Curved

You know how your friends and ex-lovers change over the years, and sometimes that change is painful to watch and sometimes wonderful? One of the most wonderful transformations I've had the pleasure of witnessing has been the way my ex-lover and collaborator Chris Carraher went from a dancer and performance artist living in the heart of the urban Mission District in San Francisco to a lesbian painter living in the middle of the Mojave desert. She has a fabulous blog and does fabulous artwork.

This month her work is featured in Curve magazine (the Jan. 2007 issue pictured here), and she has been getting other notice as well, as much for her writing (which I love) as for her art. Ya know, we were performance artists together twenty years ago! (see picture below)

Yesterday I spent 11 hours engaged in an intentional marathon talk session with other artists and writers addressing the evolution of our careers. I reflected that while I wish I had decided sooner in life to concentrate on my writing to the exclusion of some of the other creative stuff I spent the first half of my adult life focusing on (dance, music, performance art, magazine editing, activism), I don't regret having done that instead of writing. It was hugely fun, I met the best friends of my life, and I learned an awful lot -- scraps of which I still use in my life as a writer --the performing experience certainly comes in handy when I do public readings. But the period of working with Christine (as I knew her then -- lower left) and Jody (upper right) was a happy and fruitful period. I wouldn't exchange it for two novels.

(Our collaborator Jody Suden, by the way, seems to have found her way to a life in the U.K.)

Cris took that picture 20 years ago. We had met only a few weeks before. She's the one who evoked that charming expression on my face.