Things I Have Shared

Last night I was up past 1:00 a.m. doing laundry (when it's your turn, it's your turn.) I shared the laundry room in the basement of our apartment building with a totally weird, drugged out and deranged neighbour who carried his laundry around in a cardboard box marked "Danger!" "Hands Off!" "For Your Eyes Only!"

As I washed our clothes, I thought about some of the other things I've shared in the past:

Dirty dishes with a former Miss America, 1982. I was a busboy at Gilda's in Santa Cruz. She was Miss America 1980. "Thank you," she said in a pretty little Mississippi drawl, as I scooped up her lipstick-covered coffee cup.





A hug with Carlos Santana. Christian Life Center, Santa Cruz. 1983.

A near aviation disaster and certain death with poet Robert Bly in 1993. Everyone on our flight was asleep except me as we descended into a fogged-over Lisbon at dawn. Our plane came down out of the clouds to find a 747 sitting directly beneath us on our runway. The pilot violently jerked the plane skyward to avoid disaster and narrowly save us. Robert Bly, asleep in the row across from me, didn't miss a wink through the whole thing.

A washroom with the great Pharoah Sanders, during a break in a show by this jazz legend at Blues Alley on Washington D.C., in 1997.

A small table at House of Nanking in San Francisco. This is one of my all-time favourite restaurants and it's eternally crowded. On a packed evening in August 2001, I was eating alone and a waiter sat me at the table of another single diner who just so happened to be one of my all-time favourite performance artists, the incredible Guillermo Gomez-Pena. He chowed down his food and talked on a cell phone during the whole time I sat there. But was it art?

An arts panel with the incredible musician Michelle Shocked. She struck me as more like a creative force of nature than just a simple individual. What a beautiful person. Sojourners, Washington, D.C., 2002.