Sitting down with friends....

We were talking about men—don't know how we got on that subject—but there we were, four women having dinner at a place called Turks and Frogs in Tribeca, some of us meeting for the first time. We found we had much in common, and even before dinner was over, we realized this was one of those rare and wondrous occasions where everything clicked.

One of us, okay, well, me, started talking about a boyfriend I once had when I lived in Canada. One week, E. and I decided to go camping in Algonquin Provincial Park, a vast wilderness area four-hours north of Toronto. I'm not sure why the two of us—Jews, who had no experience in the wild—thought this would be a good idea, but we did. E. seemed confident he could handle any problem that came along. 

The first night, after we had set up our tent, eaten dinner and gone to bed, we heard a bear. How did we know it was a bear? Well, for one, we could smell it. And for two, it was moving around outside without much delicacy, making it's way through the woods with grunts and shuffles.

Nice bear, nice....

Suddenly, E starts pushing me towards the opening flap to be a protective barrier between him and the bear. "What are you doing?" I hissed, hoping the bear wouldn't hear. E. was shaking in his boots, scared to death, but I felt calm, thinking: What makes you think the bear will come through the front door and eat me? If the bear attacks, he won't care what entrance he uses! Later, too late, I left E. and Toronto: that camping trip in the wilds of Canada had revealed his true nature.

Stop it!

One of the other women at dinner told a similar story: J. and her college boyfriend were active in the Vietnam protests of the mid-sixties, marching at Univ. of Wisconsin, a political hotbed. At one march, things got out of hand: police threw tear gas, as student protestors threw whatever they could get their hands on, and violence escalated on both sides. J. turned to her boyfriend to say, "Maybe we should get out of here...." when she saw he'd already taken off, flapping his legs in record speed down the block.

Moral of the story? I'm not sure, but sitting with friends telling stories about past debacles sure is fun. We laughed so hard that night because we'd survived and were there to tell about it.

Here are a few other friends and family I've been sitting down with while visiting NY:

 Katrina and Mekko at the loft

 Lunch with Lynn at Studio Bouley

 Connie on the High Line

 Outwalkingthedog, out walking her dog in Riverside Park

Molly from LA at Grandaisy Bakery

 

dear Uncle Cecil

Passing Through: part one

I was standing by the window. I remember distinctly what I felt the moment I got the news: at that instant, I knew the sixties were over. That thought seems rather simplistic now but at the time, it was a shock;  with Lennon's murder, everything we'd fought and lived for, everything we believed in was irreparably gone.

Simultaneously, I was thinking about my friend and fellow dancer, Bettle Liota, because she happened to be in NYC at that historic moment. She'd gone I believe to see a Meredith Monk performance, and I got a call that she was headed to Central Park, where hundreds were gathering for a spontaneous vigil. I wanted to be there, but I was in Toronto. Good thing for her to have taken that greyhound bus to Port Authority. What luck, I thought with a tinge of jealousy.

 Bettle  Liota in Toronto

How to describe Bettle? For one, there was no one like her, and there'll never be another....

Bettle had everything a person could want; she was beautiful, talented and smart, with long legs that for a while had more spirit than technique. After kicking around for a few years she went back to school and received a degree from York University, a star in the dance dept. A modern dancer and choreographer, she moved on to step dancing and became an expert clogger. Took up the fiddle and called square dances, sang in the sacred heart chorale. Later a mother of two and a wife. A laugh that burst out of an overly abundant chest and kicked with long legs all the way to the Rockies. 

a laugh hard to forget

By the time I left Toronto Bettle and I weren't speaking; we'd had a falling out. A few years later I tried writing, but my letter went unanswered. I don't blame her, for whatever it was that came between us was my fault. Much later, I found out from a mutual friend and her old lover that she'd died of breast cancer in the early naughts, not quite 50. She had tried mistletoe treatments in Switzerland and every alternative therapy known to man, but later as the cancer advanced to her spine she underwent a course of chemo but lost the good fight. With two teenagers, and hundreds of people who adored her, she didn't want to die.

Here's an ancient picture of us when we danced together in Toronto in the seventies, in a piece called Artificial Desperation....

Bettle, me and Nancy Shrieber

at 15 Dance Lab

John Lennon and Bettle Liota, the two will forever be linked in my mind.