Columbus, Ohio USA
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Gazette Columnist Christine Hayes
email hayesmoon@core.com
Daughter of the late Ben Hayes – former columnist for the Columbus Citizen-Journal

See Also: Hayes Features

MAY 2008
Outgoing on Olvera Street

Christine Hayes at the Avila Adobe, August 1956.

I was taught to be quiet and polite as a young girl growing up in Columbus, Ohio. This did not prepare me for the man my Aunt June was to marry, Mark Cowdrey. I had met outgoing, boisterous men before – certainly my father – but not one who would spend all his time exploring the world and having fun. He liked me to come along for the ride in his red MG with the top down, with the black cocker spaniel Skipper airing his ears out in the back. We drove from Mark and June’s house on Avocado Crest in La Habra, California, to downtown Los Angeles. In those days, there were no freeways. Mark always pointed out Tennessee Ernie Ford’s house on the way.

We went to Olvera Street. The street was part of the Californios Culture when LA was a part of Mexico (1821-1848). Eleven Mexican families started El Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1781. They flourished with cattle ranches. Agustin Olvera was the first county judge of LA. By 1848 the Mexicans were overrun by Americans. By 1928 the Mexicans were already in ghettos (called barrios now) and Olvera Street was cut off by a highway and by Italians. But
a forward-thinking socialite named Christine Sterling decided to save Olvera Street. She raised money. The street was closed to traffic in 1929. The old Mexican buildings were renovated. By 1930 it was reopened as a tourist site. In 1953 it was named a State Historic Park. And in 1956 Mark and I were venturing there, parking the MG by the Mission Style Union Station (for trains) across the street.

In the overhanging arches of the old hacienda –the 1818 Avila Adobe – we could see a compelling garden. I remember hanging back, but from Mark’s beckoning I followed onto the porch and there we saw a woman sitting. He won her over with his banter, and we talked for some time. Well, they talked and I explored the cactus garden lined by rocks, the shady veranda with old-wood poles and hanging vines. I do remember the woman telling us that this was the oldest existing house in LA, belonging to then-mayor Francisco Avila. The only other thing I remember about her historical conversation was the fact that people cured themselves of a number of ills by going over to the pharmacist’s and getting a leech. That really impressed my 9-year-old mind! She pointed out the pharmacy window and in subsequent visits to Olvera Street I would look at the window and shudder.

I learned from Mark’s example that day the value of forging your way in and becoming inevitable. And the value of listening.

Uncle Mark with his albacore, Ensenada, Mexico, 1956.

On Olvera Street also were the first church, firehouse, and theater in Los Angeles. At the oldest continually serving restaurant, La Golondrina, we ate taquitos (rolled-up tortillas with meat) enchiladas steamed with cheese in cornhusks, outside in the dry LA air. We bought St. Christopher medals and huaraches (sandals). My cousin Jim (who was also with us sometimes) and I liked to dance on the gazebo’s tiled floor and hear the echoes. We might have done the Mexican hat dance. Where did we learn this? From cartoons? Soupy Sales?

For some reason, on early TV in Los Angeles, they played the movie Them! over and over. It starred James Arness and a lot of giant ants who are taking over LA. The ants were breeding in the concrete tunnels that were the “rivers” of the LA area. My cousin and I watched this movie a lot. I think it warped us some. Near Olvera Street in downtown LA was Japantown. My cousin and I made fun of the plastic Japanese food on display at the front of the restaurant we always ate in. Especially the plastic octopus. This stuff was supposed to make you want to order the food, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. In Japantown my aunt bought pedestal flowering plum plates that we ate off of for years.

Later we all went to Ensenada, Mexico, with a trailer and slept in a campground. I got a really bad sunburn and got to fish from the beach. My Uncle Mark went deep-sea fishing and caught some albacore. He canned it himself in peanut oil and I can remember how good it tasted. He glued a photo of my dad on a Mexican columnist’s picture and sent it to my dad. It had Fumar in the title of the column which Mark thought meant “humor” but it means “to smoke.”

I’m going to end this memoir with an anecdote about a restaurant in Bucerias, Mexico, a little north of Puerto Vallarta. We were a merry party with a private driver looking for respite from the ubiquitous souvenir sellers on every beach in Puerto Vallarta. But to no avail. Even the most remote beach had Mark-like persevering vendors. So we decided to go up on a balconied restaurant and eat overlooking the ocean. It was a glorious day. Before we could get a bite of mariscos (seafood), however, the mariachis (musicians) were upon us … and the most amazing thing was, the balcony had a huge crack in the floor that one had to step over, and the whole place was listing toward the sea. But we ate well anyway, my eyes looking down over the edge of the crack and watching sand crabs scuttle in the waves and create their airholes in the sand as they dug in.

APRIL 2008
Tupperware tops off trip to Chardon

Independent Tupperware Consultant Laura Welling demonstrates her wares.

We were hip-deep in snow and Tupperware in Chardon, Ohio.

Chardon, located near Cleveland, is the “Buckle of the Snow Belt” and the county seat of Geauga County. The Maple Festival occurs here in late March (think pancake breakfasts with lots of local syrup). Amy Bennett and Justin Simons got the jump on festivity by hosting a Leap Year Tupperware Party at 7:29 p.m. on February 29.

Amy and Justin, actors formerly known as “Rose and Bud” at the Central Ohio Home and Garden Show, and “Marge and Bob” at the Columbus Symphony Summertime Concerts, among many other roles, invited co-workers from the mental health field, neighbors, and friends to dress in ‘50s style and enjoy ‘50s cuisine while Independent Tupperware Consultant Laura Welling asked ‘50s trivia questions of her audience and demonstrated the famous “burp” top – and other attributes of the enduring and endearing line of plastic home products.

We warmed up by munching Melba rounds, blue cheese bites, Jell-O shots in three colors, pizza, and crudités while listening to Justin’s eclectic record collection. Among his selections for the evening were Judy Garland, the Incomparable Hildegarde, Do-Si-Do with Tommy Jackson, the Bob Allen Trio at the Christopher Inn – circa 1963 recorded near the circular pool at the circular poolside lounge – and my personal favorite, Taboo Volume 2 (“new exotic sounds of Arthur Lyman” – Kahiki-style music with shrunken heads on the cover). Copious liner notes made for excellent party reading.

Records not only spun on the turntable but adorned the walls. Yellow and orange 45’s (which we surmised played at 78 rpm because we couldn’t quite make them go) emphasized the slant of the stairway – early arrivers Jennifer and Quinn gamely donned brightly patterned aprons and did the honors of arranging. A word about the guests: they tramped in from the frozen tundra in various states of anxiety and then relief, as they had to negotiate finding the place and problematic parking. A plaster head of “David” wearing an apron and sporting an umbrella with PARTY written on it beckoned the wary traveler. A fruit-printed dishtowel was buttoned onto a tree. Tall sticks indicated the side of the road, as snowplowed piles of the white stuff towered everywhere.

Rose, of the poodle skirt and faux cheetah-fur jacket, missed the David and the dishtowel and the flashing porchlight signal as she drove up. She followed a dinner guest right into the place next door. Fortunately, Neil, the occupant, was cued into the Tupperware event. He bounced between his place and the party, wearing the ant-printed apron, winning lots of raffle tickets in the trivia contest, running back to mind his dinner in the oven. Rose found her way into the right house to join other guests Susan, Cindy, and Briana in apron-wearing, munching, and Tupperware lore.

Laura presented her wares in between the wild goings-on, a bit ruffled by the unruly attendees. She looked fabulous in a playing-card-themed apron. (I wore terry-cloth mushrooms.) Amy wore a flowing red apron with her fruit shirt as befits her shared ownership (with Justin) of the Froot Coop, a fruit-themed art car formerly of DooDah and Grandview. Justin wore a beer shirt with “Wick” on the name slot (yes he answered to that for the event).

The modern Tupperware slogan is E3 (“Enlighten, Educate, Empower”). So I’ll do just that: did you know Tupperware adds glamour to a simple snack, sophistication to domesticity, value to women’s work, and raises consumerism to a social event? Tupperware’s on display at the Museum of Modern Art (and was featured in a show at CCAD in the not too distant past.) Depression-era values of “Waste Not, Want Not” came to fruition with Earl Tupper’s invention. The product didn’t sell in his first venue, the hardware store. It took marketing genius Brownie Wise to create the ‘50s furor of home sales, the party setting, conventions, competitions, prizes.

My mother was an early Tupperware saleswoman in the 1950s. I have memories of entering strange (to me) homes and advocating the products myself. I was fond of the popsicle makers and the little tumblers. Unlike Mary Kay, Avon, and Longaberger products, Tupperware does not seem a luxury but a touchstone to purity. No stereotype of the makeup wearing, cigarette-smoking, bridge-playing idlers here – this club means business! The other similar American company, the Fuller Brush company, sold to the individual. But as a group, the Tupperware consumers “circulate beyond the realms of utility, status, and individualized desire.” (A quote from The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America by Alison J. Clark, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.) Justin quoted The Graduate: “I have one word for you, young man: Plastics.” So our shenanigans were bathed in glory as we ordered our piously useful products.

Nowadays we have the Disney-and-Nickelodeon-licensed Tupperware product. (I ordered the modern popsicle makers with Mickey-head handles and the SpongeBob SquarePants sandwich containers) and the ergonomic devices (I ordered the corkscrew and the simulated Cuisinart with interchangeable paddles and blades.) The widespread use of the microwave oven gave Tupperware a shot in the arm. Laura wowed us with the 8-minute cake made in the microwave in a special Tupperware container: a small pineapple cake mix, a diet Coke with lime, and half a can of icing on the bottom, and then the rest iced on afterward.

Justin, Amy, and I rehashed the party in the knotty-pined Chester Diner (near Chardon) over hash browns and eggs and toast. The Joys of Jell-O and Pyrex Passion cookbooks, won by Amy, will become her prize possessions. We agreed my next trip up would include a visit to the Mayfield Drive-In movie when it opened in May, with snacks brought along in Tupperware, of course. Amy can’t wait to use her new “Forget-Me-Nots,” hanging Tupperware containers for the fridge, expressly for those often-overlooked half-lemons or half-onions. After breakfast, Justin and Amy headed home and I crossed the Chagrin River toward Columbus, my bright yellow Tupperware cheese-cutter door prize glowing from the dashboard.

MARCH 2008
Hot Times Brings Warm Thoughts

The Mendelsonics grace the stage at Hot Times Festival 2007.

In this season of bare trees and blowing snow, it is fun to think about Hot Times.

Hot Times is a sunny cartoon, a kaleidoscope of colors – a mad dash through a rainbow, a box of geegaws and gimcracks we keep under the art car table, a shower of bright notes falling from horns and drumbeats in rhythm with your heart. Singing and swinging and sashaying around.

In order to describe it, let’s divide and conquer. Columbus’s own Hot Times Festival (always the weekend after Labor Day) has three separate areas. The Main Street Stage with the colorful dance floor is one, the dance floor often filled with dancers, drummers, or children. Included in this section is the friendly (and inexpensive) beer-and-wine bar. Also just outside the tent is a line-up of food vendors, carefully chosen for variety and ethnicity, meaty or vegetarian, sweet and healthy. Café tables and chairs dot the lawn for the use of diners and listeners. Huge trees complete the scene.

