Jacquie Phelan's Weblog

West Point Inncredible

•August 19, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Panzanella, vino rosso, insalata.

Had so much fun up at the not-so-secret Wombat Hideout this past week–a five day stay in a no-electricity hotel where you have to WALK or CYCLE to get a bed.

Sally Burr came up, loaded with at least thirty pounds of organic provender and clothing for all weathers. It was about 90 degrees F and she’d ridden from Belvedere (i.e. sea level …to 2000 feet). I had three days and two nights to learn more about this artistic, shy, statuesque wombat-woman whom I’ve known for years and looked forward to riding with (don’t ask me how I wore her out the next day).

I was a storm in the kitchen.

Prepping, chopping…and sometimes even burning-to-a-crisp (A.D.D. cuisine!)

Nothing is more relaxing than chopping vegetables, assuming you don’t slice yr left forefinger into the cilantro yes I do that a bit too often. There goes the ‘vegetarian’ designation. As for the burning…well, that Wolf range is restaurant-caliber and you have to stare at the food to PREVENT it from burning …turn your back (or god forbid go out to the chaise lounge because after turning your back you FORGET the damn food in the huge iron skillet is happily cooking itself into…what looks like another black frying pan.
OK, no problem. Since I always prep around five, I’m way early for the dinner rush.

Just begin again (put the wine glass down and focus on the food and the flame).

Got loads of ingredients (back door supplier in summertime overflow mode).

The most fun element is the people tromping up the steps. Most visitors are NOT spending the night. The Old Railroad Grade (and old Stage Road, and El Drudge Grade) deliver at least a hundred people on a fine summer day. Most are looking for a view, a workout, or that True High that comes from ascending a Genuine Mountain. Some even leave their Self-Owns switched off (it’s against the rules to even USE the damn things on the Inn property, thank goddess).

Many are looking for lemonade or a snack bar…some are looking for a similar soul who hikes or bikes…and one or two are dealing with demons, and you get to help them by uh…letting them tell you all about it.

Thursday’s smorgasbord of hiking and cycling humanity included ‘Uncle Tony’– a ruddy faced Irish Australian who came to Marin in the mid-sixties and never left.

Hauling himeself up the last step to the deck he says: “Don’t get up!”

Another grandiose comic like me, telling people to remain seated!!
Hmm. This merry, grizzled gent regaled me about Forbes Island, and how it used to be…and I promised myself a visit Pier 39 somehow, somewhere, just to make sure that this memorable gent who out-rode his 25 year old niece up the mountain, wasn’t just a hallucination with an Irish/Ozzie accent.
I get hallucinations now and then.
Then they prove real…and I have to ask yet again: is life but a dream?
Is the Row Row Row Your Boat song telling an imponderable never-ending cyclical truth?

And: is this row-boat floating gently on the Niagara river Kay Ryan describes?

(Ed: are you using too many words? Kay does so much more in a few lines…)

The heat was hard to take until I remembered to dampen a cotton longsleeve shirt to serve the dinner looking disheveled and demure. Drew a cool bath and sent lobster-red hikers up to chill for a few minutes in it before they headed down the mountain. A guaranteed non-conforming Use Of The Inn.

There will be a few racers from the Single Speed World Championship coming up there next tuesday: Artist Damo-the Bamboo Bridge Maker and his girlfriend, and Andy Laing for sure…assuming they can find the place.

Posted in Uncategorized

8-8-88! Lettuce celebr8 our st8 of welded bliss

•August 8, 2008 • 19 Comments

Intertwingled

]

“The day started out as uneventfully as any other, and continued thus to midday, and from there it was nothing at all to ease into an evening of numbing, undiluted monotony that survived unmarred by even the least act of momentary peculiarity—in fact, let’s skip that day altogether and start with the day after.”*

Times twenty years. AH, what a fun ride it’s been, getting old together. I am throwing in a picture when we were mere middle aged kidless kids with a bicycle factory to play with and a whole mountain to play on.
My Italian friend Raffa reminds me that OTTO means eight. Of course I know that, but that is in the “proximal foreign linguini” lobe of my brain, and I had not quite integrated this numeralogical coincidence…whew. Beats going in circles…(JP thinks for a mintue, trying to work a moebius strip into the monologue…no luck. She’s tired, she’s done a three hour ride today to mark the time in weather IDENTICAL to the day we tied the unafraid knot. Fogggggggy below, suuuuunny above Mt Tam’s waistline).

