On the Road to Find Out
First a storyteller.
As a child I read fiction, including the dirty books I found on my Uncle Bruno’s bookshelf and I wrote journals and stories and sketched and collaged. The music of my childhood was the Beatles and the albums my parents had from Broadway shows like Sound of Music, Funny Girl and West Side Story that I could sing by heart. I inherited a cache of thick vinyl 78s and memorized Betty Hutton and Billie Holliday. I learned to play piano from a drunk that my mother paid with shots who taught me Moon River by Henry Mancini from Breakfast at Tiffanys.
I threw down my cheerleader pom poms after I read Second Sex by Simone DeBouvier and became a feminist. I got the first issue of Ms. Magazine in my mailbox when I was 15. I believed that “pot” made me more “creative” although I was always too high to remember my Ideas and I was high through most of high school. I was angry and dressed all in black, Goth before it had a name. I was a compulsive eater. When I was 17, my mother took me for diet pills and a love for speed was born. I had crushes, but mostly I thought boys were entitled and I resented them. The picture of my girlish face in my highschool yearbook looks like any other, but the words next to my picture were dire. Anatomy is Destiny.
Breaking Away
My father didn’t want me to go to college. My mother didn’t want me to leave her orbit, but if I had to go she wanted me to be a nurse – her unrealized dream. I got to NYU as a nursing major, but switched as soon as I could to journalism for which I had no talent. I had one friend on my dorm floor at Rubin Hall, a self-obsessed anorexic named Andi who kept getting rushed to the hospital. On a trip with my parents to New Hampshire that first Thanksgiving I lost my virginity to a sweet guitar player in the hotel bar who had weed and was a heroine addict. Back in school, worried that I was pregnant, isolated and lonely, without diet pills, and with unlimited food, I was overeating again. I gained back the weight I lost the summer before. The freshman 15 becoming the freshman 50 and more.
I had my first nervous breakdown when I was nineteen, barely finishing my first year of college. I was fighting hard not to go back home so I stayed for a while in the city, working at a German restaurant in Times Square called Wienerwalds wearing a tight white bodysuit and leaning over for tips. My classmate’s mother let me sleep on a mattress in her apartment at 88 Bleecker Street, until she and the job were both fed up with me and I went back to wander the woods behind my childhood home. Back to my Billie Holliday records and my journals, stoned, watching soap operas with my mother, and eating. My mother started hiding baked goods under her bed. I was a fat addict.
My father got me a job as a check-out girl at the A&P. I listened to the training talk about their tiny profit margin and pushed meat through for free. Only for the women of course. I liked the smell of the coffee and I saved some more money. I decided to make a change.
The road to recovery began with an “Ameripass” which you could use to go anywhere in the country for a month on a Greyhound bus. I packed a few clothes in a backpack, and my journal, took my money and left. I saw monuments and Indian reservations and walked for miles through small cities and dusty towns. I slept on the bus or in cheap motels and walked and walked. I walked the streets of Albuquerque and Kansas City and San Francisco. It was my first adventure alone and it ended in Los Angeles when I hooked up with some girls from my past that happened to be on vacation. They picked me up from the skid row hotel where I was staying and brought me to their room at the Beverly Hilton like a loser they were rescuing, not appreciating my adventure. They went to Disneyland and I met a guy by the pool that had drugs and I brought him back to their room to get high and have sex. After that, it was time to go home.
When I got back to my parents house in the suburbs, things were shaken up just enough. I moved to the basement where there was no bathroom, but I could have some privacy. Now the music was Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan. I started back to classes at NYU. Unlike the magical cross country Greyhound bus, the commuter bus was no lifeline to freedom. I got my parents to agree to an apartment in the city.
RIght around then I went to my first 12-step recovery meeting. It was an Overeaters Anonymous meeting with a bunch of women in various stages of obesity. I wasn’t really fat anymore after all the walking, but I thought I was. I met an older married woman named Sandy who had free time to drive me back and forth to the city, who took me to concerts, and gave me drugs. She introduced me to Carol King and Jackson Brown and we went together to see Cat Stevens climb out of a magic box in Madison Square Garden. She helped me relocate to a fifth-floor walkup on Thompson Street which was cramped and ugly and belonged to me. She also seduced me.
Falling in love with movies.
While I was in college I spent a lot of time watching French New Wave movies at an old theatre on the upper west side called the , and at some point realized that I wanted to make movies. Not having any idea what jobs even existed in the movie business, I took a course my first year after college, circa 1980, at a feminist collective on West 52nd Street called the Women’s Interart Center.1 My teachers were four female film editors who were already famous and who taught us fillmaking and most importantly made me realize what the different jobs were – Muffie Meyers2, Jill Gdomilow3Susan Fanshel4, and Ellen Hovde.5 I was too young and arrogant to be properly grateful for the influence of these women, and still somewhat afraid, but I knew I wanted to be an editor.
Then the studio years,
Jill Godmilow, , Susan Fanshell, and Ellen Hovde. ↩︎
Women’s Interart Center 549 West 52nd Street New York City 1970-2016 included a gallery and a theatre, held exhibitions, theatrical and musical events, poetry readings, film screenings, panel discussions, lectures, and video performances. Co-founder Jacqueline Skiles served as co-director. Dorothy Gillespie was an artist-in-residence and, later, a member of the board of directors. ↩︎
Muffie Meyers was an assistant editor on Woodstock (1970), editor on Lords of Flatbush (1974) a co-director (with Albert and David Maysles) and editor of Grey Gardens (1975), editor (with Lynzee Klingman) of Gilda Live (1980). In 1978, Muffie and Ellen Hovde formed Middlemarch Films Inc and went on to produce films for PBS, winning a Peabody Award for the miniseries Liberty The American REvolution. ↩︎
Jill Godmillow got her first Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 1974 for Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman about female conductor Antonia Brico (now in the film registry of the Library of Congress). She was won best feature film at Sundance in 1987 for Waiting for the Moon, a biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. toklas played by actresses Linda Hunt and Linda Basset. In 2022, she published what she called “a manifesto” called Kill the documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars and is a professor emiritus at Notre Dame University. ↩︎
Susan Fanshel’s career was only just starting when she was my teacher, having edited a short about LLouise Nevelson called Nevelson in Process in 1977. She would go on to edit many television movies and mini-series, ↩︎