Introduction to Society (“BZ”)
(or Dancing > Music > Weddings > Dating > Marriage)
As related in the previous chapter, although I enjoyed an immediate upgrade in my social life during my first two years of college, I hit a bit of a stumbling block in my junior year when I transitioned to living in rooming houses, away from those folks I met in Freeborn Hall. But early in that fall quarter, I saw a flyer posted at the Student Union Building, advertising the Berkeley class of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSDCS). Well, my interest in things Scottish overcame my distaste for things dancing, and so I did something radically unusual for me: I tried something NEW, and the next Friday night I made my way over to All Souls Church in North Berkeley.
The RSCDS had spread well beyond its founding in Scotland in 1923, and by the 1970’s had branches established all over the globe. One of these was the San Francisco Branch, which encompassed weekly classes in several cities, including Lafayette, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and San Jose. The Branch also sponsored a monthly party (where folks from all classes could comingle and dance together), a formal Valentines’ Ball, as well as an annual weekend workshop (now held at the Asilomar conference grounds, in Pacific Grove – a magical place, and definitely THE social event of the year for the Branch).
But of all the Bay Area classes, I felt the Berkeley class in the mid-late 1970’s was something special: it was populated by teachers and dancers mostly in their twenties and thirties (Fig. 5.1), with live music, and awash with a wonderful vitality that was palpable. In fact, it was a completely different from anything I had ever experienced before, and I ended up throwing myself wholeheartedly into this new social realm. And one of my very first discoveries was an intriguing coincidence – that youthful girl I passed by when crossing Strawberry Creek (see Chapter 4, fourth paragraph) was there as well. I learned her name was Carolynn Harvey, and she shared my love for Sherlock Holmes stories. And instead of being 5-10 years my junior, she was in fact a year my senior. Her friendliness and overall pleasing personality were remarkable, and we became friends.
From that point on, virtually all of my social interactions were determined by dancing parameters – not only the weekly classes, monthly dances, and other special events (both in the Bay Area and elsewhere), but beyond the dance floor as well, as all my social recreations were now done in the company of dancers as well – like my newly discovered interest in cross-country skiing (Fig. 5.2), white water river rafting (Fig. 5.3), as well as helping fellow Honda owners with maintenance work1. The high water mark of my Scottish country dancing career undoubtedly was in May, 1980. I was unemployed then, and so on each of the five weekends that month, I was able to attend the Branch’s monthly party in Lafayette (May 3), the Boston Ball (May 10), the Sacramento’s SCD Society’s May Ball (May 17), the Santa Maria weekend workshop (May 23-24) and the Branch’s Annual General Meeting in Palo Alto (May 31) (that was 45 years ago, and I’m just now regaining my breath). Eventually I served on the board that governed the Branch holding two successive offices – first as editor for the bimonthly newsletter The Reel and Strathspeyer for a year (Appendix E, part 2 includes the articles I authored), then as the branch treasurer for three more years. I also was inspired to compose several country dances myself (listed in Appendix F).