The second area is a street fair, its members all chosen for their exotic wares and sense of community with the neighborhood. The neighborhood is the Near East (near Olde Towne East). The location is the shaded lawn and driveway of the Columbus Health Department at Parsons and Main. This historic building was constructed in 1874 as the site of the Ohio State School for the Blind. Jazz notables Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Art Tatum were educated on this site. Although some turrets have been removed, the handsome architecture still towers over the commercial proceedings below. (Ample parking exists on the other side of the building.) The old porch area (“The Porch Swings”) is the site of Saturday afternoon fashion shows, also dance revues, acoustic music, visual arts.

The third area is the lawn itself. From this lawn is a classic view of the city and also the sunset. On this lawn you might find art cars, Sonny Fenwick blowing mighty bubbles with his Bubble Truck, a Starbucks art van serving free pumpkin frappucinos, a big bouncy kid-bouncer, storytelling, an art tent with projects for kids and kids at heart, Jim Arter leading a sculpture project. The Community Stage features everything from Poetry Slams to yoga.

Hot Times is usually just that, a bright, sunny weekend. Last year, for the first time, it rained. But something exciting happened because of the rain. Most people gathered in the Main Street tent. Always before its sides had been rolled up to catch breezes (and to see the Four Mints arrive in their stretch limo.) But, due to extreme pelting rain, the sides were dropped to enclose us all safely. As it happened, Bisengo Musica, of the Congo, was scheduled to appear at this time. As they took the stage, the many band members apologized for not wearing their feather-and-animal-skin wild apparel (we had seen the picture in the program). No one cared – as soon as they started playing, the energy rippled through the tent. It was like being in a Congolese nightclub, without the danger. Coziness and great acoustics defined their steamy set. They played for what seemed like hours.

These well-remembered musical moments are what Hot Times is all about, from reggae to jazz to blues to rock and roll. That and the sense of community. The festival, like Comfest, is run entirely by volunteers, and also has a rich history going back more than 30 years. All the programs include honored artists and remembrances of dearly departed Friends of the Festival. But unlike Comfest, the venue has remained small and user-friendly. And, of course, the entertainment is free, and excellent, thanks to the efforts of Darryl Mendelson and Cliff Hardy.

Arnett Howard kicks things off on the Friday afternoon, sometimes followed by the Mendelsonics. Whether you like Jamaican food or German pastries, you might like brunch with jazz on Sunday. And sandwiched in between on Saturday you might like the stars of Columbus’s musical heritage: Shaun Booker, Willie Phoenix, Dave Workman, to name a few. It’s the kind of stage where anything can happen and surprise musicians are popping up.

Let’s go over some personal highlights – first of all, there was a back massage person there who really knew her stuff. I bought many Christmas presents from Kojo and Pepper’s booth (and presents for myself.) We love to have Candy Watkins (the festival’s organizer) over for a snack at the art car “living room.” At night it is amazing to watch the night hawks flying above, catching insects in the bright lights – they must live in the towers. They fly in time to the music!

And did I mention the parade? “Saturday 11 a.m.” is the call for the Columbus Children’s Parade down Bryden Road ending at Hot Times. It’s the gathering of the clans, with a free lunch for the children at the festival.

Is Said weaves his poetry into both stages, with a performance of his spoken word and also in leading a Poetry Slam. Listen For the Jazz All-Star Band is the live embodiment of the Listen For the Jazz recorded history project. B.Wahru Cleveland brings her talent to the drum circle at 11 a.m. on Sunday. Dan and Jody Thomas got married at the festival a few years back. There was cake for all. They are essential in organizing the street fair and the food vendors and making sure all goes well. Other stellar operations coordinators are Lynn Stan, Bill Shaffer, and Anita Ba.

Give it all away – that’s how I feel about the festival. Give back, don’t hold on too tight, improvise, start over, roll with the punches. By the third day you’ll feel like family. And you’ll be bouncing to the tunes wafting over the grounds.

JANUARY 2008
Occupational Food

The crew of the Spritzgarten and friends. Christine Hayes front row center, wearing the hat.

My occupation as a food service worker began as a freshman in college: I prepared desserts for consumption in the dorm cafeteria. That is, I took sheet cakes, large cobblers, puddings, or pies, and transferred pieces onto little plates. I used to love those desserts, and ate at least five at every meal.

During the meals I was the key number-taker at the desk at the entrance. Dormies and others who had bought a “meal ticket” would show me their plastic number as they entered. I would let certain people that I liked pretend they had a number. Some people ate free all year like this, especially an actor who went on to become famous as the Right Guard man in commercials. In gratitude he gave me a ceramic jug which I gave to my aunt, which she treasured all her life.

By graduate school I was the only female employee of the Spritzgarten, a German food-and-beer-and-wine restaurant on campus. All the male employees were members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) so we had strange plainclothes police mixed in with students and professors as clientele. I was the cashier in lots of eye make-up and miniskirts. The artist Bruce Nauman was teaching during this time period and he always played the Beatles’ “Number 9,” a long sound collage, on the jukebox.

In my memory both the cafeteria and the Spritzgarten have the tone of a peasant-group scene by Bruegel; riotous talking, constant moving of chairs and tables, love intrigues, pontificating, solving the problems of the world. It was the late ‘60s at the University of California at Irvine.

During summers, between college years in California, I worked at Green Meadows Country Inn near what is now Polaris. A bevy of young people worked there. We had kind and entertaining chefs, Earl and Ervin. We served tons of fried chicken. Between shifts we got to go into a hotel room and watch “To Tell The Truth” on daytime TV. We waitresses (we were not called servers then) wore plain white polyester uniforms and white shoes. There was one older waitress named Marge who barely tolerated our shenanigans and shouted “Behind ya!” when she passed with a tray of food.

For a time, I moved to Honolulu and worked at the Burger Basket in Waikiki. That was the first place I witnessed young boys who hung out there by day, turn into drag queens at night. I quit after eleven days and got a better job in a record store. I tried out for Hawaii 5-0 but did not get a part (everybody was doing the Hawaii 5-0 thing.)

I worked at a restaurant called Millabee Treats in Laguna Beach, Calif. We future employees imbued the hippie architecture and furniture with collage and fun paint touches before it opened. I painted pink roses on the floor of the women’s bathroom and blue on the men’s. We had a grand opening at which everyone in town feasted on organic vegan cuisine. We did a photo shoot as an ad for Millabee’s up in the Laguna Hills (later the scene of a wildfire) in fine hippie dress on Persian rugs and café-style tables and chairs. The wonderful restaurant closed within months but the Hav’astand (its take-out silo) and Hav’achips still remain.

Cut to San Francisco where immediately I started living in a commune that was the company called the Ecstatic Stomach. We made sandwiches and sold them through New Age Natural Foods on Ninth Avenue. My job was cutting sheer slices of Jerusalem artichoke to put on the sandwiches.

I went to Guadalajara with family members to vacation for Christmas. While in a park there, I met a lawyer who owned a restaurant in San Francisco. He gave me a job as a waitress when I got back. It was the trendy vegetarian Shandygaff of the early ‘70s. Many a rock star and new-age guru ate amid the huge graphic-painted walls. We waitresses outdid each other in outlandish attire (though we did not wear see-through like those trampy Trident waitresses in Sausalito.) One of the kitchen staff was a very young Mollie Katzen of Moosewood fame. We were a cohesive and jolly group who fraternized outside of work.

Recently I got an email of a Shandygaff reunion. Maybe I’ll get to see that old restaurant gang of mine. It was a heady time. I had the job of adding decorative touches to the place – I remember the school desks with zebra pillows by the payphone and huge baskets of pussywillows in the spring.

From the Shandygaff I went to the Acme Metal Spinning Works Café on 24th Street. It was a popular neighborhood soup and salad kind of place. I used to serve the famous photographer Imogene Cunningham, she always wore little ethnic hats.

Then I went to the apex of restaurant jobs, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. I had to belong to the Dining Room Employees Union. I worked in Drake’s Tavern, a red-plush-and-copper confection in the old-style large-booth, dimly lit scheme. I worked my way up to head waitress. We had really mean chefs, Arne (Danish) and Fritz (German). They always called you “Miss” in such a way that it was a demeaning term. We also had Chinese busboys who yelled at us. But we became friends and they took us to the Golden Dragon and ordered the best things. Later, I went to one of their wedding receptions at the Tau Tau. I never saw so much food and drink in my life.

And the legacy went on: My son worked at Easy Street in San Anselmo (Marin County) as a combination busboy and greeter. Easy Street had great food and an even greater child’s playroom. When I left California I added some nice things to the playroom.

It’s all a fantasy of ephemeral creations disappearing from plates. The endless food-service fandango. Any server has my sympathy.

NOVEMBER 2007
Cornfall . . . and the resurrection

Ramona and Christine celebrate a corny birthday.

The day started innocently enough. A little screech owl warbled a birthday tune from a hidden branch, a sound like no other I’d heard from him or her. The night before Susan and I had watched the chimney swifts do their diving dance into the school chimney. But these events gave no clue of what was to come, though anticipation had been mounting for at least a year, when I spoke to Magdiale in the garden.

I had expected to have at least some of the party in Dragonfly’s garden, little foreseeing ankle-deep water on the bricks. Some people stayed away entirely because their cats had been scared by the hour-long sirens!

Yes, those tornado sirens. One or two people said they looked up to see circular swirling clouds the color of steel wool. The authorities blew those sirens out that day – we’ll not be warned if the evil swarms come around again soon.

But back to the innocent birthday morning. The yellow sun and the blue, blue sky. I was relaxed and happy, waiting for my friend to show up at his shop and do my hair. (I was treating this birthday like a wedding or a prom – ha!)

As the minutes ticked by, the realization started to sink in that maybe all was not going as planned. I went home and did my own hairdo, sticking a crown on top of a sculpted swirl, a few tendrils curling from the humidity. I located my scepter. I did take my high-heeled strapped sandals but never put them on.

I wondered at this point where Susan was who had flown in from California for this big event. Finally she showed up, triumphant from a trip to Trader Joe’s, with items too numerous to count. She’s a food and drink aficionado, far more sophisticated than I. We examined all the goods and had chiles rellenos (my request) for a late lunch. We were still in relaxed mode even though the mystery of the missing hairdresser hung in the air.

We dressed in our elegant but now sweaty chosen gowns and stepped through the front door frame in order to enter our cars. Let us suspend disbelief for a moment: it was the sunniest of days, but at that exact moment a roar of thunder rattled the house, and the aforementioned sirens started.

Susan was returning a rental car, and I was to meet her at the rental office. Then the two of us were to drive to Dragonfly, for a last-minute check before we went to my studio to bring in artwork. I yelled to her over the sirens, “We need to get to the basement!” She, never having heard tornado sirens, and being the feisty person she is, said, “Oh, those don’t mean anything.” Just then the phone rang. I ran to pick it up. There was a “click” on the line. I played the message: my friend Greg saying, “I arranged these wild-weather alarms just for your birthday.”

I ran back out to the driveway. Susan was gone! I jumped in my car and drove to the rental place. I sat for the longest ten minutes of my life, ears ringing from the sirens. The sky in the west had what looked like the ominous black clouds of death coming toward the little hut.

