by Linda Sandoval
The other day I conducted one of those sneaky Internet searches. I had been thinking about an old friend of mine from another lifetime and was saddened when I found her there on that merciless search engine, dead. My old pal Karen died six years ago. We once shared a good deal of our life together. She was a sister mime back when we painted our faces white and had a good time acting like fools on purpose.
Karen was slim and blonde and had bright blue eyes. She had a crazy, manic energy and could go all day, teaching fifth graders, rehearsing, performing, caring for her own five children. Her house, low on the priority list, was an unapologetic, holy mess. She had a sad-sack husband, her second at the time, who never did much of anything and she didn’t love him any more and he seemed to know it. She was the type of woman that would tell another woman her whole heart, uncensored, talking on and on in complete confidence and not caring if she was shocking or disturbing. It just had to come out. She talked so much that at first I thought she never paid attention to anyone else but it was just the opposite. Karen paid attention to everything and everyone. That was why she had so much to say. Her personal antenna was all encompassing.
She introduced me to Anna Halprin and the Martha Graham Company and saw to it that I was able to able to study with both. She arranged for master teachers of T’ai Chi and Mime Corporeal to come to our studio. Somehow Karen knew all of the gifted people who could teach rare subjects. She raised money for arts organizations, throwing parties, serving on boards, writing grants, and she included me and taught me how it should be done. She had her own children’s theatre company and she carted these little kids around on her weekends so that they could perform in parks and nursing homes and hospitals. She was a powerhouse.
She asked me one day if I would help in her classroom. Karen had, the night before, written a full-length play for the student acting troupe, who needed to start memorizing lines plus she had to teach a section on long division and would I photocopy the script for her. I did do this but the huge script was un-collated and un- numbered. Never mind, she could handle it, collating, grading papers, assigning parts, numbering her pages and all the while entertaining me with juicy the behind the scenes gossip about all of the dance companies she ever worked with including having an affair with a big fat man with a little bitty penis who taught tango lessons. Kids would come up, asking questions about their math problems or costumes and she would stop talking and completely focus on the child and answer each and every question and when the students were out of earshot, drop right back into her monologue. She was like a mandala of separate tasks merging and flowing and filling the room with light. And the more she worked and talked, the happier she became. It was the most chaotic, joyous and oddly functional classroom I have ever visited.
Karen belonged to a spiritual group called Subud. This was a mysterious group and when I asked her what they did she just laughed and said, “ We stand in a circle and hold hands and sing Subud, subud, yaddaddaddadadadada.” (Think Shaboom Shaboom.) She was also a devout Christian Scientist. She would not go to a doctor or send her children to doctors. She stayed up nights with her children when they were sick, worrying, praying, deliberating, arguing with her faith, but she never made the call for a doctor. I took note of this. Life was about something else for Karen. It was to be lived, not fixed.
We went on tour to Mexico with a mime company. She and I had never been out of the U.S. and I had never seen a palm tree. We had a margarita, even though Karen never drank, but the first margarita was free at our hotel and we were in Mexico and so why not. Then we had several more than one, ate some rancid corn chips, also free, got head-stuck-in-the-toilet sick and still had a glorious time. We also a performed together in a touring commedia company, wielding rubber chickens and Spanish fans, speaking in rhymed couplets and sharing the leading lady role in alternate performances. Our shared costume was too big for Karen so she would improvise with it, spinning the skirt around and stuffing her props in the bodice. On another tour, I remember performing a pantomime with her in a bar full of Hell’s Angels. We were doing a mime striptease that included taking off imaginary wigs and false limbs and glass eyes and our audience got so excited they started to rush the stage. Karen grabbed me, dragging me out the back door. We blasted out of the parking lot in her car leaving a line of really scary looking guys climbing onto their “hogs” and howling for us to, “ WAIT UP!!!”
Even though she was a Christian Scientist, Karen decided to have her varicose veins stripped. After having five children her legs were swollen and aching with these nasty purple rivulets. She was about to change her life and she wanted her young, pretty legs back and uncharacteristically she looked to fix them. Karen asked me to go with her to the hospital. She didn’t think any of her Christian Scientist friends would come to visit and she didn’t want to put them on the spot by asking. She was afraid of coming out of the anesthetic all alone. I waited as she came to. She started talking right away, but her was speech was slowed and slurred and she was in terrible pain. She asked for ice chips with tears in her eyes. The surgery didn’t even help. Her legs looked worse afterwards and they still hurt. Never have cosmetic surgery, she told me. I learned a lot of lessons from Karen.
Soon after, she divorced the sad-eyed husband and fell hard for the local lothario, a handsome weakling who liked to act the big man by collecting woman and breaking their hearts. This useless creep dropped his current girlfriend, Janine, for Karen and Janine killed herself. Janine left her husband and children for this man and her family disowned her and would not claim the body. It lay in the morgue for months. Karen was struck to the ground with remorse. She worried that it was her fault, though it wasn’t at all. Janine’s suicide emerged from Janine’s own private complexities. Even so, Karen felt terrible.
We stopped working together around this time. I wanted to go back to literary theatre and Karen was set adrift in an ocean of guilt for the dead woman as well as love for the awful boyfriend. Sadly, in our result-oriented culture, if there is no convenient opportunity, no mutual advantage, connections often fade. Occasionally Karen dropped by a rehearsal to visit with me but she wasn’t the same old chatty, optimistic Karen. All the playfulness had gone to regret. The last time I saw her she looked at me with her haunted blue eyes and said simply, “Janine is still on the slab.” Like it was a portent. The Great Mother abandoned and waiting for her children. A shadow self consigned to death, isolated and alone with no one caring enough to grieve.
I was relieved to read in Karen’s obituary that she had married for a third time. Happily, by all accounts. Her life did change direction and rise up into that natural joyousness that was the essential Karen. Someone wisely chose her and welcomed her and enclosed her in a family once again and sang her praises. All of her accomplishments were listed and there were many that were new to me and many that I remember very well. At the end she was “beloved wife and mother, loved by so many while her journey continues.”
Now, all of these years later, I too am praising an extraordinary woman. What Karen understood down to her shoes was that there are always choices to be made and the challenge is to make good choices, choices that keep the spirit strong, choices that avoid damage to others. Like all of us she tripped up from time to time. But, Karen weighed all the essentials, for her children, her students, herself, her friends. She deliberated and she made a choice, and if it was the wrong one, she owned it. And she was a hell of a lot of fun.