When I started dancing, teachers at classes invariably relied on record albums to provide the music. But soon thereafter, Barbara Bouwsma began to bring her violin to the Berkeley class, providing us with live music instead. Other dancer/musicians joined her and they formed an informal band for the Berkeley class. As the only live music available for SCD classes in the SF Bay Area, demand for the band quickly grew throughout the branch and the gigs multiplied. One of the hallmarks of the band was the use of the violin as the primary instrument. Although the fiddle had been the traditional main instrument, when I began dancing it had been displaced in most Scottish dance bands (including those led by Jack Rennie and Stan Hamilton – see Fig. 5.4) by the accordion due to its greater volume. One of the popular dances at that time was Cauld Kail, which name derived from a reference to kale as it was mentioned in a Robert Burns song, Cauld Kail in Aberdeen. Barbara initially wanted to name themselves the Kale Band, but in the 1970’s no one around here knew what kale was, so instead she settled for The Cabbage Band (but formally known as The Berkeley Scottish Players). Though no musician myself2, I loved hanging around with them, attending rehearsals, and providing Reality© cookies3, and in fairly quick order I became their head groupie. In 1976 Barbara decided to cut a record and put out a request for 20 people to invest $100.00 each to fund the project. The $2,000 was quickly raised, and we formed the partnership “Cabbage Records” to produce the album: Barbara was the Director, Marjorie Kistemaker (now McLaughlin) was responsible for processing mail orders4, and I was the Financial Director (Fig. 5.5). As befitting a proper business environment, I began referring to Barbara (my boss) as “BB” and she in turn began calling me “BZ”, as Tanya Drlik did previously (see Chapter 6), but this time that moniker stuck, and ever since I’ve been known by that epithet among most of my dancing friends. The engineering was done by Mike Cogan (Fig. 5.6), who operated a small recording studio called Bay Records in the city of Alameda. For many of the recording sessions, a small cadre of dancers also attended, dancing in the neighboring hallway as a tempo check. Of course, the first time through any selection was never perfect, and so multiple takes were necessary … some more than others, which took its toll (to this day I involuntary shudder whenever I hear Monymusk). The album was titled Camp of Pleasure, and when it was released in 1977, it was the first long-playing album for Scottish dancing ever recorded by an American band. And it was a hit (well, in SCD circles, anyway). We sold out of the first run of 1,000 albums and reprinted it … three times. A second album, Heather & Yon, was released in 1978 (Fig. 5.7), and a third, None So Pretty, in 1979 – both of these had multiple pressings as well, and the investors got all their money back plus substantial interest … and as financial director, I was able to enjoy multiple sojourns in the south of France to research, um, something or other. BY THE WAY: In my humble (well, take that for what it’s worth) opinion, there is no finer piece of music that gets one to MOVE than the last cut on Heather & Yon – The Sailor. I earnestly recommend listening to this if you are looking for something to cheer you up: you can check it out on Spotify (search for Berkeley Scottish Players/Sailor) or listen to a 15 second sample here: https://my.strathspey.org/dd/recording/1604/.
So I had discovered a whole new life: one where I finally became more comfortable with females, and began to adopt the social graces I had sadly been lacking in up to that point. And with all this youthful vitality and enthusiasm in mixed (ie: females and males) company, it is not too surprising that a lot of romances blossomed here, leading to any number of weddings. I can’t remember how many weddings I attended, but I was honored to appear in the wedding party of four of them. And these four ceremonies serve fairly well as boundaries to my young adulthood, when I transitioned from a teen into a, well I can’t say “responsible” … let’s just say, a functioning member of society. In the fourth wedding my role was “The Groom”, which I’ll discuss at the end of this section, while the first one was as best man for my brother, when he married Merryl Rubin in 1975 (Fig. 5.8). Serendipitously, just prior to this I had run into Celeste Carter while walking along Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley (I had known Celeste from high school, but had no idea she was attending Cal as well). At the time, I didn’t own any wedding-appropriate clothes, so I asked Celeste’s help in picking out a suit, and she (to my great surprise) happily acquiesced (she also introduced me to the works of James Thurber, for which I am even more in her debt). As far as I remember, my duties at Ned’s wedding were extremely simple – passing over the ring when requested, and proposing a toast at the reception.
In contrast, I was a lot more active in the second wedding in 1979 when Barbara Bouswma married Robert McOwen (who played guitar in the band, was a top-notch dancer, and later instructor): I served as Robert’s best man (Fig. 5.9) and spent a lot of time running around helping to get things set up for the reception and other such chores.
