ignore the fact you’re hanging out with a star. It’s equally hard not to be aware that you belong on the other side of the red velvet rope, with all the fans and nameless people that don’t get “seen about town” in Variety. I’m not complaining – far from it. It’s exciting to orbit a star. I loved it.
Living in LA, it’s not unusual to see stars going about their daily lives. I ran into Dick Van Dyke at a play and got to tell him how brilliant he was in a TV movie called The Morning After. I passed Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Beverly Hills restaurant. He’s much shorter than you’d think. My most memorable celebrity spotting, though, maybe because it was the first, was eating lunch at a table very close to where Cindy Williams and one of her co-stars from American Graffiti dined. I didn’t interrupt them, ask for an autograph or gape openly – it was enough of a thrill just to spot a celluloid heroine eating like a regular human being. Given this memorable (on my end) early sighting, the working relationship and friendship we developed later felt fated – in a six-degrees-of-separation way. We met because Cindy was looking for a writer. A mutual friend recommended me, for which I am forever grateful.
Don’t bother looking for Little Miracles, the project we met about on May 13, 1980. The network shelved it. Luckily, our friendship survived.
A Catholic priest created the Wutzit Club to keep teen-agers off the streets. In 1966, it was on Newhall Street. It was open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights and featured a ballroom, stage, game room, television lounge and snack bar. Dances were strictly chaperoned and a dress code was enforced. No alcohol – and nobody 21 or older – was allowed. Live mostly local bands performed; Buckingham and Nicks played there in ’68, before Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac. Dues (admission) was fifty cents – a small price to pay for the chance to meet the love of your life.
For people like me and my friends, who weren’t part of the Wilcox High “In Crowd,” the Wutzit offered an opportunity to meet non-Wilcox guys who didn’t know we were dorks. Males massed on the right side of the room. Girls milled on the left and waited for some brave boy to cross the great divide and ask us to dance. Our popularity – which in those days meant success – depended on how many times we danced. Higher mathematics were not required in my case since it is hard to miscalculate one (1).
At the Wutzit, beauty got you asked to dance. (I suspect being under 5’9” helped but I can’t prove it.) While it’s true other values – intelligence and persistence – are rewarded in the real world, it’s equally true that real life tends to be easier for those born beautiful.
Today, girls don’t need to wait by the wall. No social stigma attaches if they dance alone or with their friends. I applaud their freedom but can’t help wondering if underlying values changed too. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect more than a few millennials dancing alone still relate to the words Janis Ian wrote in 1975.
I’m not sure if I’m revealing myself (and – guilting my best friend Sandy Hegwood Walker by association) as a typical high-spirited high-school girl or a pathological liar. In our defense, we didn’t distort the truth for an unfair advantage – we just couldn’t resist any opportunity to try on a new identity. An only child, Sandy’s fantasy life and active imagination meshed perfectly with mine. We were naturals when it came to playing off each other and improvising. We had our own secret language for awhile, but that was kids stuff. When we matured, so to speak, pretending to be aspiring rock stars was one of our favorite gambits. When we really got it going, we could go into elaborate detail about our set list and who sang lead on what song. I’m surprised we never got around to printing up band cards. (But what if somebody wanted to book us?)
This fantasy sounded so cool Sandy and I struggled through a few guitar lessons before we realized our talents were better suited to shopping for dramatic stage costumes, not learning to play an instrument. Years of piano lessons, during which I fell progressively further behind my younger sisters, had alerted me keyboards might not be my forte. My next hint I might be musically challenged came when our church choir director eliminated my half of an upcoming duet with the lame excuse a Natalie Nilsen solo served the music better. I told myself she just didn’t want to show preferential treatment to the pastor’s daughter but I was devastated. While I didn’t want to “toot my own horn,” I didn’t want to hide my light under a bushel either.
I took my case to my father. “I have a beautiful voice, don’t I?” I asked.
He paused and said, “Kathleen, we all have different gifts.”
Even I couldn’t spin this response. So what if I’d never be a real life rock’n’roll icon? Thanks to Sandy’s and my living theater, I knew how it felt to strut the stage and blast away on my Stratocaster. Just to prove that sometimes fantasies do come true, Sandy’s parents bought her a drum kit which she housed in a black light room. It didn’t get much better than that.
If you’re worried about all the gullible people we deceived, rest easy – I don’t think we fooled anyone.
I’m not sure today’s millennials could survive the sixties high school experience. While searching for a photo of the frigid Wilcox High swimming pool, I unearthed an impressive array of “Mermen” shots – but this was the sole illustration of girls in the water. (I’m so disappointed I couldn’t show you the hideous dark green maillots we wore.) In fact, this was the only photo I found depicting girls in any athletic endeavor. Based on my Wilcox yearbooks, athletics and team sports were a “Men Only” preserve – not that my consciousness was high enough to perceive this slight at the time. Until I sought a photo for this blog, I never noticed the omission. Although Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, feminism wasn’t on my radar.
In addition to an outdoor pool in the dead of winter, the class of ’69 was the last to be subjected to a dress code – which meant girls wore dresses every day. If your hem failed to skim the floor when a teacher ordered you to kneel, you were sent home to change. Once a year – on “Grub Day” – girls were allowed to wear pants to school. The top photo of me with the rest of the Literary Magazine staff illustrates typical Wilcox style. For the epitome of high school fashion, see the photo below of the pair my class voted “Best Dressed”.
High school has loomed large in my writing career and I will revisit aspects of my experience in future diary-blogs. If you recognize yourself in a photo, please tag it!
