A very Santa Cruz weekend

Ah, Santa Cruz. I miss it so, but it's always such a treat to get down there for a day or two. It was a fairly spontaneous plan. My old friend Vnes, who I hadn't seen in at least a couple years, was celebrating her 40th birthday, and I decided getting down there for the party would be a good excuse to make a weekend of it in the old stomping ground. Astrid and I met up with V and friends at Coaster's, a music/karaoke bar inside the Boardwalk Bowl where the ticket included three bands: Santa Cruz locals Beaver Fever and Fainting Goats, and the SF-based Slow Trucks. We rolled into town at 11:30pm, so only caught the Slow Trucks, who I really enjoyed - they've got an indy, Pixies-ish appeal, and the girl drummer had a charmingly removed-concentration that made the dykes in the house all swoony. It was priceless to see V's face when we arrived - a really lovely birthday surprise.

Astrid and I then went to Exene's new digs to spend the night, where we were joined by other San Francisco interlopers, Raquel and Juju. The next morning, we all met up with V for the mandatory breakfast at Zachary's (sourdough pancakes! artichoke frittata!) and then Astrid and I had some relaxed alone time. Strolled around Pacific Avenue, got a nibble at the Bagelry and then went for a soak at the Well Within. Saturday with Astrid was the second monthly "Luxuriate Day" in which we are committing to a full day of intentional, relaxing alone time together, an unplugging from the internets and the daily grind and a turning on to only nourishing, de-stressing, and healthful activities for our bodies/minds and togetherness. Hot tubs most definitely fit into all the above categories. Astrid's back was feeling particularly tweaked as well, so she scheduled a massage directly after our tub, during which time I walked back up to Exene's and lounged with the ladies on the upstairs deck, where they had arranged a mid-afternoon snack of olives, gouda and manchego, rice crackers, almonds, and tequila for sipping. I opted for water at this juncture, but alcohol was to figure prominently in the evening hours to come.

After break time with the girls, I drove back downtown and picked up Astrid, and we set a course for West Cliff Drive* for a more brisk walk filled with sea air and beautiful vistas. We hung out at a couple special spots on the cliffs, holding each other and appreciating the hell out of our amazingly connected and yet freeing relationship. It was a perfect cap to the Luxuriate portion of the day. Time to party with the ladies and meet Exene's new beau, Caleb.

So we got back to Casa Exene, and Caleb was dude-ifying at the Weber, in the most non-dudely dude way. Juju was in close tow, making sure the grilling operations were running smoothly. We grilled veggie skewers with onions, red bell pepper, and crimini mushrooms; huge portobellos brushed with olive oil and a little s&p, zucchini, fresh corn, and various varieties of chicken and turkey sausage. For sweets, we had brandied cherries, and we grilled up some pineapple slices and halved peaches, serving 'em up with Raquel's hand-whipped cream. The word is decadent.

All the while, the lot of us were getting nice and sauced on various drinks of choice. Exene's housemate Fela blended up fresh-frozen strawberry margaritas, which were as tasty as they sound, but several of us, including yours truly, opted for the icey comforts of locally-distilled Sarticious gin. There may have been some wacky tobacky involved, but I'm not naming names. And as it happens when in the company of wonderful friends old and new, fantastic food and drink, and a bit of stoney energy, the evening and conversation eventually devolved into glorious and giggly repartée, covering any number of topics from singing-drummers to trying to articulate to each other, drunkenly, our personal most passionately geeky areas of interest. The population of the room, being filled with both academically-oriented geeks as well as students of the live-life-to-the-fullest school, came up with personal-project callings as related and disparate as sex and polyamory, to memory and the operation of narrative and story, to death anxiety, to semiotics, to literature, to Looney Tunes. And then the weekend concluded with a lovely brunch with old pal Oliver at the Other Must-Go Santa Cruz breakfast eatery, Café Brasil, where I devoured perfectly poached eggs on a bed of sautéed spinach and mushrooms, covered in a rich brown cocota sauce. My mantra for the weekend: good shit.

* West Cliff photo by Astrid; Link goes to Scott Haefner's site for some awesome coastal shots.

Red to Green, Part Three (of Four)

…in which Bree's sex life gets even dodgier.

Click here for the legend, which will open in a new window.

Jump back to Part Two

1995-'96. Drama factor: 10! Notes: Oh, lord, where to begin? Well, you've read the overview of the situation already. I'll describe the players and the context in a semi-systematic way:

Center branch: Bianca was my lover for about 1 ½ - 2 years. Bianca was living with her partner Bella for about 4 years at the time we met. The three of us negotiated my involvement with Bianca, so the connection between us is green. Over time, however, as Bianca and I got more emotionally involved, Bella's consent eroded, yet the relationship persisted. I'm not proud of this, and I gather Bianca isn't either.