Anyway, in this wonderful assemblage of warm-hearted, friendly people, the chances for romance blossomed, and gradually my shyness began to dissipate. For example, I felt comfortable giving a number of friends (coincidently, ahem, all female) back rubs (well, technically, more like shoulder rubs), and although unlicensed, over a couple of years developed a small clientele of satisfied customers. And as I began to meet women through dancing, I was finally able to move on from my earlier objects of affection from LGHS. But I had some stiff competition. Back then, other single, male dancers of dateable age included the likes of Tom Chambers, Bruce Hamilton, Kevin Lesko, the aforementioned Robert McOwen, and Michael Schwartz, all of whom were certified with either a four or five star rating by the NCRSHC (the Northern California Registry of Studs, Hunks & Cutie-pies).
The first woman to really catch my eye was Maria Corse (Fig. 5.10), who lived over in Pleasant Hill, but regularly danced with the Berkeley class. Although my shyness was reduced (I was completely at ease talking to her and being with her in group activities), my lack of self-confidence in the romance department precluded me from asking her out right away. But during a summer break from college when I was back in Los Gatos, I finally came to a decision: once I returned to Berkeley in the fall, I’d gird my loins and ask Maria out … only then to discover once I returned north, one of those aforementioned NCRSHCers had stolen a march on me and cut me out – Maria now had a boyfriend and I was back to where I started5.
Then in 1976, at the ripe old age of 23, I worked up the gumption to ask out a woman named Kathy Krause, who danced with a SCD group over in Marin … and I got to experience all the clumsiness of dating that most other people had figured out back in their teens. Kathy and I were never in love with each other, and after several months that relationship just sort of went away. This left me where I started from – pining for someone who was already spoken for.
By now I had graduated from college and was living in a rented house on Peralta Avenue in north Berkeley, just a block and a half from Solano Avenue. It was a four bedroom house, and over the course of the nine years I lived there, I had a succession of at least 13 roommates. The first two of which were fellow employees of the Olkowskis (see Chapter 6), Gar Satrom and Mark Minter, while succeeding roommates included Alexandra (=Alex) White (who taught me the correct way to pronounce “Baltimore”, and ended up marrying Mark), Clifford Schwartz, Sylvia Levy (who was the sister of one of Cliffo’s high school friends), Viviane Alfandary, and Lynn Watson (whom I had known from SCD). Roy Kaitner was another roommate whom I originally met through dancing (he was also the drummer for the Cabbage Band, see footnote 2), and the two of us began an elongated game of tag, for which we felt we needed to clarify some rules; for example, supported objects (e.g. the clothing one wore, or an object one carried) would indeed constitute a tag when both people were in physical contact with them, while unsupported objects (like a door on its hinges) would not transmit the tag. I remember trying to ride my bike up the stairs in pursuit of Roy once, but I never got past the first step or two. Another housemate was a woman named Robin Smith who decided to have a little fun with me one evening when we decided to split a pizza for dinner, as well as the responsibilities for retrieving it: she phoned in the order, while I agreed to go pick it up. When they asked her “What name?” she looked straight at me for a second of two, and said: “Daffy” … and that’s the name I had to give to get the pizza. Sigh.
But when it came to restaurants, my favorite eatery was Walker’s Pie Shop, which was only a five minute walk away – I ate there almost every Thursday, when their special was lamb and their soup of the day was split pea … with pie for dessert of course. My second favorite restaurant was India Kashmir, located at the top (eastern end) of Solano Avenue – that was my go-to place whenever I was meeting a (always female) friend for dinner … and I couldn’t help but wonder if the restaurant staff thought of me as a regular Lothario, as I regular showed up there with a variety of women.
Then in 1979, my life turned around again at a monthly dance in San Francisco. I had just walked into the hall when a woman in a white dress on the other side of the room caught my eye. She was a stranger to me, and so with no pre-existing emotional baggage, I felt comfortable approaching her. Her name was Robin Outzen (Fig. 5.11), and we enjoyed talking as well as partnering for a dance or two that night. I learned she lived across the Bay from me in San Mateo and that we had a friend in common, Cathy Sponseller6. As it so happened, Kim McGarrity7 (Figs. 5.9 and 5.12) (who was then living with Howard Erwin8) over in Piedmont, announced they were hosting a party at their place the next evening, and everyone was invited [mark these names well!]. So I earnestly suggested Robin attend (though it was quite a drive from San Mateo to Piedmont) as I knew I would be there. Which she did. Again we had a pleasant time talking with each other. She left the party early (she had a long drive to get home) but as I walked her out to her car9, we arranged to meet the next day in her stomping grounds on the other side of the Bay, where we spent an enjoyable couple of hours getting to know each other.
