Month: June 2002


  • This is my great-granddaughter Miranda.  Maybe it’s just because she’s a girl, but I think she might be even cuter than her father was at about that age, and he was adorable.  You can see his picture with my blog from a couple of days ago.  I know I said I’d avoid posting images to keep my pages loading quickly, but grandmas–and great grandmas–do get sentimental, and I love imagining the “awwws” when most of you, women especially, see Miranda.


    Portia’s comment about my name-dropping blog from yesterday put things into perspective.  Deadheads and fans of Tom Wolfe might recognize names such as Mountain Girl (she married Jerry Garcia if I recall correctly), but as I said in that blog, Gregory Bateson hasn’t got nearly the fame he deserves if our Portia hasn’t heard of him.


    BluePaNDoRa, we are writers of a feather, you and I.  The run-on sentence is my speciality, and I wouldn’t get far at all if I didn’t have two articulate men, a dictionary and a thesaurus around to help me choose words.  I seem to be a better writer than I am because I’m a fairly good editor.  I’m glad you happened in here, otherwise it might have taken me much longer to find your site.  I’ll have fun getting deeper into it, and exploring your SIR list.


    SealKitty, IMFFHO, having Ernest Borgnine hit on you gives you the right to drop his name, fershure.  Shame on him, that dirty old man; I’m sure you were just a child at the time.


    My weekend was devoted to photographing a Saturday wedding and then getting up on Sunday at an hour that would be pre-dawn if this were not the season of the midnight sun, to edit and modify the images, and make a few lousy sample prints on my ink jet printer to show the bride and groom.  I’m sure they have no idea yet of what a great record of their big day we have on my hard drive, but there will be time for that to be revealed.


    The setting for the wedding was the annual Spring Fling at Ray and Sindi’s place.  This party on the first weekend of June is usually a rowdy affair.  The wedding, and the presence of so many children and elders, seemed to bring out the best in that rowdy crowd.  I left when all my memory cards filled up.  The reception/party was just starting and the children’s curfew hadn’t come yet.  When I went back the next afternoon, the subdued and hungover remnants suggested that I’d missed at least a wee bit of rowdiness.


    Now I’m off to replace the current crop of scenic shots on my gallery webpage with wedding pics.  I’ll let you know when it is ready to view. 

  • “Empower me.”

    I’m on the laptop again, so by the time this shows up on Xanga, it will have spent the night on this hard drive and/or the little black disk with the tiny illegible sticker. This thing’s last battery will hold a charge for no more than a few seconds, so it must have that umbilical thingie snaking back to a power supply somewhere. I can live with that. But my umbilical thingie is plugged into the same power strip as the worklight on my jewelry bench over there by the computer where the kid is. He has these marvelous powers of concentration that have been dxed as ADD. He’s playing a game. To get his attention, I say, “Hey!  Kid?  Turn on the power strip… I need power over here… empower me!” That did it. And now….

    High Hookups,

    in which the semi-famous psychic shamelessly shows off a few tenuous connections with the truly famous and the merely notorious.

    Fame is capricious and fickle. We don’t all get the notice we deserve, and some get much more than they can handle. I have some modest fame myself, as the “Fu-Bar Lady”, developer of the recipe for the world-famous all-natural healthy organic herb and spice fruit and nut bar cookies. And I have easily a thousand second- or third-degree connections such as my step-father working for Sammy Davis, Jr.’s eye surgeon or my shooting speed in a bathtub with a roadie for the Greatful Dead.

    When I arrived early once for a Hells Angels benefit concert in San Francisco in the late 1960s, I stood down by the stage during set-up and sound checks, and schmoozed with Janice Joplin.  After I complimented her on her baggy vintage pastel silk dress, she complimented me on my skin-tight black jeans.

    There was the time, a couple of years later, when my boyfriend the Hulk took me to Ken Kesey’s farm and we passed the chillum and hit up some crank in the old chickenhouse that used to be Mountain Girl’s room. Rubbing elbows with Merry Pranksters over a span of a few years produces some moments like that.

    Years later, work would bring me into contact with some music celebrities. I worked security at some Anchorage concerts in the ‘Seventies.  The high point of that chapter of my career was passing joints onstage with Kiss while our whole security crew sat on the edge of the stage to keep the fans back. The rest was just a lot of crazy work with an excellent soundtrack. The NDN rock group Redbone were a rude bunch of assholes, and Tina Turner is a genuine sweetheart, lucid and luminous.

    In one of my past lives, I had close friends among the actors who worked with Will Shakespeare; and in another, that little gimp Toulouse-Lautrec used to stand in the wings to watch me dance.

    That was nothing… well it was something, but nothing like the awesome thrill of having been in an auditorium at a little community college in 1968, hearing Gregory Bateson talk about the coming Cybernetic Revolution.  He nailed it!  He knew that nobody knows how this is going to turn out. And he knew that henceforth and forever, everything has been changed by these machines. He knew so much more than just that… if you’ve not had the pleasure, read some of his stuff sometime. Talk about lucid and luminous! Bateson deserves a lot more notice than he’s ever gotten. Through his recorded and published words, that man continues, twenty-some years after he left this plane, to enlighten and empower us.

  • Family Reunion


    I’ve had reunion on my mind ever since a few weeks ago when I got some clues to finding my long-lost middle-aged “little boy”.  Yesterday an unanticipated reunion came at me out of left field.


    The image above shows me with my first grandchild, twenty-three years ago, the last time I saw him.  He’s the son of my eldest daughter, who is now deceased.  The boy and his brother and sister grew up with their father, and I was never able to locate them.  When I came online a couple of years ago, I located the kids’ other set of grandparents and wrote a letter to them.  After months of no reply, I tried again.


    Last night I answered the phone and a sweet, somewhat hesitant voice said she was my grandson’s fiancee.  After two years, my letter had finally been passed along to one of my grandchildren.  My grandson was too shy to talk to me, but this young woman who is the mother of one of his children, expecting the second, had enough courage, curiosity and love to call me.


    I’m a great-grandmother!  She’s two years old and her name is Miranda.  I still have not seen pictures of her and all I know of their whereabouts is that it’s in the Central Time zone.  I guess some caution is understandable when making contact with the crazy Great Grand Mama.  But Miranda’s mother Felicia (such a felicitous name!), my grandson’s estimable (in my view) significant other, gave me their email address.


    Mere hours before the phone call, I’d been thinking about my grandkids.  The thought crossed my mind that I could well be a great grandmother by now.  And then…. Ta DAH!


    As soon as I was off the phone, I called my other daughter to let her know I’d found her sister’s kids.  Her eldest, whom I’ve only known through emails and phone calls, answered the phone and seemed as excited about finding his cousins as I was.  He and my daughter had plenty of good news of their own to share, so all ’round it was a very good day for family affairs.


    My heart keeps singing:  “Miranda, Miranda, la la Miranda.”