The early period, counter-clockwise from top: Elsie and I had a sweet fling in the spring/summer of '95, til she went off to be a garden monk at a nearby zen center. Bianca was apprised of this, whether she liked it or not. I also had the opportunity to sleep with Lola and Iris again at various times during my involvement with Bianca, and these were legit and openly discussed. Note that Lola and Iris, having met through me, were dating at one point previous to this period, which I found revolting.

Throughout my time with Bianca, she continued to burn a torch for her erstwhile lover, C., who she had rare opportunities to be with during our run. This was a major source of tension between Bianca and Bella, but I was so very enthralled with Bianca's flair for drama and always keen to hear stories about her Great Love C. Meanwhile, Bella had a lover for a spell, Edward, whose presence kind of relaxed the stress between Bella and me and provided a bit of freedom for Bianca and I to spend some time together during the mid-point of our affair.

Later on in the relationship, as Bianca and I became more emotionally enmeshed and Bella became less okay with our affair, my other involvements went underground. I was fucking our mutual friend Pookie, who also worked at the Org, and that was a direct affront to Bianca; in fact, very unfairly to Pookie, I consciously used her as a wedge to put some distance between me and Bianca. Meanwhile, Pookie had also fucked both my exes, Lola and Iris. We were all such class acts, right? I also slept with a sweetly nerdy boy, Jarek, made out with a new friend Kate, and then had a couple-week fling with yet another co-worker, Irene. Of those involvements, I managed to come clean about the boy, but I outright lied to Bianca about Irene, which put the final nail in the coffin. During this late period, Bella had a clandestine affair with her friend Hank as well, so Bianca was getting grief on all sides. Not that she was the innocent in the situation; after all, she had continued her affair with me long after Bella had clearly stated it was no longer okay. High point: Bianca and I had the most indescribably hot sexual rapport. Low point: it should just never get this low.

1997-'98. Drama factor: 2. Notes: When Bianca and I were finally done with all that, and Iris moved back to Santa Cruz from points East and North, we made another go at being girlfriends, this time for about two years. We always maintained an open agreement, but neither of us really put it into practice – I think we were both sufficiently worn down from all the previous turmoil. We once took my friend Kate (see the Bianca Bramble) to bed with us, which was fun and low-key. I always nursed a handful of crushes, but nothing materialized. Then, toward the end of our relationship, after it was clear things weren't going to work out long-term for us, Iris became involved with Shannon, a local dyke-about-town. We broke up within a month or so. High point: my first really adult relationship, and sharing our lives together. Low point: we were both pretty bored.

* * *

I then entered a beautiful (and rare, for me) period of being single. No chart here, but honorable mentions to Callie, Kate (again) and the random playmates who passed through my life in the fair annum of 1999, the year I finally quit the Peace Org, road tripped across the country, and landed the very unstressful jobs of making sandwiches and scrubbing down hot tubs.

* * *

2000-2004. Drama factor: 3. Notes: As you can see, structurally, my relationship with Nat was almost a mirror image of my relationship with Iris, as far as nonmonogamy goes, even down to the three-way, this time with a random Craigslist hookup. I was adamant that I wanted to make nonmonogamy happen this time in a mature way, but I was still restrained. Natasha had had a very bad pseudo-polyamorous bramble of her own with her ex-husband, just previous to our relationship. Internally, I had my own unresolved emotional issues and guilt, and fears about hurting Nat in the shadow of her situation with her ex. So I stalled on it for a long five years. My most persistent crush at the time, Rita, became fuel for some low-level drama between Nat and I, but really nonmonogamy was one of the big elephants in the room for the entire course of our relationship. High point: hands-down the most mature relationship I'd been in to that point. Low point: we were both repressing what we really needed.

One more installment, kids…

Jump back to Part Two
Jump forward to Part Four

Red to Green, Part Two (of Four)

…in which Bree's follies continue.

Click here for the legend, which will open in a new window.

Jump back to Part One

1992. Drama factor: 4. Notes: After many months of sexual tension, Casey and I finally started dating. In the interim, I was still burning a candle for Iris, and had hooked up with Ube's UCLA housemate at some Jewish student retreat. I had the opportunity to see her again after Casey and I had gone GF. I was straightforward with Casey, but she wasn't happy about it. After I moved to Santa Cruz that fall, Casey and I both became involved with other people, she with a guy friend of hers and me with Lola, who would become my first really long-term partner. We discussed both our other involvements with much maturity, and at that point, even though I was open to our relationship continuing, Casey read this moment as our break up. At least, that's how I think it went (Casey – any feedback from your side of the table?) High point: those magical, unforgettable hugs. Low point: showing up to meet Casey with a fresh Lola hickey on my neck. At my eldest nephew's bar mitzvah. Real classy, Bree.