After an interminable time she arrived. (She had been filling the gas tank.) She fussed for a while with the rental car. (Sigh.) I was having visions of us in the tornado scene from the Wizard of Oz, the witch cackling on the bike and all.

Susan got in with me and we drove down High Street, sirens blasting every ten blocks or so. She had her head out the window looking for the funnel cloud. At Ohio State we had to pull off to the side while the sheets of rain obliterated our ability to see out the windshield. When the storm abated, we continued to Dragonfly. Cristin, co-owner of the restaurant, had brought the children downstairs because the potential tornado was, according to the radio, in the neighborhood!

Instead of picking up my art for the walls, we drank a glass of wine poured by the comforting Patrick of Dragonfly. At least if we were to be lifted away we would do it in style. Finally, the black sky gave way to the sun. Susan and I left for the studio. But – in moving my huge ear of corn sculpture, it split in two. Susan insisted we bring it anyway. I didn’t have the heart to bring anything else.

Back at the restaurant, Susan and Patrick patched up the corn and hung it on the wall. I filled the rest of the space with little stuff I had expected to group on a side wall, a montage of my life. It looked odd, but maybe nobody would notice.

Guests started arriving. No time to contemplate. Time to just be. All was convivial. I sat on my “throne” (an ornate but comfy chair), barefoot in a dress printed with orchids, an encrusted banner across my chest (lots of buttons and badges). I greeted everyone as they arrived. I saw groupings engaged in sparkling conversation. Food and drink were brought to me. Presents piled up.

Suddenly, the ear of corn fell to the hardwood floor and split in two again. I could not run to it, nor clasp it to my bosom. I later noticed it had been draped across a chair, and still later dragged forlornly to a corner (so much for ever showing my art at Dragonfly’s Neo Art space. I think I will concentrate on my photography which should not split in two.)

When caketime arrived, the birthday song was sung once. No cake appeared. Then later it was sung again. This second time Magdiale’s creation, a beautiful and delicious vegan cake decorated with flowers and berries, rose like a vision toward me. I blew out the one candle.

I have two names, Ramona and Christine. The two songs and the two corn parts symbolized this dichotomy. And I’m always torn between being out in the world and being in my own little world.

But this little party tale isn’t over. Oh no. There was the double hit-and-run just outside. Many guests witnessed it but no one got the license number of the offending vehicle. Apparently there was a lot of smoke and noise coming from the vehicle.

The SUV (as reported by witnesses, not me) locked bumpers with my neighbor’s car, which bumped the car in front of it. This front car was Caroline’s rental car. She was freshly back from India, floating among us all in a white sari like an angel from another world. This crashing brought us all back to earth.

The SUV extracted itself and peeled out. Much exclamation was made over the amount of rubber on the road. The two hit vehicles were crumpled in spots but still drivable. Caroline kept saying, “It’s so good I took the insurance!” A little assurance goes a long way. What a dramatic ending to the party!

My friends packed up the corn sculpture. It was amazingly intact at the end – I didn’t think to ask who put it back together. They packed up the presents and we went back home – stunned but satiated.

I’ve been interviewing the persons involved for their feelings about the party – one said, “a traditional framework with stark individuals.” Sometimes the best-laid plans…

One part of me wants to be summoned to the feast of Life. The other part wants to be left alone. It may be a long time before I have another birthday party. Or, I may have one every year. Only the Ear of Corn knows for sure. It’s listening to the tenor of the wind. (To be poetic about the uncertainty of Life, and the feebleness of the Will.)

SEPTEMBER 2007
Thoughts on a birthday

Christine as the Birthday Fairy.

While driving down a rural Ohio road recently, our car surprised six turkey vultures feasting on roadkill. One by one the compact, strong, bronze backs, seemingly headless, literally sprouted wide wings and took flight over us as the car sped by. Later, I thought about them as the six decades of my life leaving me, like spaceships leaving a space station. Leaving only me hovering in the void. Me and the lingering smell of carrion.

I’ve been spending more time with my aunt and uncle, both 92, because of their necessity to be in the hospital and nursing home. Nothing could be less romantic than a nursing home. Approaching a birthday topic with a nursing home angle is not a good start. I’m not trying to be depressing, though. I’m thinking of the ability of instinct to take over when one advances in age. Those vultures flocked together and shared. They took off as one entity. When I’m old, I’ll need my buddies to help hold me up, both mentally and physically. So I’m looking around for buddies.

On the same trip, we saw actual fish in an actual clean stream. The fish would swim toward shallower water – my son pointed out the current ran faster there – in what looked like a game of one-upmanship to see who could get “farther out” – and yet they would all line up perfectly facing the current when the shuffling of fish-bodies was done. They did this over and over. They were moving as a unit (like some human endeavor) but there was always room for expansion. I took this as a sign that in the duration of my seventh decade, I would utilize all the talents I’d gathered in the first six, to provide meaning to what had gone before (sort of like the seventh Harry Potter book.) My endeavors would go further, then line up.

As a child I had an ancient “Aunt Mil” who, every time we came to visit in Lakewood, Ohio, would say to me, “Want to see Whitey go to the store?” Whitey was her equally ancient dog, a nearly blind miniature cocker spaniel. Whitey would sit patiently while Aunt Mil put a scarf on the dog’s head and tie it under the dog’s chin. Aunt Mil put a change-purse between the dog’s teeth. Whitey’s eyes would look a little pained, but she held that purse unflinchingly.

I was fascinated. About the tenth time Aunt Mil and Whitey did this for me in a single day, Auntie Gladys, her sister-in-law, would yell, “No, she doesn’t want to see Whitey go to the store!” (Of course I did.) Aunt Mil’s eyes would look a little pained but she would obediently put the scarf and purse away.

It did not dawn on me until many years later that Aunt Mil was senile. And in those days, senile people were not indulged as they are today.

I am not sure what conclusion to draw from this, except that none of my cats would do this trick at all, unless the cats were very, very senile.

Very near where Whitey used to take his mock-journey, grew up the Berry sisters of Shaker Heights. When the two of them accomplished the significant age I am about to accomplish, they went on significant journeys, one to India, the other to Easter Island. (The India journey also involved a month of silence.) I pondered the journey I might take. I decided it was far enough to go to Dragonfly (the restaurant). I’m heading farther in than farther out this August.

I’ve been to some far out places though. Once I was on the road to Hana on the island of Maui, sitting on a promontory overlooking a little missionary church and the ocean beyond. One of the most peaceful places imaginable. Suddenly, a jeep roared down the slope, and one of its occupants shot a seagull with a gun. As the bird’s body fell with a splash, I thought, “You can’t get away entirely.”

My friend and I found the most picturesque café in Maine, on Deer Island in the town of Stonington. The sun came out from the clouds and we sat on the deck overlooking the fishing boats. We ordered cups of cocoa. Our waitress was ill and coughed into our cocoa. We drank it with trepidation .

I was looking for a friend of a friend in Yelapa, a tiny fishing village south of Puerto Vallarta. The only way to get to Yelapa is by overloaded motorboat. We were warned to wear bathing suits because you get totally soaked from the spray and the water in the bottom of the boat (true). Through use of my Spanish and winding around pathways (no electricity or cars in Yelapa), we found her house. She was talking to someone. I spoke to her and told her who I was. She looked over and said, “Yes. Nice to see you,” then turned her head, dismissing me, and went on talking. I had come this far to be snubbed! Oh well. Where are those buddies again?

And I won’t go into the near-riot I got into in Agadir, Morocco, at the Berliner Zirkus. Or the near-riot in Paris the night DeGaulle was voted out of power. I am sure I have used up nine lives and have guardian angels. Anyway, I have been far out and come back. The path can be rocky and there’s no place like home.

JUNE 2007
Sucking my sustenance off the sidewalk with a straw

Spalding Gray kept an index-card box with the titles of all the theatrical events he’d been in. He would draw a card and then do a monologue on the randomly chosen one. I haven’t been in as many shows as Spalding Gray, but I do have a few cards to put down on the table.

I did the lead-off for a show of interconnected little dramas in an art gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco. The idea was that the audience would gather in the storefront one door away, step out into the street, and enter the gallery next door, where they stood and turned as each wall became a set for a short play. Meanwhile, the decorated art car, the Turkey Toyota, would be undercover in the street outside, as the first piece of the evening. As the audience stepped onto the sidewalk, the cover would be pulled off the Turkey Toyota and a (seemingly unexpected) drama would unfold around the car. The drama involved me, as a Golden Turkey Egg, talking to my chauffeur. (See photo, depicting the line, “Sucking my sustenance off the sidewalk with a straw.”) I will spare you any more dialogue details.

The first time we tried this little drama in the street, a homeless-type man walked directly between me and the audience, with a bleeding gash in his head. I caught my breath in the middle of one of my monologues, but I had to keep going. I had heard the audience members gasping before I got him in my line of sight. Not only did Mr. Gash-Head recover, he was a regular for my street show almost every night after that.

The show had two “tour guide” actors from the Teatro Campesino. As rehearsed, they simply greeted the audience and led them out into the street. But on the last show of this run, they decided to add a little drama with a mock-domestic struggle involving a gun. My chauffeur-actor and I were hiding in the covered car. We heard the yelling, and thought it was coming from the apartment above the storefront. We were just about to call the police, when the audience descended upon us. We couldn’t believe no one had heard the argument. But then we found out that we had been taken in by the tour guides’ drama.(The audience went on into the gallery and saw five more presentations. It was a daring and edgy thing, that San Francisco theatre of the ‘80s.)

Through a Sausalito maskmaker I got involved with outdoor pageants using huge masks and dancing and music. As I was going on stage at the Sausalito Arts Festival, clad as one of the four elements (Earth? I changed from one to the other as casts varied for these shows), Lucian, my small son, whose teenage babysitter wasn’t paying attention, grabbed the strings of my costume and ripped them as I stepped out. The audience thought it was part of the show!

From the pageantry I went on to the Bolinas Floating Sun Festival. One year the focus was the California condor. I made a condor mask and costume and “flew” (ran, holding out my large wings) around the beach, with “scientists” in white lab coats trying to catch me with a net. Later, I went to UC Santa Cruz where I gave a presentation on the pageant, and wore the costume. I had parked my decorated Turkey Toyota (at the request of the teacher of the class) right outside the door of the hall, in a grassy park. Apparently the university police had not been informed, although I had a parking permit. During my talk, and I use that word lightly, my son was telling me through a side door, unseen by the audience: “They’re towing your car away. People are pushing it up the hill.” When I ended the talk shortly, and “flew” out the door, my car was indeed gone. We found it up in the upper parking lot, and a heated argument ensued. We were not fined, and drama is supposed to arouse emotions, right?

One year the Floating Sun theme was Gaia. We, as a group, decided to build a two-story papier-mâché goddess with an interior under her skirt where all participants could go and be “blessed” and receive a token of the Earth Goddess. I was chosen as the maskmaker artist to start the huge head and torso. I was out on the Bolinas Mesa on a sunny but windy day just having a good time with large amounts of chicken wire, flour, water, and paper. I had a sculptural, wavy woman in mind, and that’s what I created. Along about late afternoon a man came who was on the committee, and decided that my goddess was too wavy. He took a hammer to her and “straightened” her up. I was incredulous. He said it was for stability. He was not the usual kind of person to do this, but I had to go along with it, because he was building the bottom story, if you will, of the goddess. Now, I still look at those pictures of the straight-laced, stiff Gaia and laugh.

