Flashback—Charleston, South Carolina—1984
After auditioning for a production of ‘California Suite’, the director pulled me aside, said that I was not right for any of the parts, but would I be open to meeting for lunch.
BOB!!!! And a long, deep, heavenly orchestrated friendship of gentleness, phenomenal beauty and tumult began.
I was 33, a newly single mother with two young daughters, directing a children’s theater company and trying to sort myself out….and Bob was a former soap star and Shakespearean actor who had walked away from it all to go to India and sort himself out. Now we were both in Charleston. And in a flash, instantly recognizing each other as ‘something’ but neither feeling available for anything beyond friendship. Beyond friendship…what is that?
We PLAYED. We investigated ancient cultures and healing modalities and travel fantasies and everything theatrical and musical imaginable and we PICNIC-ED…regularly.
One Saturday afternoon Bob called me and asked if I ‘had the girls for the weekend’ and no…so he said to meet him at Folly Beach at 6:00. The entire beach was ours…and there he was with an embroidered table cloth spread, RUSSIAN music playing loudly, the weirdest food imaginable mixed in with caviar and potatoes and a vodka concoction (which I minimally sipped)…and we POLKA DANCED and laughed our heads off. A young teenage boy drifted by in the midst of this and watched…and when Bob said hello, the boy said, “You two aren’t married are you.”…and we cheerfully hugged and danced some more and said ‘NO!” and he said ‘I didn’t think so, you’re having too much fun.“
Time time time and complexities…one of us wanted more….the other didn’t…and then Bob got a lymphoma diagnosis. He wanted to disappear into the African bush…no hospitals…no landing in someone’s lap…and so he joined the Peace Corps before his illness was obvious…and off he went. Bob died when he was 57 and I was 47.
I had his poetry…his love poems….his journals …his photographs in my Malibu home….of all people on earth he would be accepting of such a loss due to the elements….but I did LOVE having his written words in my care….WHAT TREASURES LIFE GRANTS US, in each other.