1992-1994. Drama factor: 7. Notes: Lola and I were together for two years, and during that time, I was always clear about wanting to be open. She was willing to negotiate, but it wasn't ever something she was into, and so I remained nonmonogamous mostly in my fantasies. I still had the Energy with Iris, and became really smitten with my friend A. who lived in Tucson and wrote the most intellectually juicy letters, but I didn't discuss these emotional involvements with Lola. Somehow I was able to talk openly with her about my crush on my friend G., maybe because my feelings for men have always been less serious and therefore seemingly less threatening to my primary relationships. G. and I had made out at a party early on in my relationship with Lola, before we were calling ourselves girlfriends, and I didn't reveal that. I ended up smooching a casual friend, and Lola wasn't thrilled, but we discussed it at least. Then toward the end of our relationship, Lola and I both kissed our mutual friend Spider unbeknownst to each other! I think I may not have known that Spider and Lola kissed until years later. So somehow the nonmonogamy was not working properly in that relationship, even though I was constantly preoccupied with it. High point: a lot of great communication, despite my intermittent tendencies toward repression. Low point: oh, that breakup really stung. It was awful for us both.

1994-early '95. Drama factor: 4. Notes: Dani and I dated but were never SO's, which I think accounts for some of why the nonmonogamy went smoother than many relationships before and after. We were also both oriented toward being open, and this was a first time for me, dating someone else as slutty as I was. The drama wasn't about the negotiations re: nonmonogamy, but about my push-pull with intimacy. Fresh from the breakup with Lola and wanting to be a free agent (not to mention I was kind of insane at this time in my life) I wasn't willing to be very present with Dani, even though I cared about her a lot. I had a passionate evening with A. (the letter-writer from Tucson), and got to fuck Iris again for the first time in years, and had a one-night fling with Kym, a friend from school. All were talked about freely with Dani (and with my other lovers). When I started to become involved with Bianca, Dani knew it was the death knell for us, and the drama spiked. High point: most above-board nonmonogamy yet. Low point: hurting Dani and the resulting awkwardness at work. Yes, we were co-workers. Can't say it was the last time for that nonsense…

Jump to back to Part One
Jump forward to Part Three
Jump forward to Part Four

Vintage Bree: Where were you during the Loma Prieta earthquake?

October 17, 1989, San Jose, California, early evening. I am sitting at the desk in my bedroom, my senior year of high school, and my mom is in the room next to mine, playing Boggle on our now ancient Mac. I am working on a homework assignment (I don't quite recall which) when the house begins to shake, and shake. My mom and I both yell, "Oh Shit!" in unison, and then I scream, "Get into the doorway!" and we stand there, in the doorways of the rooms side by side, waiting for it to be over. The quake kills 63 people, injures more than 3,000 and leaves even more homeless. The Bay Bridge and the Cypress structure collapse.

Ten years later. I work at a natural foods deli in Santa Cruz, and I'm fetching some items from the case for a customer who looks familiar to me, a friendly middle aged woman, all smiles and silky grey hair. I figure she's a regular. My co-worker and I are having a conversation on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Loma Prieta temblor. "Where were you during the quake?" I ask from behind the counter, including the shopper in on our chat. The customer thinks on it, and then offers in good cheer, "I was giving a pelvic exam at the Women's Health Center!" We all laugh, and then she and I beam at each other in embarrassed recognition.

Dispatch from the Cruz

Hello one and all,

I'm spending the weekend with my pals Exene and Oliver here in my erstwhile hometown of Santa Cruz. Once E & O's friend S. gets here, we will sup downtown at a new Pakistani restaurant, new since I last lived in this town some eight years ago. Astrid is on a teaching gig in Oklahoma, and I miss her. There's so much to tell, and I'm working on an epic blog entry about some of the thrilling updates in our lives. Mainly, I'm referring to the whole polyamory thing, blown wide open since L.'s visit from Germany. Suddenly I have tangible glimmers of life as I've ideally wanted to live it my entire adult existence: to be very committed and still head-over-ass in love with Astrid, and to experience the incredible joy and titillation, and also the struggle of owning all my own authentic fears about sharing the woman I love with other people who she might grow to love as well. There is something both altruistic and keenly selfish about cultivating my polyness: I get to support Astrid in her loving adventures with other people, and of course, I get to have some of m'own.

Goddamn, I'm hungry. Pakistani food sounds just right.

xo
Bree

Vintage Bree: The Cult Meeting

This is not a timely post, but the anecdote came up a while ago, and I realized I really needed to blog it. This prompts me to think about other classic Bree Lore that may be included in the blog over time. So let's call this the first installment of Vintage Bree.

So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go?

We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."

I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.

There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.

One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.

So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.

They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)

At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.

Maybe she saved some lives that day.