In subsequent Sun Festivals, I decided to let others star and direct. I attended rehearsals for a dancing and speaking chorus much like a Greek chorus. The writers of this segment seemed to be serious in their intent. When pageant day came, only two members of the chorus, my friend Cypress and myself, stepped out to do the piece. We felt like fools (a role we often did play, with appropriate costumes, in “downtown” Bolinas) because the piece didn’t work with two actors out of eight. We found the rest of the chorus later, lying on the sand, having taken some kind of mushrooms. That was my last Sun Festival, but it continues, on the fog-wisped beach in Bolinas.

One last note: my favorite Bolinas set-piece was a dragon-head made from an overturned armchair, lots of drapery, flowers, and well-wishers underneath.

APRIL 2007
The case of the disappearing desserts
Or, the scoop on snow ice cream

Christine Hayes hiking
in Marin County, Calif.

When I was in junior high school, I had to bake a cherry pie in Home Economics. I got a ‘D-’ on my pie. I remember there was a lot of staying after school to finish baking and a lot of spilled pie sauce in the oven. I have never made a cherry pie since. There was a time when I was an “Earth Mother” type; I baked organic pumpkin pies in cast iron skillets. These were more successful. And I’m known to bake a custard pie now. (Well, I buy the crust.)

Also, I am a big fan of tiramisu and crème brûlée. But, I don’t remember these desserts being around when I was a kid. Then, it was spumoni ice cream. And then they invented tortoni ice cream. These were the highlights of my childhood desserts. And you can’t find them nowadays, not of that remembered quality. They came with little papers or cups that you peeled off. The spumoni was what passes for “Neopolitan” nowadays, but richer and with pistachios. Mexicans have a triple-colored cookie called a “Payaso” (clown) that has that spumoni triple- header look. But my quest is for Nesselrode Pie.

I had it in New York City once, and I thought it was a New York thing like cheesecake, but I couldn’t find it anywhere the last time I went to New York. It is a concoction of fruit and chocolate and some filling and crust. It was superb. The recipes on the Internet vary quite a bit, but they all require a (gulp!) double boiler.

I’ll give you my recipe for snow ice cream. First you take a big bowl of clean snow. Then sprinkle sugar on it (I use the health food store fructose granules). Then put some vanilla in it. Stir. Lastly, put a little milk or cream or soy milk in it. Stir again. Yummy. (Cocoa powder – real cocoa powder – is good in it too.)

I have considered opening a snow café with snow smoothies, snow sundaes, snow stir-fry. Ramona’s International Snow-Fry Café. Our specialty would be the Oxymoron Omelette – a little snow, a little salsa.

In March and April, it’s often snowing when the calendar says it’s spring. “Snow time ain’t no time to sit outside and spoon.” Spooning and forking are out of the question; it’s time to go jogging. But one cannot jog on snow safely.

I used to jog around a lake called Phoenix, in Marin County, Calif. (I hope my high school gym teacher, Miss Bach, is reading this. She often gave me ‘F’ for the day for sitting around and talking instead of jogging.) Phoenix was one of the Marin Municipal Water District’s six manmade lakes. Five of the lakes were forged from Mt. Tamalpais streams in the teens. Italians came in 1917 when labor was needed to build Alpine Dam. Quaint hunting lodges had to be removed before the water filled the canyons. I like to say the names of the lakes: Lagunitas, Bon Tempe, Alpine, Kent, Nicasio, Phoenix.

The Italians settled in Fairfax, west of San Francisco, below the lakes (for 13 years I lived there). Wonderful Italian restaurants still flourish in Marin. My son’s first job was as a delivery boy for Ghiringhelli’s. (He was fired when he changed the company’s motto on his T-shirt to “Fat my pizza” instead of “Eat my pizza”.) I never got to ask if there was any spumoni.

Yes, good restaurants. And I was addicted to the carob-covered almonds at the health food store. Thus, the need for jogging. The path was dirt around the lake, but fine-crafted rustic stairs surrounded some of the water, for even better exercise.

The Pacific Sun, one of the local newspapers, informed you on how to react if you saw a mountain lion (sometimes sighted at Phoenix Lake). You do not turn your back and run. You stand still. You slowly pull your jacket up around your head and spread it out with your arms. (All Marinites wear jackets for when the fog comes in.) All the while you are staring the cat in the eye. You begin to slowly back up. Fortunately, I never had to try this out.

I always hoped the mountain lion would appear, if it had to, during a certain section of the hour-long skirting of the lake. This section featured the ranger’s house, like a toy-craft movie set, obviously constructed by those same stairmakers (WPA? CCC?), lovingly gingerbread, with antlers.

I thought I might back myself into the house, hopefully with the ranger near, still staring into the cat’s eyes, and then take a look around inside.

From the teens to the ‘30s, daytrippers from San Francisco came into Fairfax on trains for a look around. Hiking, a dance pavilion, and the extensive picnic grounds were the draws – and a break from the fog, for Fairfax can be sunny and dry when all around is overcast. A novelty from 1913 to 1929 was the Fairfax Funicular, 500 feet up the hill on a wooden trestle. Fare on the one-cable car was 5 cents.

One woman came every weekend. Maybe she ate spumoni at the restaurant at the top of the funicular. But she was mainly interested in the bronzed Italian men gardening without their shirts on the high sunny ridges of Fairfax. For those more well-heeled, or less inclined to heights, a pianist played a grand piano from a platform in a redwood tree at Pastori’s, the Italian restaurant which took over Bird’s Nest Glen from Lord Fairfax and his wife.

And then I’ll explain about Lord Fairfax. Charles Snowden Fairfax, the tenth lord in a family of Scottish peers, came to California in 1849. He was a politician, but his reputation was made mostly on his hospitality, gambling, and drinking. His legacy lives on in the “Wild West” feeling of Fairfax (they used to film westerns in the hills above Fairfax). Somewhere, there’s a sign I made for the town that looks like a piece of ribbon candy – toys glued on, including cowboys.

Eventually, the excursion trains stopped. The pavilion was used for basketball practice. Then, in the 1990s, the town of Fairfax and a pioneering puppeteer named Frank Gonzales started an artist-in-residence program. I succeeded Frank as artist-in-residence of Fairfax for two years. The studio is located in the loft of the old white wedding-cake of a dance pavilion.

I made successful desserts and served them to the good people of Fairfax at Valentine and Christmas open houses. But no pies or snow ice cream. I had to move back to Columbus to be able to make fresh snow ice cream.

FEBRUARY 2007
My Life as a Clown

Christine Hayes after a long day clowning.

It all started with a school auction. For the highest bidder, I donated my services as child’s party entertainment in the character of the child’s choice.

The Birthday Boy chose Princess Leia. So I wore a spangly jumpsuit and my hair in balls upon my head. I don’t remember much about the Star Wars party except there was a long staircase up to the mountainside Mill Valley home, and there were some mighty nice Star Wars paper plates. As I staggered back down those wooden steps after the party, I felt a new career dawning upon the redwood slopes.

I must have entertained those children. In my five-day-a-week job, I was a Montessori teacher. In short time, I had a seven-day workweek to fill the constant demand for a birthday clown.

I soon had an elaborate repertoire of songs, puppets, and shticks with props. I did not run around with a squirting seltzer bottle, a big red nose, or do pratfalls. No, on the contrary, my act was designed to calm the savage sugar-fueled child. I was crowd control.

I didn’t have a kinky name like Zuzu or Koko. In fact, quite often I would arrive as a “normal” person and put my costume, wig, and make-up on in front of the children. This quelled their fear of the evil clown. It also killed time for which I was paid. Face-painting on the children also filled time, after the half-hour to an hour “act.”

The worst parties had children who were older. Their attention-spans did not allow for fingerplays and group movement, so they distracted the younger ones.

My very worst parties came at the beginning of my clown career. There were many wealthy families from Iran in Marin County (near San Francisco) at the time. They had lovely children and homes, but their grasp of American birthday customs were sketchy. They knew they needed a clown and a cake, but had no idea that playing loud Persian music drowned out my act. The grandparents yelled in Farsi from the kitchen. The mother and her friends lounged on the couches. Nothing could happen until the father came home.

At last, he arrived! The parents of the party guests were also arriving to pick up their children. Video cameras caught the frantic action: A cake hurriedly sung over and cut, children asked to stand around makeshift tables. “Eat your cake! Eat your cake!” yelled the young mother while the much-older dad wondered what the shuffling clown was doing. I got my pay and beat it out of there, tripping over unopened presents. Everyone was baffled by the chaotic scene.

By the end of my clown career I had three clown costumes: black with colored hearts, half-orange/ half-yellow, blue with stars and jacks. Ruffs were stringy, puffy, or ribbony; wigs were blue feathers or orange rag-doll. I had a collection of fancy clown gloves and wild boots. Hats were straw with fake fruit, or cute and ruffled. In addition, I had two rabbit costumes, white and lavender, pink overalls adorned with a large moon and stars, a pale-blue Birthday Fairy costume, a rather Bavarian Santa outfit (I used flour for snow on my shoulders), a flowing cloud costume, and a golden turkey egg costume made out of egg cartons.

I was ready for anything.

I was the Christmas Fairy at a stylish house. Things were going fine until the piñata. (Mexicans have elaborate safety precautions when they have a piñata with their children – it’s their ritual.) Other people have little idea of the dangers of (1) a child (2) a baseball bat. I had to get out of Christmas Fairy character to prevent pure havoc and injury. The piñata never broke. A hand had to be inserted and candy given little by little to the tykes who would have bumped heads dashing into the scene. Later, I saw the father outside beating the piñata to death with the bat when he thought no one was looking.

I gave away all my clown costumes when I moved back to Columbus. I do have a jester’s cap that I want to wear on Mardi Gras Day. I kept some of the non-clown costumes, but I don’t wear them much. I think I’ll have a “Hand of Fate” garage sale in which what goes, goes, and what stays, stays. I look at the old photos and think, what ever happened to that outfit? The ebb and flow of clothes is the heartbeat of the thrift-store shopper’s art. My mother was a precise seamstress but my slapdash style cut a wider swath.

I had a little “magic music box” with toys and beads glued all over it that I used to entertain the kids. Once in a fury of clown hurry, I put it on the roof of my art car and drove off. It hasn’t been the same since. In high school, my son used it to carry his egg around. (Do high school kids still do this? It was some kind of awareness thing about learning responsibility that they all had to do.) I was proud that a clown box got such a deal.

All my props and puppets – they migrated somewhere else. Maybe kids don’t like clowns anymore. I don’t see any clowns hanging around my neighborhood. Maybe the clown mystique got too antique. Good only for Circus Day, DooDah Day, or Doomsday. Cremate me in my cloud costume, I’m headed for Clown Heaven, where piñatas are safe and cake is eaten sitting down.

DECEMBER 2006
Francis Ford Coppola and the San Francisco Collection

Christine Hayes and Francis Ford Coppola
at the Art Deco Ball, San Francisco, 1972.