Well, I was feeling great, as I now thought I again had a girlfriend. But I was (as heard in innumerable episodes of Perry Mason) “assuming facts not in evidence”. When I suggested we begin telling people that we were going together, Robin immediately disabused me that notion – she enjoyed my company, but made it known she did not consider me her boyfriend. So I was … disappointed (well, more than that actually). However, because we were so compatible, I retained hopes that perhaps our friendship might yet grow into a romantic relationship with time, and I had just been a little too quick on the trigger. So, even though 30 miles and the southern San Francisco Bay separated us, for the next couple of years we ended up seeing a lot of each other, exploring the Gold Country with Cathy (Fig. 5.13)10, meeting for dinners and movies, and of course seeing each other at dancing. In short, in no little time I found that I had fallen for her, HARD. But although she still enjoyed my friendship and company, she never reciprocated my romantic feelings. Yet I could not move on from her – I was just having too much fun doing stuff with her. And the more time we spent together, the “righter” it seemed to me, and I got drawn into her more and more. But she was still looking for another romantic interest, and eventually began seeing one of the NCRSHCers mentioned above, Tom Chambers.
I was now up against the situation I had been dreading– that our friendly relationship hadn’t evolved into something more, and Robin had gotten herself a guy. This was depressing, but at least I was back on familiar territory – loving someone who now appeared unattainable. Then things got REALLY convoluted. It turns out that Tom and Kim used to have a thing for each other: in the past they both had felt a strong attraction to the other, but they never had the opportunity to act on that. Kim’s attraction to Tom outweighed her feelings for Howard, while Tom was now in a position that reminded me of my high school days – when I had crushes on several girls simultaneously. But there was one big difference between us: in high school, I never actually dated any of the girls (it was all a case of “love from afar”) while in Tom’s case, both women wanted to be with him. It was thus a time of really turbulent emotions for all involved.
Tom vacillated between Robin and Kim for a while but ultimately decided to break up with Robin and date Kim. Now I was really in a weird and difficult situation: on the one hand, Kim was one of my dearest friends, and I was happy to celebrate anything that gave her joy. On the other hand, I was still focused on Robin, and willing to do whatever I could to ease her pain. And unfortunately, everything was not wine and roses with Kim and Tom, as they had their own issues to work through. So for months I shuttled back and forth between Robin and Kim, doing my damnedest to comfort and be a friend to the both of them. Meanwhile, true to my Gemini nature, I began to oscillate between wanting to see Robin, and wanting to avoid her, since on the one hand, I knew she was hurting over the loss of Tom (and as a valued friend to her, I sure as hell didn’t want to desert her in her time of need), while on the other I was constantly reminded she didn’t reciprocate my feelings.
This brings us to my third time as a wedding party participant. In 1981, Kim and Tom got married. Both of them asked several people to stand with them during the ceremony, and I was one of Kim’s choices, so I guess that made me one of her bridesmaids (bridesmisters? bridesgents? Wait, I know: bridesguy!). As a member of the wedding party, I was tasked with bringing an urn of coffee from their home to the reception site (Kim was fairly fanatical about coffee and brewed it herself to ensure the beverage’s quality). I transported it in the back compartment of my Honda Civic hatchback, where it sloshed around a bit with a fair quantity spilling out. The smell of coffee lingered in my car for months, and months later when I looked in the spare tire well, I noticed a huge “sludge” of coffee there, which I was never able to completely clean out11.
