LETTERS FROM HOME: LOOKING FOR ACTOR, SHOOTING STARS

Aug. 11, 1994

Dear Pat,

DC and I went to Ferndale a few days ago to watch the making of a Dustin Hoffman movie called "Outbreak," but for some reason they weren't shooting. Dustin wasn't just hanging around either. The movie's about a mean virus that escapes from a lab. Your prototypical modern horror. Unlike werewolf movies, based on a true story.

Ferndale is a little Victorian village full of antique shops and art galleries. We've been there often but this time walked by an old brown brick hospital a couple of times before realizing it wasn't real. The movie-makers had applied a plastic mask to a modern drive-in bank and even added a second-story facade. Even though I now realized the deception, I had to rap the hospital with my knuckles just to make sure it wasn't really brick.

Unreality of a different sort awaited us and 10,000 other folks at Reggae on the River last weekend. All the local nonprofit groups and some professional vendors set up booths that fit around the stage and seating area like a big horseshoe. They were selling Rasta Pasta and drums and African statues and Jah-Man coffee. Free-lancers roamed the crowd asking, "Do you need a ganja brownie in your life tonight?"

Bands played from 10 a.m. to almost midnight both days. Some, especially the African ones, were very good. A few sounded like they'd arrived direct from an engagement at the Kingston Holiday Inn. The most moving thing I heard was a man who at dusk played the eerie-sounding Aboriginal instrument called a didjeradoo. The sound sort of resonates off your breast bone and seems to reawaken your primal self from the sleepwalk life can become. I wanted to light huge bonfires whose leaping sparks, when night finally fell, would turn into shooting stars.

Another movie star, Danny Glover, was there and said a few words about peace, love and unity from the stage. Actually, I ran across him in town a few days earlier. He was in the market in the bulk food section, shoving the contents of a bag of potato chips into his mouth. A young stock clerk walked up to him and uttered these immortal words: "No eating in the store, guy."

Peace, love and unity actually were much in evidence at the show. The only trouble I saw involved a woman who'd decided she would enjoy herself more if her breasts were unencumbered by clothing. She danced in front of the booths awhile and seemed to be having a wonderful time until one of the booth owners offered her a shirt. There followed an often heated debate between the two over what I imagine to be the issue of whether her bare breasts were hurting his business. Maybe not. Maybe they were arguing over the price of the shirt, but he sure seemed intent on giving it to her.

In my mind, she was taking great offense at his suggestion that the world would be a better place if her breasts were covered up. And he was saying he didn't have anything against her breasts personally but that some of his customers might not be as liberal-minded as he.

Truth is, if she'd been one of the hordes of bare nymphets twirling about the grounds, I think the guy might have been dancing with her. But she was a woman of certain age and a certain weight. It made me think of the life-size porcelain dolls I saw at an art exhibit. One was a beautiful crone. I know those two words aren't supposed to go together, but there it was, a face that was evidence of a life lived inside out.

I stood before it a long while, taking in her fine hand-stitched clothing, her bent bones, her smallness. Most of all looking at her face, beaming out her love of still being alive. Love both happiness and pain because it is yours, she said. As age etches my body, she said, it beautifies and beatifies my soul.

Months later, I met the artist, Holly Sweet, a woman involved in a women's sewing collective. She is another woman of a certain age, a kind of California country Catherine Deneuve. What bravery, I thought, for this woman to envision herself old. And baring-of-the-breasts wonderful that she still found herself beautiful.

Love, Sam