I collect books on San Francisco. I lived in “The City” and its environs for 27 years (1970-1997). My son still lives there, in an art gallery in the Mission District. I’m sure he’s living in an art gallery because rents on apartments are sky-high. He keeps his stuff in a warehouse of a skateboard company.

He tells me, “Don’t send me anymore books.” I send art and skateboard books, because he is a skateboarding artist. To him, the streets are fluid, because he approaches them on small wheels. He likes to travel lightly, and books don’t fit in with that lifestyle. Ipods and laptops do, maybe a paperback or a sketchbook.

My books on San Francisco allow me to contain the city in even rows, on call, between covers, whereas the real City is a sprawling, brawling, traffic-choked, construction-yoked miasma. It is picturesque to the tourist, but exactly what makes it picturesque is the cause of many a standstill: water and hills. You can’t get from one place to another except on bridges, ferries, extremely steep streets, or gridlocked flat streets. I want back the time I spent in my car (laid end-to end, I’m sure years of my life). I can’t look at the book Above San Francisco – the sight of the many freeways makes me exhausted. I will always gauge a mile by the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then there’s one more variable: fog. The force that thwarts fluidity. It’s not always there, but quite often, it is. And its partner, wind. Strong wind. One thing I know about is wind. Like a tremulous Arabic ditty, it flows through your head nearly constantly in San Francisco.

In my San Francisco book collection, the one where I can file the city away neatly, I pinpoint the events of my years there: every street corner, building, and city block tells a story. Many corners in San Francisco are on the edge of one district or another. One such building, on the edge of the Financial District and North Beach, is Columbus Tower, at the corner of Columbus (one of the main streets in San Francisco is called Columbus) and Kearny. Called Coppola’s Cupola, because he owns it, it sports an onion dome on top of an eight-story flatiron.

The Art Deco Ball, 1972. The Sheraton-Palace Hotel on Market Street, in the Garden Court. My date was John Diamante, a mayoral candidate in a satin Uncle Sam suit. What I wore: one of those slinky white satin deco gowns. I was standing behind a potted palm when a sweaty, portly, bearded man in a rumpled white suit asked me to dance. (John was dancing with another deco-clad woman.) The white-suited man was holding me way too tight. He challenged me with body language to follow his jerky lead.

I noticed that everyone was staring at us. I thought we were odd, that’s why everyone was staring. Then, flashbulbs started going off. The song was over. That
awkward moment. I realized who he was and became even more awkward. Luckily people started to talk to us and the moment was broken. I rejoined Uncle Sam.
A few days later, a photograph appeared on the piano in my house.

(I never found out how it got there.) Here’s the photograph. You guessed it, Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Coppola is no saint, but for a time he became the unofficial patron of San Francisco. Even his name is Francis! Now I buy his wine. A toast to St. Francis, patron of wine and films. Huzzah!

And my son is now a (skateboard movie) filmmaker in San Francisco. Just give him one thing to hold onto – a camera. (But no books.) From 1973 to 1975 Coppola published City magazine weekly, which contained bold graphics, gossip, pieces by hot new San Francisco writers, and some muckraking in the style of former newspapermen of the city like Ambrose Bierce.

(Another Ohioan who moved to San Francisco.) City set the tone for a new San Francisco society that was rising like a phoenix out of the hippie “ashes.” A band called The Tubes set a rather edgy pace for the “scene.” Could disco be far behind?

I’ve been looking up facts for this article in Literary San Francisco (Ferlinghetti and Peters, City Lights, 1980) and San Francisco Architecture (Woodbridge, Woodbridge, and Byrne, Chronicle Books, 1992.) In the former volume I came across this passage by John Steinbeck: “I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me… this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed.”

I need to get those distracted, refracted glasses and look back at San Francisco like Steinbeck – I also fledged there and my son has grown old there. Many city blocks have changed since I left almost 10 years ago, beyond all recognition. Former warehouse areas are now filled with skyscrapers, condos, and office buildings. Coppola’s Cupola and other true landmarks will stay. The rattle and chime of the cablecars will still echo through the hills. But the wind – the wind will not blow through my collection. I can trot out any person or spectacle at will in the relative calm of my home.

OCTOBER 2006
Stars in my eyes

Christine Hayes with her father, the columnist Ben Hayes,
and Pat Boone, about 1955.

As a child, I bought into “Pat Boone Fever.” His preppy cardigan sweaters, white teeth, and white bucks sent girls into a frenzy. In an embryonic rapture I met him at a press party in the Deshler Hotel.

Right after this picture was taken, I was out on the balcony with a press agent’s sons, dropping ice out of our “Shirley Temples” on unsuspecting passersby many flights down. And wearing that navy-blue polished-cotton-with-white-lace dress my mother had made! (You can just imagine the white socks and patent leather mary janes I wore on my feet.) It just goes to show that wearing nice clothes and being in the presence of a star does not automatically dictate good behavior.

On my ninth birthday, an article appeared on the front page of the Dispatch about two 9-year-olds who spent the day with Roy Rogers. They got their pictures taken sitting on Trigger the Wonder Horse, and Nelly Belle the jeep. They ate breakfast and lunch with Roy. There they were, with fake guns drawn, on my birthday! I was crestfallen. I, the meeter of stars, was not chosen to do this. My father caught hell from me, I’m sure. It was a clunker of a birthday for me.

I wore my red-and-white cowgirl outfit my mother had made to the Ohio State Fair that day, where Roy was appearing. My father and I spied him in the press room at the Fair. He shook my hand and delighted the little birthday cowgirl. Alas, no photographers were present, nor Trigger or Nelly Belle. But I at least made contact with “my hero.”

Another evening we were in the Jai Lai (now the Buckeye Hall of Fame Café). A piano trio played as diners seated by large aquariums enjoyed their meals. My father and I were whisked from our table by our hosts to meet Adolphe Menjou. His film career started in 1921 with Rudolph Valentino in “The Sheik.” He is known as a suave character actor in such films as “Morocco” (1930) with Marlene Dietrich.

Mr. Menjou’s role in 1960 was with Hayley Mills in Pollyanna. Perhaps he was in Columbus to publicize that. There he sat in a Jai Lai booth with piercing dark eyes. Mr. Menjou played Pollyana’s mentor who turned her on to prisms (really). “Her rapt eyes were still on the dancing flecks of color from the prism pendants swaying in the sunlit window.” – author Eleanor H. Porter.
Another dress my mother made for me had an iridescent prismatic look. I wore it as a “junior hostess” at a German Village House Tour of the 1950s, at my ballet teacher Jorg Fasting’s house. Never have I felt so “walking on air” as that day, in my ice-blue, shiny full-skirted dress. I must have been twelve. My feet were probably in summer-white “flats.” Heels, like lipstick, were elusive to 12-year-olds back then.

Back at the Deshler, on Easter Sunday they invited Columbus celebs and their kids to the “Sky Room,” a glass-walled restaurant near the top. We kids chased after eggs while our parents had brunch. Nita Hutch, in a tropical dress and upswept hairdo, always broadcast a radio show from the Sky Room.

One year I won a very large, very ugly stuffed Humpty Dumpty. My innocent warblings upon receiving it were probably sent out over the airwaves. The best part, however, was the elevator interior covered in Astroturf (called “fake grass” back then) and a bunny-costume-clad elevator operator who made you anticipate the Sky Room fun.

I was on Fern Sharp’s show on Halloween wearing a cowboy outfit (preceded the cowgirl outfit, as when I was very young I wanted to be a boy). Fern Sharp always had her full name pronounced and she always wore a hat. The television lights were too bright, so I hung back because I was the littlest kid there anyway.

At the end of the show, popcorn balls covered in red, green, blue, and yellow plastic were thrown to us. It was an early live television free-for-all. I was probably stepped on in the melee, and was sweating in my plaid flannel shirt, jeans, boots and cowboy hat.

Honey-coated though these memories may be, the feel of the fabric has a lot to do with the remembrance.

AUGUST 2006
An Architectural Memory

Christine Hayes dreams of a Frank Lloyd Wright house while her parents are otherwise occupied.

A happy remembrance is the Frank Lloyd Wright-style home I played in as a child. The house belonged to friends of my parents. It was near our farmhouse. My mother sewed for the woman of the house, which was filled with the activities of their four children.

The children of the house and I often played Hide and Seek. The house was long and low, lying along the top of a ravine. Spectacular views beckoned from ample windows. Most of the walls were of rough stone. It was like being outside when you were inside. All the furniture was built-in. Many child-hiding cubbyholes existed behind hanging curtains. Textured earth-tone fabrics and beautifully stained wood surfaces were everywhere.

I admired the unexpected crevice, built into the stone wall, with a crystal or sculpture contained in it. A window with two pieces of glass that fused into a point fascinated me the most.

Another feature that fascinated my child’s mind was a bed on top of a dais of large red tile. This was the master bedroom. Later, a room was added onto the end of the house which became the master bedroom and bathroom. Thus, I got to sleep on the dais bed during an adult party. I felt like a princess, because the whole situation was quite different from our little rented farmhouse.

A small corridor running off that bedroom was scary; a huge sculpture of a man’s head presided over built-in closets and a bathroom. I didn’t like to find hiders in there. Also, there was a stairway in that area that led who knows where. Into the depths of the earth?
Wright (and his disciples) designed small bedrooms; he felt all activity should take place in a family or living room. Kitchens are small, too – obviously the man didn’t cook!

True to form, there was a large family room that connected the living room to the children’s small bedrooms. We would race from one end of that room to the other, using the stone walls as “base” during bouts of tag. Also, the person who was “It” during Hide and Seek would do the counting in this centralized location.

Of course, the outdoors was just as much fun. I remember unsupervised childhood activity in the rocky ravine and swift-running stream. Lots of rocks were thrown and crawdads caught.

Around the house were a circular garden with stone walls, a circular swimming pool and a tower with a balcony overlooking the ravine. We weren’t allowed in the tower. The father worked there, “teaching people how to write clearly.” I could not imagine what he did in that tower. My father typed on his Underwood in our attic, a place where I was allowed to play, and I read in the attic on my beloved windowseat.

I recently read a book by Kevin Canty, a man who writes clearly about the uncertainty of human emotions. The setting of Into the Great Wide Open is a Frank Lloyd Wright-style house. Here’s a passage starting with a passageway: “He walked away down a dark corridor that ran along the spine of the house. Kenny was alone in the flagstone hallway … the living room ahead was sunk down a couple of steps and dominated by a wall of gray fieldstone, a fireplace cut into a square in the middle of it. Everywhere were long windows framed in dark wood, and through them a series of views of the garden. Even through the bare branches of late fall, there were no other houses to be seen, no cars, no swing sets. The house seemed to exist to bring the natural world inside, to welcome it, everything long and low and graceful. Like walking inside a piece of classical music, Kenny thought. Beautiful. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not but he owed this house the word: beautiful. Lovely in its bones.”

The bones of The House of Hide and Seek held me in a gracefulness that I have not forgotten. Someday I hope to unclutter my life, like lifting spiderwebs, and make my way back to the freedom of unfettered appreciation of natural elements.

JUNE 2006

Memories of the Middle

Christine Hayes in the middle of things.