Meanwhile, Robin began to date a (non-dancing) guy named Guy (well, Walter actually) Winchester. He spent part of the year up in Washington State, so their relationship had a sporadic and semi-remote component, and Robin still felt comfortable spending time with me. Initially, I didn’t have a full time job to absorb my day-to-day attentions, and thus I had a lot of free time to ponder being miserable12. Which I was for the next two years, although this was somewhat ameliorated when I got a full time job in 1981. I was still hoping against hope that she might change her mind about me. But she and Guy grew closer and closer, and sometimes it just became too painful to see her – during these times I alternated between seeing Robin (and giving her support when necessary, like watching her cat13 when she went on a vacation), and making a determined effort to avoid seeing her. Which included giving a miss to SCD events where I thought she was likely to show (a friend of mine brought to my attention that my dancing friends were missing me at these events, but at that time I didn’t have sufficient emotional bandwidth to worry about that as well). After one of these (on my part) forced separations, I remember posing myself the question, “Well, what am I going to do with the rest of my life now?” Well, evidently the answer to that question was “Not much”, as I still vacillated between seeing and avoiding Robin over two years. During that time we did some fun things like visiting some Harold and Maude sites13, but generally I was not comfortable seeing her in social situations (like dancing). Eventually I realized I was still going nowhere with all this, and something had to give. I told her that she should call me if she really felt the need, but I had to say goodbye to her … and wouldn’t see her again for over a year, when we both attended an Asilomar weekend workshop.
So I was now (theoretically) as free as the air, and started to look for other females to hang around with. Since SCD remained my main social environment, I never really gave serious thought to dating a non-dancer, although I did trying posting, and answering, personals in the Bay Guardian, but other than meeting someone for coffee once, nothing came of that … I think to my relief, because I still felt 100% committed to being with a dancer. I ended up going on a series of dates with three women whom I had known through dancing. And evidently, I must of had a certain type, as the given names of two of them were “Carolyn”, and the third “Carolynn”. The latter was Carolynn Harvey, who was attending veterinary school at UC Davis, although she stayed in her family home in Oakland during the summers. We had a bit of a head start in our relationship due to a lot of shared interests and activities over our friendship spanning the previous decade, although this was somewhat offset by the fact that for 75% of the time she was living 60 miles away. Also, Carolynn was always a private person, and so it took some time for our relationship to develop, while she may have been hesitant to enter a relationship where initially she’d be competing with an absent rival. Eventually, the two “single n” Carolyns lost traction with me, while I became more and more enamoured of Carolynn (whose family ancestors also hailed from Lithuania), and in 1983 I finally felt that we had become a couple.
And after another month or two, I realized she was indeed everything I was looking for, and realized I needed to propose to her. My first thought was to immediately go out and buy an engagement ring, but before proposing, I decided to confide in our mutual friend Sheena West15 (who knows something about my tastes … or lack thereof). She told me that getting exactly the right item for an engagement ring is very important to a woman … and suggested I instead get her something else. So I heeded her suggestion and picked out some earrings to present when I proposed (figuring we could visit a jewelry shop together afterwards, when she’d be able to have some input into the decision of which ring to get). This was to be in mid-September, just before Carolynn’s return to Davis for her final year in vet school. We had already made plans to spend a weekend in Guerneville on the Russian River, but alas, a day or two before I came down with a bad case of the stomach flu. Several times Carolynn suggested we cancel the trip, but I insisted we had to go. By the time we drove up to Sonoma County I felt a little better, but was still suffering. Against Carolynn’s further protestations, I also insisted we go out to a nice restaurant – Carolynn had the steak, and I had … the flu. During dessert I presented her the earrings while popping the question, and she finally realized why I had been so adamant about the trip (later, it became apparent that proposing under this adverse circumstance engendered a bit of a curse for us – whenever we travelled afterwards, invariably one of us would get sick).