A man I know removed everything from the inside of a Lincoln Continental. He filled in the space of the former seats and dashboard with a level floor. The floor and the sides he covered with gold carpet; also there was a gold chair and a gold lamp. Sitting in this mock gilt living room on wheels gave one a comforting feeling. It didn’t matter what was around (a car show), you felt safe and enveloped.

Now I’ll take you to a time in my childhood when I didn’t feel safe. I was riding in the back seat of a car, with my parents in the front seat, through the town of Belle Valley, Ohio. We were not in a Lincoln Continental. We were in one of the first compact cars, a Chevy II, and we were headed for some rushing water in a dip in the road. My mother, who always drove, did what they say not to do: she tried to gun right through the flood, for that’s what it was. The motor died when we were in the deepest part. I remember being pulled from the car by men with heavy boots on. The water came into the back seat when my door was pulled open. The current was strong; the water was muddy. I think my mother and father got into a truck and I was carried to safety. The truck towed the car to higher ground.

We sat glumly in the car in the rain. Later, the car started up again. We continued on without further incident to my Grandma and Grandpa Hayes’s house in Dexter City, Ohio (Noble County), but under ominous skies.

We had dinner in the wonderfully old-fashioned dining room, and then I was put to bed. I slept in a brass bed painted white under a ceiling of silver-leafed wallpaper. I saw those leaves moving around as I lay on that bed. Vintage relatives stared out from oval-glassed photographs around the room. Large windows looked out on the railroad tracks and the middle fork of Duck Creek.

I was awakened by my father in the middle of the night. I could hear my mother saying, “No, don’t wake her.” She said this, always, when I was awakened in the middle of the night. (I’ll explain the two other times later.)

I was carried down the long staircase by my father, and out the heavy, dark-wood front door. The front porch was built a story off the ground, and now I knew why. Surrounding my grandparents’ house was water as far as the eye could see. I looked out the carved-wood porch rails in my summer pajamas.

My father, my grandfather, and his brother, whom we called “Uncle Harve,” were measuring the depth of the water and marking how it was climbing up the stone porch steps. I was marveling at the swirl and murmur of the water. I wasn’t scared. In fact, I felt secure, the house like a sturdy ship. Just like being in that gold Lincoln-Continental environment. It was heady stuff to be in the middle of a flood and feel safe.

Of course, I didn’t know then that Henry Barnhart, a nonagenarian who lived across the street in a little cabin, had to be got out by Uncle Harve, hoping Henry didn’t have a heart attack. And I didn’t foresee the dirty oil skim that would lie over everything when the waters receded. Just then it was Duck Creek showing me its silver might in the moonlight. I don’t know how long I got to watch the flood. No doubt my mother put me back to bed.

I promised the other two times I was awakened. One involved my Uncle Mark Cowdrey who liked to party. He got me up from my little bed in our farmhouse in Blacklick, Ohio, to dance around (he and my Aunt June were visiting from California). The adults were into their cups (or highballs as they were known in the ‘50s) and I was delighted to have everyone acting like fun people for a change.

The second time was by my father out of the same white brass bed at my grandparents’ – only this time there was no flood. We went out through the farm kitchen onto the back porch. Huffing, puffing on the railroad track nearby was a big black steam engine. I have no idea why it was stopped there but it seemed like a resting dragon to my young eyes.

The next part of this story takes place at the Aquamarine Cabana Club, an enormous swimming pool which existed at 6030 E. Main St. in Columbus. I do mean enormous. It was a private club, and the members had little cabanas to change in, located around the edges of the pool. My parents were not members but their friends were. I would go out in the middle of this sparkly body of water and pretend I was a synchronized swimmer in my ‘50s flowery bathing cap, all by myself. I recall this as being one of the most pleasurable sensations of warmth and security I have ever experienced.

The Aquamarine Cabana Club is no more. Nor does my grandparents’ house still exist, or our farmhouse. But I have my memories of being in these remarkable middles. They string together like odd beads of a necklace, the golden stuff stories are made of.

APRIL 2006

How Chris Costume Became Ramona Rabbit

Christine Hayes as Ramona Rabbit
on rakishly inclined Clayton St. in San Francisco, 1973.

This is the story of a place shift, a time shift, and eventually a name shift. Here’s the way it unfolds:

In November of 1970 I moved to San Francisco, fresh from theatre grad school at the University of California at Irvine. I followed some friends who were actors and techies. I ambled around San Francisco for a month and a half like I was Alice and San Francisco was Wonderland.

For Christmas, members of my family were going to Manzanillo, Mexico, so I joined them. At that time I thought San Francisco was going to be a short stay in my rambles.

We flew to Guadalajara. We had to catch a bus over the mountains from Guadalajara to Manzanillo. The first bus had room only for my aunt and two uncles and two cousins. So my mother and I stayed several hours in Guadalajara having lunch and sitting in a park by the bus station until the next bus left. Presently we noticed a silver-haired man sitting across from us. We talked to him and learned he was from San Francisco, a lawyer named Ruben Glickman who owned a restaurant. He offered me a job when I got back to San Francisco. At that time I thought this was too good to be true.

We bid good-bye to Ruben and boarded the bus to Manzanillo. All I remember was that the bus ride was six hours of hell with bottles rolling around all over the floor of the bus. We lived through it and arrived in Paradise, beautiful beaches and views from our rented apartment. I remember I read the Ring Trilogy while sitting in the surf over those ten days.

We made it back to the states without further incident. I did get a job as a server at Ruben’s restaurant, the Shandygaff. It was all very trendy; I met the cast of characters of San Francisco’s motley elite. Little did I know that many of them would become my lifetime best friends, and partners in many theatrical escapades.

One of those escapades was an original musical called Mamma I’m Comin’ Home produced at Lone Mountain College by my friend Jack Davis who was technical director there. I was the costumer. I was working for costumes, which I could use for other things and to sell to the many second-hand stores. One of the costumes was a white rabbit costume. I gravitated to it because I had played Alice in Wonderland in a Worthington High School production many years before. (Also I got a dress which was printed with “BEWARE DYNAMITE” all over it ala Miss Frizzle).

In the company of Mamma (which was about a bunch of cowboys who get involved with gays in SF! – a musical before its time) there were five different people named “Chris” including myself. I became “Chris Costume” to point me out from the others.

In grad school, I had produced a radio show from S. Clay Wilson’s cartoon “The Checkered Demon and the Hog-Ridin’ Fools.” I played Beverly who punches out a character named Ramona (Wilson names all his female characters Beverly, Stella, or Ramona). My co-actors in this endeavor all liked the way I had delivered the line, “Take this, Ramona honey.” (Sound of simulated fist fight followed.) These same actors were the ones I had followed up to San Francisco. They nicknamed me “Ramona” as a result of this show. And Ramona was designated my new name backstage at Mamma. (They had tired of Chris Costume.) Then when I began wearing the rabbit costume around Golden Gate Park and other venues, they called me “Ramona Rabbit.”

But the naming didn’t stop there. Soon after this, I moved for a short time to Glenellen, site of Jack London’s Wolf House in the Valley of the Moon. The house is in a park and is a ruin because it burnt down before he could ever live there. But the shell of the house is a visitor attraction with its reflecting pool and some beams still intact. For reasons of adventure, I and a friend decided to visit the house at midnight on a full moon. We ran into guard geese and a barbed-wire fence. I cut my palm open on the barbed-wire fence and had to go to the emergency room and get a tetanus shot. From that experience I acquired a second lifeline which palmists have remarked upon. I also acquired another name, “Ramona Moon.” So my parallel lives coalesced in the Valley of the Moon.

I have encountered the name three times outside of my own use. First, Ramona Moon is a character in a book by Allison Lurie called Nowhere City. (A friend of mine discovered this recently.) Second, it appears in the credits for a porn movie called The Resurrection of Eve starring Marilyn Chambers. I certainly did not appear in the movie. Third, Ramona Moon was the name of a mail-order business of kitchen implements that was based in Marin County outside of San Francisco. I have a suspicion this one was stolen from my name! But then, it’s not my property. I’m just borrowing it for a time.

I still have the white rabbit costume. And I still use both my names. And I stayed in San Francisco for 27 years.

FEBRUARY 2006

A Dollop of Coffee

The house at Second and Hope. Betty Hayes, Ben Hayes, David Ball (1943).

Looking out the forward and aft windows of Acorn Bookshop in Grandview, I can see Starbucks (corporate coffee) and the French Loaf (home-brewed and baked, yummy). Many booklovers swear by Stauf’s down Grandview Avenue. The Short North and the North Market are also good sources for various coffees. But I bring up Grandview because that is where my parents lived when I was born, at the corner of Second and Hope. I was the second child to my mother and the Great Hope to my father.

The house is still there but no longer on the corner, as a small house has been built on the then-vacant lot where my father grew a profusion of flowers. My house, the red brick has been painted white and a dressed-up goose sits demurely on the porch. But I look at the solid place and imagine the baby I was, watching my father at the breakfast table drinking his morning coffee.

A newspaper photographer was there, setting up a publicity shot that was later to have the caption, “Take a look at this handsome mug! And read ‘Around Columbus’ in the Daily Citizen.” They had written in big letters on the mug, “JAVA.” And of course in those days “mug” also meant face. We still have the “mug shot” in the scrapbook. But my dad’s column “Around Columbus,” well, Mike Harden and Joe Blundo give us some continuity from those Ben Hayes days with their pundit’s wit about Columbus.

The lines between what is Columbus and what is Grandview are blurry now. Not in the school district, mailbox kind of way, but in the memories of old Grandview and the exciting neighborhood it was. I was babysat a lot in Grandview (we had moved away to the country, but Grandview continued to be my “neighborhood.”) In my present place of work (above-mentioned Acorn), which was Culter’s Drugs at the time, I was taken by my babysitter, Susie Greenidge, where she purchased Persian Melon lipstick and matching nail polish. I was thrilled by the whole idea of it all.

Soon thereafter I got another thrill by watching (and I believe I was allowed to help) Susie and her Grandview High School compadres paint Halloween scenes on the storefront windows. I could not believe that we were allowed to do such a thing. We went trick-or-treating in Grandview, as gypsies. In those days you were either a gypsy or a hobo. The teenagers were a little embarrassed to drag around a miniscule gypsy (me) with them. I think the Persian Melon lipstick figured into this too. I had no idea what a gypsy was, much less a Persian melon. I do remember being yelled at by an old woman who was obviously not a believer in gypsies and hobos coming to her door.

In those days coffee was a plain something you got at a coffee shop, in a plain white cup with a stripe around it, poured by gum-chewing waitresses wearing hair nets. I spent so much time in coffee shops and restaurants, with my parents and also my babysitters, that I named my dolls after the waitresses. I probably dragged my dolls to the Grandview Pool.

Susie brought me to the Grandview Pool. I sat on a terry cloth towel on the concrete and watched the shenanigans of teenage angst and love. The girls knitted argyle socks for their boyfriends. The boys snapped their towels. I got to eat drumsticks, the ice cream kind. We sat on top of the picnic tables. The girls took turns taking me to the baby end of the pool.

We walked everywhere. In Grandview, I remember wooded paths and secret passageways between homes. We walked in a clump of girls, always. Those girls ended up being bridesmaids at Susie’s wedding. Me, too. I was 16 and they were much older. We wore pillbox hats as bridesmaids! Susie cried before the wedding. This impressed me. I have never been married. I think this is why: I can still hear her anguish. But I think everything went well after that. I don’t know. Sometimes I can stare into a cup of coffee and think about what might have been.

I’m so glad I work in Grandview, and that it has stayed somewhat the same. Oh, the restaurants are fancier, and certain things have been torn down to be replaced with large-box edifices, but the neighborhood feel is still there. High school kids come into the shop to buy book-list books and then explore into retro or futuristic fiction. Poetry sells well. We have an old Culter’s bag that a customer brought in. He is still wearing the shirts it came in, he said. Culter’s expanded from drugs and nail polish to clothes, gifts, and jewelry. People shopped for clothes right in their own neighborhood. What a concept.

I did have a crushing blow in Grandview. It was the Soapbox Derby down the Grandview Avenue hill. My half-brother and Susie’s brother were competitors, David Ball and Charlie Greenidge. Imagine my surprise when they said, “No girls allowed!” I was told to “Get out of the way!” I cried. But I get my revenge by driving art cars around Grandview.

Art flourishes in Grandview. The old industrial buildings make good art galleries. I have a little one in Backroom Studios behind Reed Arts. It’s just a little room but maybe it will be open to the public someday. I’ll serve coffee and nostalgia.

DECEMBER 2005
Not an Orphan

Ben Hayes babysitting Christine.

Ben and Betty Hayes in May of 1948 embarked upon a rather innovative idea for the time: switching roles for a day. My mother became the newspaper columnist; my father was my babysitter. We lived in a farmhouse near Blacklick out at Joe’s Corners (corner of Broad St. and Reynoldsburg-New Albany Road).

Ben Hayes wrote: “There I lolled, in pajamas and bathrobe, by the kitchen window, watching the missus hike down the road to catch the bus into town. She was going to work in my place at the Citizen while I took her day of ease at home.”

It was all very tongue-in-cheek, of course. Here’s a sample of my father’s day: “First thing I did was to get Christine some decent toys. Pink and blue rattlers are mighty babyish toys for an 8-month-old child. I got her a claw hammer, David’s B-B pistol and a small saw. She liked them.”

I remember my mother said she was terrified of leaving me with my father. Especially the part about the fishing. Not that she was unfamiliar with fishing. She often returned to her girlhood memory of fishing on Duck Creek with my father’s sister Pearl.

Blacklick Creek in those days was a rushing, deep stream containing lots of fish. (We ate the ones we caught.) You also had to watch out for leeches and snapping turtles when you waded the shallows of Blacklick Creek. Apparently my father suited me up in a fleecy thing and took me out for photographs, hanging over the creek with one hand on the pole and the other hand on me. Apparently I survived.

Of course I don’t remember any of this public role-switching, I was too young. But I do remember when my mother tried to be one of the first Tupperware saleswomen in Columbus. My father had to stay with me when she went out selling, and she later told me he would have none of that. So her selling career was short-lived. Recently, just before she died, she did get to go to the CCAD Tupperware retrospective as the oldest living Columbus Tupperware touter and was thrilled to be greeted by Denny Griffith.

But before I was born they went on a fishing trip to Lake White. Ben Hayes wrote: “I stayed for two weeks in the lakeside cottage of Floyd Dixon, Piketon rural mail carrier. With me was my wife, Betty. The deep bass of the bullfrogs put us to sleep, the humming of a million bees in Mr. Dixon’s sweet clover field awakened us. Betty is a druther-fish-than-eat fisherman. “I don’t want any fancy tackle,” she said. “I just want a plain pawpaw pole with line, sinker, and hook – and a can of worms.”

The story goes on to show her prowess in catching bass.

Some trouble came when we moved away from the fishing creek when I was nine. Now that they had planned a house together and had it built, some invisible line had blurred. Before, in the Grandview house and the Blacklick house, my father took care of the outside and my mother took care of the inside. Now he was telling her how to run the house and she was telling him how to run the garden and trees.

My mother said the buckeye, the redbud, and the dogwood were planted too close together. My father said the new furniture wouldn’t do. This kind of thing kept on until they went their separate ways after I was off to college.

My father had been an excellent gardener. Now that I am steward of the land, things don’t get growing as spectacularly as in the Ben days. But of course the trees he planted are bigger and there is more shade. Also, I like things to look natural. (Garrison Keillor says, “Those kind of people let the weeds grow and call it a native-plant environment.”)

It’s been sixteen years since my dad’s been gone. My mother died this year on the same day he fell on the back porch and never regained consciousness. Mike Harden wrote, “Ben suffered a stroke while out on his patio, the patio looking out on the ravine that abuts his north Columbus home. The medics who took him to the hospital speculated he might have lain on the patio two days before he was found. The death certificate will cite his death as Friday, but his life likely ended a few days before with some final glimpse into the tree line at something the rest of us would have missed for the forest.”

Since my parents were separated so long in time and place, I thought of them separately. Now that they both went on the same day 16 years apart, and in the same hospital, I had to stop thinking of them separately and think of them together.

I just knew there would be something odd about my mother’s death, but there wasn’t. However, a few days after I made an altar to her in the cleared-off place we call the Japanese garden, two large trees fell right in front of her altar. These two ?trees were already dead and topped, and they had ceramic birdhouses attached to them with metal spikes (my father’s doing). The birdhouses were unbroken. The altar (which had her pink hat, photos of her, and her ladybug collection) was untouched. The trees narrowly missed the buckeye tree, the redbud, the dogwood. They fell on the pawpaws in the exact spot my mother had asked me to prune about two weeks earlier. A honeysuckle tree was the only thing crushed and it now makes an excellent sculpture.

I’ve heard many people say once both parents are gone, “Now I’m an orphan.” To me, nothing could be further from the truth. If the coincidence of the falling trees isn’t enough, I’m convinced I can hear them in my mind offering advice, guiding my eye, showing me where lost stuff is. Fortunately, I feel nothing was left unsaid, except to tell me what it’s like on the other side. (Maybe they’re fishing.)

October 2005
A Fortune in Fabric

I’m sitting in the fabric department of Lazarus basement downtown. I’m in love with a deep blue cotton print with white and black stars that look like flung jacks. I’m actually under the table with the bolt of fabric. Here, it’s quiet and cool on the tile floor, many lower shelves of dazzling fabric at my eye level. These shelves and the tabletops display bargain yardage. The department is large, well-lit, with a bank of elevators to one side and an escalator on the other side. I spend a lot of my childhood time here, as my mother sews beautifully, she loves fabric, and she loves a bargain.

My mother is trying to convince me that a clown costume is made of a harlequin pattern predominantly red. I stick to my guns about the starred blue. I win.

I wore that costume with its voluminous folds, shirred collar, and matching pointy hat on the following Halloween when I was in the fifth grade. I subsequently kept the costume so long that when I decided to become a clown at children’s birthday parties for extra money beyond my teacher’s salary, in my middle 30’s, I wore the very same blue clown suit. The elastic was still taut at the arms and legs, but the hat looks a little small in the existing photo. Thereafter I acquired many more clown suits, fairy princess outfits, personas of all character.

I loved the names of the fabrics: twill, seersucker, serge, hopsacking. I loved to accompany my mother to the Lazarus upstairs fabric department, more expensive and extensive, where we would pore over and purchase eyelet, lace, seam binding, thread, patterns. There also dwelt pattern books – thick as a brick – filled with enticing pictures of fashions, costumes, doll clothes, novelties that my mother could make, seemingly effortlessly, and with enthusiasm.

A month has elapsed, as I write this, since my mother has gone farther upstairs to the great fabric department in the sky. I dreamt that she moved into a new, squeaky clean apartment. The fabrics in the couches were a glowing turquoise and gold. She liked her new place a lot, and remarked about the beautiful material of the couches.

A month, and how to sort through a lifetime of memories? I let the final years with the scenes of doctors, hospitals, therapists, pills, slip by – the mind sifts and shifts, the image that remains, comes forward, persists, without conscious direction – my mother in the fabric departments.

The dresses, playclothes, curtains, bedspreads she made fan out in my memory as though caught in an infinity of mirrored reflections in a Lazarus fitting room. The choices of style, pattern, and color were inspired; the work always perfect. I learned the kaleidoscopic eye, but not the patience of the craft.

Right out of high school I was hired as the costume mistress of Playhouse-on-the-Green (a summer stock tent theatre on north 23) based on my mother’s merits. To use a theatre metaphor, I got by on the “Skin of my Teeth” and her expertise.

I went off to college with an impressive wardrobe – and then the late ‘60s happened. I wore old ladies’ chiffon dresses out of thrift stores, much to my mother’s chagrin. She had made me colorful muu-muus to wear to bed or the beach. I wore them to class with funky army jackets over them. I sewed up bell-bottoms with the wildest combos of paisley, flowers, and ball fringe I could find.

She kept a cartoon of an old lady with lots of fabric behind her. “The one who dies with the most fabric wins,” is the caption. Well, I’ve got the fabric now. Large hunks of faux fur. Intricate quilted pieces in Hawaiian colors. A turquoise, white, and gold sundress ready to be stitched.

And I still have all the doll clothes. They’re in a chest in the living room where the sun shines through in the mornings and casts rainbows through the prisms. I’ll pull them out and put them on a clothesline as a memorial on her birthday.

And as for Lazarus – well, it’s fitting that she and downtown Lazarus slipped away from us within the same time period. I frequent fabric stores, but it’s just not the same. But I’ll keep hunting for bargains in the honor of Betty.

AUGUST 2005
Star-crossed critters inspire further fables

Christine Hayes reading her fable
at the Thurber Literary Picnic.
Photo/George Bauman

Recently, I entered a writing contest at the Thurber House. Much to my surprise, I won. The idea was to write a fable in the style of James Thurber.

Since the fables were short, there were actually four fable-writing winners. The prize for each of us was dinner and admission for two to the Thurber Treat Literary Picnic, our own public reading, entertainment by the Thurber Players and the Young Docents, and a nifty certificate.

Nannette Maciejunes, executive director of the Columbus Museum of Art, was our evening’s invited host. She read Thurber fables, told a fable she recollected from childhood, and generally made us all feel welcome and relaxed.

I was first to read my original fable. It was called “A Groundhog’s Life.” It went like this: A groundhog had a fine home in the ground. But then one day it began to rain. And it rained. And rained. It rained so much, the water in the nearby streams joined to become one roaring gush of water, and wiped out the groundhog’s home.

The groundhog sought shelter under a tree on higher ground.

When the water receded, the groundhog went back to his home. He learned to live with the sogginess of it all, because he liked the location.

But he caught a disease called rodent corrosion from the wet earth, and he couldn’t shake it off. So he went back to that tree on higher ground, and studied the possibilities of establishing a home in the tree.

Although it was difficult, he managed to squeeze himself into a hole up in the crotch of the tree.

But then a huge windstorm hit, and the tree was knocked over, leaving the groundhog sitting on a stump. The groundhog was not daunted, because he figured he was still off the ground, the stump probably wouldn’t blow over, and there was no rodent corrosion in the wood. Just as he was beginning to feel secure, a small meteor came down and wiped him out.