The following June I was a major participant in a fourth wedding, just after Carolynn graduated from vet school (Fig. 5.14) – that way I made sure I was marrying a doctor. With our printed invitations, we included a map to the wedding and reception sites for the benefit of our out-of-town guests. And with Carolynn’s permission, the map included references to some of our favorite pieces of literature by Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Adams, Dorothy Sayers, Frank Herbert and P.G. Wodehouse (Fig. 5.15).
The wedding was held at Carolynn’s family home on Eucalyptus Road in Oakland, with the reception just a couple of blocks away at the Claremont Club (Fig. 5.16) on Hillcrest Road. Carolynn’s family’s housekeeper, Dorothy McGhee (Fig. 5.17), did the catering. The ceremony was scheduled for 4pm, and we pretty much had everything all set by the night before. That left me completely free the morning of, so I tootled over to Tilden Golf Course where I ALMOST completed 18 holes before I had to leave to get dressed (Fig. 5.18 and 5.19 are before and after shots) for “that other thing I gotta do today.” Since it was Scottish Country Dancing that brought us together, other dancers were well represented among the invitees, including Carolynn’s bridesmaids (Fig. 5.20) (I was way outnumbered – Carolynn had three attendants, while I was assisted solely by my brother as Best Man), the band (Fig. 5.21), and of course the dances were mostly SCD in origin – the highlight of the evening was dancing to Carolynn’s Waltz, a tune composed in our honor by Barbara16, as well as Eucalyptus Waltz, composed by Paul Machlis. Additionally, two dances had also been devised to celebrate our union: Bruce Herbold, a former housemate of Carolynn when she lived in Davis, composed a 40 bar jig, Hawe Harvey, the wooin’ o’er, while Noyes Orr wrote a 48 bar reel, Bob and Carolynn Reel (finally! someone thought to include my name). Within a week of the wedding we moved up to Pullman, Washington, where Carolynn had an internship lined up at the veterinary school at Washington State University.
And so it turns out I DID end up following the advice of Wanda Kownacki (a LGHS 1971 classmate) who, when she signed my yearbook, wrote that I should “Marry a nice Lithuanian girl” (Fig. 5.22).
1 See Chapter 7, section 10.
2 My lack of musical talent didn’t prevent me from occasionally joining in as a percussionist, first by playing the spoons (my personal highlight being when Barbara invited me to play for one dance at the formal ball at Asilomar), and after Roy Kaitner moved out of the house we shared, I inherited his snare drum, and for two or three years, I drummed for a pickup band at one or two gigs – but I was never any good at it.
3 See Fig. 4.8.
4 At some point, Marjorie got a new job and moved out of town, and the responsibility for processing mail orders fell to Edith Turner (Barbara’s mother), and so for years Barbara’s family home became the official address for Cabbage Records.
5 Well, almost (again). Maria and I became very close friends over the years – of all the people I met through dancing, she has the biggest heart.
6 Referenced in Appendix I, first entry.
7 She is mentioned further below, as well as elsewhere in these memoirs, including the Appendices. Regretfully, she passed away from cancer at the much too early age of 46.
8 Referenced in Appendix C, song 5.
9 A Datsun 240Z (see Chapter 7, section 10).
10 Where my two companions instructed me in the fine difference between absconding with items, versus merely “rearranging” them, ie: moving them from one place (like outside a structure in Sonora), to another (like their bookshelves in their homes).
11 That and a couple of other event led to a song: see Appendix C, title 15.
12 I did have a couple of escapes open to me. One was playing arcade games evenings in the basement of the ASUC building at Berkeley, another was cross country skiing in the winter. But the big one was hang gliding (Chapter 7, section 4) – unfortunately, this was still early in my flying career, and I‘d break a down tube or two when I had a hard landing, thus sidelining me for days or weeks at a time until I could get them replaced.
13 “Lou”. Robin added yeast to Lou’s food, giving her the absolutely softest fur I’ve ever felt on any cat.
14 See Chapter 7, section 7.
15 See Appendix I.
16 According to a note on the sheet music given us, Barbara started writing it in May, 1985 (one month before the wedding), but didn’t finish it until June, 1988.