Moral: Catastrophes are always with us, they just keep changing shape.

The Thurber prize-winning certificate gave me “every wish for continued successes, including the not inconsequential wish that, one day, long after this award has faded either in significance or from its being hung on the refrigerator and bleached by direct sunlight, there might be something more practical or promissory upon this citation’s recipient…”

This fable-writing experience made me think of a fable that enveloped me one summer. I’d say the year was 1986 and the month was August. It was called “In Conjunction with the Jays.” It went like this: I spent one summer month in the backyard gluing small stuff onto my car. I had spent the prior eight years adding to it little by little. I was embarrassed at the times it fell into artistic decay. Now, at last, I was focused on making it look its best.

For part of the month, the car was lodged between sticker bushes on a path leading to my toy shed. I would carry my portable radio down there and glue onto the driver’s side – I called that section “Happy Birthday” because I started it on my birthday – and onto the trunk. One day I was gluing onto the trunk and I had a revelation of the meaning of life (I remember it involved the words “levity” and “amenities”) but then I forgot it.

To my right was a tall fence. From over the fence came two aged voices. A female would say, “The onions need watering.” A crabby male voice replied, “What?!” This would be repeated over and over until the male voice grunted instead of saying, “What?!”

I got to thinking these were the voices of Death bickering. So I would turn my radio up so I couldn’t hear them. The songs on the radio were banal that summer. I had no favorites.

It pleased me to see the car trunk so encrusted. I called it “urban camouflage.”

Also, that summer in the backyard enabled me to watch the jays. The scrub jays terrorize the other birds. They make a louder noise than anything around (even Death and the radio). The brown towhees and the rufous-sided towhees scratched loudly in the leaves under the bushes. Sometimes I could hear a towhee sitting breathlessly inside the bush while some jays screamed their way into her.

I imagined the backyard, the car, the summer’s day, the radio, the jays, the towhees, the voices, my son in the house, all part of my perfect little treasure box in heaven.

My car could be shouting its way into offensiveness like the scrub jays coming in to the brown towhee. Art, like nature, could be on the offensive. Art – that’s an abstract concept for my little treasure box set in mental concrete as thick as the sunlight, as thick as the screaming of the jays.

A hummingbird cut in and out, wings with a noise like a snapped wire. He also made pipping noises. He was my stamp of approval.

I didn’t get a certificate for that one. But rereading it made me remember that month. Thanks to Thurber House for being my fable enabler, for reminding me to go through files, watch the critters, and make stops along the rushing creek of life.

JUNE 2005
Great-Aunt Gladys and the Muskingum River

Great-Aunt Gladys attaches Christine Hayes' shoe, summer 1949.

I sat on the floating dock and fished with my Great-Aunt Gladys. We watched boats going by and looked out upon the opposite bank, which resembled a painting by Grant Wood. The grey-green water rolled under us when larger boats went by.

Great-Aunt Gladys lived in Marietta, in the house of her parents, Mary and Quin Tilton. She had been a milliner in Cleveland when she met my Great-Uncle Henry Van Rooy, a coffee importer. But when I was a child they were all retired and living on the river. The front of the house looked out on the Muskingum. The back of the house looked out on an alley. Down a ladder from the front yard was the method of descending the cliff face and getting onto the floating dock.

In the Mills cafeteria in downtown Columbus, I used to stand in front of the panoramic mural of Ohio history. The mural was located on a grand second level reached by two staircases. Depicted were pioneers, statesmen, and native Americans on a riverbank. As a child, I confused this painted view with the real one in Marietta. I believed I melted in with the figures in the mural, as I had lots of time to kill while I was waiting for my parents to finish talking. And I could smell the fishy river, even in Mills.

Back to the wonderful house in Marietta: it still stands and is inhabited by a young couple. They don’t climb down to the river, and the steps run a different way up to the kitchen. In this spacious kitchen Auntie cooked hearty meals, often using luscious produce from the garden. To me, everything in the house had a magic air.

The dining room had lamps with crystal prisms. I played with my Great-Aunt’s figurines in the copper-colored fringe of the couch, creating mini-entrances and exits. I would be called in to dinner, where we might sup on soup and fish, then I would go back to my playing. I thought this idyllic life would never end.

But one by one, Mary, Quin, and Henry (“Uncle Van,” who always called me “Peaches”) died. Great-Aunt Gladys had to go to a nursing home. The wonderful prisms came to me. It is wise to draw sustenance from the remembrance of the peaceful moments, for the world can tilt and crack like an old soup tureen. The steady floor can roll like a river beneath your feet.

My father’s relatives lived across the road, in a more elevated area of the “Rathbone” section of Marietta. In a story called “Marietta Memory” he remembered an epiphany he had there as a small child:

“The first night I slept in a city I was tucked in by Mother and an aunt at child’s bedtime on the second floor rear. The bed was big, and its sheets felt both firm and clean. I thought I could feel their boiled whiteness in the dark. The year was 1917.

That night away from home was long and pleasant; I languished. The sun then was rising late, setting early – still, the weather was warm, surprisingly warm. The time could have been the portion of November in which weather is often freakish.

The bed stood beside a window, and I opened the window. I sensed that there was warm still air out there above a backyard, and I leaned out into it. I was looking toward a barn beside an alley but seeing nothing at all in the darkness.

I was in a river city, and I thought the air I was looking into had moved from the river to the residential area in which my aunt lived. The barn – my father’s auto must be parked in it, yet, he could have driven away, maybe across the river bridge to another state – those were among my thoughts when it happened.

A milk wagon, with a horse, came along the alley. Inside the wagon was a light – a lantern? A glow came from the wagon and touched the bricks of the alley beside it, a magical apparition. I saw the milk wagon in its nocturnal beauty as a wainwright’s fantasy, a small and glowing steamboat on a dark river.

…I never actually saw the milkman. He spoke, perhaps twice, before clucking the horse into going. He walked (I think) behind the vehicle of luminosity. The horse knew the way of the milk route.

All the days of my life I have cherished my memory of beauty that rolled through the warm night as I watched.”

APRIL 2005
Daisies, please, with a side of corn

Christine and her father, Ben Hayes, in 1952.

At Joe's Corners we ate lots of sweet corn and grew lots of Shasta daisies. Joe's Corners was the intersection of Reynoldsburg-New Albany Road and Broad Street, in the Blacklick area. Our rented farmhouse, the old Milburn place they called it, stood on the northwest side of that once-country crossroads. Today the farmhouse land is paved over and part of Eastpointe Shopping Center.

But in those days, it was farmland. My father, Ben Hayes, farmed part of the acre surrounding the house. He did this in addition to writing six columns a week for the Columbus Citizen. The Saturday column was called “Around Home” and included such tidbits as, “Christine, our tad child, fell backwards into a huge kettle of grape pulp and peach peelings. She was tinted all the way to her underpants.”

As a tad child, I once ran away and hid in the cornfields surrounding the house. I can remember the heady feeling of freedom in the August heat. It was shady amid those towering stalks. Then I heard my mother's hysterical cries. I didn't answer for a long time. Finally, she found me.

This reminds me of a D.H. Lawrence quote, from “Love Was Once A Little Boy.”: And when I find her, away down the timber, when she is a ghost, and lost to the world, like a spider dangling in the void of chaos, then she is relieved….

But, he was talking about a cow.

The cornfield had its other perils. There was a black substance we called “smut” that grew on the corn ears. Smut was often eye-level for a small child. No doubt I touched it or ate it, and therefore it frightened me. It has probably been eradicated by modern chemistry.

An electrical transformer was attached to a telephone pole above the front cornfield. During thunderstorms, this transformer attracted lightning. It was “zapped” several times in my memory, with a loud cracking noise and loss of power for the farmhouse. This colors my remembrance of that “lost” cornfield.

The barn that stood in the field (many outbuildings surrounded the house) has a particular memory. While our family was breakfasting, I saw an odd creature out the window. It did not move; it was rather large with a squared-off head. My father went out to investigate and brought back a cat with a tin can stuck on its head. He cut the can off carefully with tin-snips. Thus “Ugly Charlie” came to live with us.

Blacklick got its name from H.G. Black, who owned the first farm south of what eventually became the little town. As early as 1806 the nearby stream was referred to as “Black's Lick Creek,” as Mr. Black kept a salt lick on his farm.

Joe's Corners got its name from Joe Grubs, who was a retailer there, selling everything from rolling pins to newborn pups. I knew it as a restaurant owned by Lucy Ramey. Later, a gas station occupied the small building on the corner.

I remember the sound of a car accident at the intersection. My father went down to help the victims. Later, he retrieved some belongings that had been thrown from the cars. They hung in our car barn, and I shivered when I saw them, remembering that sound.

The other thing that made me shiver, scream, and run was the bumblebees. They took up residence in the walls of the “Ranch House,” an outbuilding of two rooms that was my playhouse. My playthings were an erector set, Lincoln Logs (invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son, by the way), and a “Li'l Abner” drumset that I received, inexplicably, one Christmas. I had Dad's funny hat collection on the wall, a chalkboard, lots of dolls and cats.

My father had cut a cat-door in the side of the Ranch House for the outdoor cats to get in and sleep in the winter. This open wall-slice also gave access to the bees. The constant hum would drive me wild, not to mention the biggest bumblebees you've ever seen. I would tear out toward the grapevine when they came at me. That grapevine had the sweetest, suckable grapes, the same grapes that filled the tub I fell into. They were trying to make wine in that tub.

My father grew, and my mother served, canned, and cooked, sweet corn, asparagus, strawberries, tomatoes, beans and peas. Gourds were also a big crop. The profusion of flowers, not just daisies, was vivid.

I would sit in my sandbox down by the pear tree and create little farm-worlds from pebbles, plants, and sand. I was a solitary child with imaginary playmates and a dramatic inner monologue. I loved my hollyhock-blossom dolls, flower-petal potions, and a forest of tickly asparagus ferns in the fall.

But the corn! Here's a quote from Ben Hayes: June 10, 1952: “Just a few months ago these very fields were wastelands of stripped cornstalks – forlorn vistas, the earth frozen hard, tattered here and there with ragged patches of snow as the whistling, biting wind of winter rattled the debris which harvest leaves behind. Now, on every side, as I sit in the deep green shadow of the tree, are fields that have been plowed and harrowed and cultipacked into excellent seedbeds. From this pulverized earth, rain-moistened and warmed hour after hour by the sun, is springing the tender green corn. This crop will climb skyward – you can see it grow in the shimmer of summer which already has begun. What a phenomenon!”

Now if only we could unpave that field, have back the giant catalpa tree with the swing, and go back to the simple life at Joe's Corner's.

FEBRUARY 2005
How the art cars came to Ohio

Christine Hayes (Ramona Moon) elated at the
Turkey Toyota’s arrival in Columbus

When I moved to Ohio from California, I left the art cars behind. Then I went back and forth, Ohio, California, Ohio, California, looking out for them and trying to ship them.

One, the Turkey Toyota, was in the petite garage-turned-garden shed of my friend Marilyn. This garage sits perched at the end of a steeply graded driveway on a precipitous canyonside in Mill Valley. The house and garden of this garage are lush, tended with care. The littl