Like virtually every other wombat with control issues, I proposed to Charlie.

I also picked the date.

The hell with it being a Monday, let’s see who our real friends are!”

The letterpress invitation would be easier with most of the numbers coming out of the same little box in the job case.

Besides, I wanted to bowl that line of little eights over–domino-style–leaving four infinities rolling about in an attempt to confer good luck and longevity upon Charlie’s and my ‘lawful welded union’.

A quick google search of the that quartet of numbers broke my heart: along with our merryiage, the date marked the outbreak of the bloody, failed Burmese uprising where thousands were killed by soldiers in the streets. Guess it was a lousy date to have a revolution, luck-wise.
Meanwhile, back in Marin, fifty mountain bikers loafed about the West Point Inn that sunny Monday, eating their very first taste of ratatouille (mtn bikers were–and are–unadventurous eaters), and discussing a ‘cosmic convergence’.

As if the heavens even paid attention to that sort of thing.

In the ensuing years, Charlie and I learned (from the telly) that wombats have a little courtship dance that involves pursuing one another in figures-of-eight!

WOW! Proof of something, but we’re not sure what.

Wombats were ice-skaters in another life?

We aspire to another boring twenty, and praying the Burmese get to experience the luxury of boredom in this lifetime…

FEEDBACK! WE could really use about eighty eight comments from you 215 daily readers…

*This is something I WISH I wrote, but no, Jay Solmonson wrote it, winning mention in the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, which takes place each year around here, inspiring writers to crank out turgid prose.

Posted in "the number eight", Alice B. Toeclips, Jacquie Phelan, Ride
Tags: "mountain bike wedding", "the number 8", "welding bells", anniversary, cosmos, wedding

Blast Into the Past

•August 5, 2008 • 3 Comments

P stands for Paddy I suppose, plus party, and prett

Friday night last, I got a message from a very significant person in my past: Betsy Aubrey, the spirited young divorcee who retained me (in exchange for a room) as a bilingual ‘au pair’ to Paddy, her three year old boy.

The year was 1979. I hadn’t morphed into Alice yet.

“We’re having a party tomorrow night at our place, we’d love it if you could come –sorry about the late notice… Paddy’s going to be there with Jamie and their boy.”

Just her voice on the tape took me back an entire epoch (before REAGAN!!). Speaking of ‘voice’…that is me singing the Irish song featuring a guy named ‘paddy’. Planxty’s Johnny Moynihan does a nicer job of it…

For about a year, I’d gotten to play with, dress for school, bicycle with, cook for, and TELL STORIES (in French of course) to an impetuous blonde three year old named Padraic. With five siblings ‘under my belt’ (so to speak) I knew that one little boy would be a piece of cake.

Well, maybe it wasn’t ALL cake, but it was a gas. I got to unfurl my Inner Julia Child, my Maurice Sendbak, and of course, dust off my underutilized Big Bossy Sister.

That epoch was tumultuous for every person in the household for three different reasons…but somehow we came through it intact, and now I was invited to come see this kid as a grown man.

It wouldn’t be a total shock.

Three years ago I’d googled Paddy in a late night web-wandering session. I think my bio-illogical clock had just gone off.

Fifty years old, and (damn!) I ‘d forgotten to have a child!

With a handle like Padraic, in two clicks of a of mouse’s tail I learned he was playing with a band called “Hearing Red”, working as a fledgling film maker, and generally being a boy-about-town in the LA fame pits. I wrote a note to the band’s MySpace page, he wrote back.

Il ne m’avais pas oublie!

And: he was about to become a dad . I promised to one day go see him (by bike!), but instead, slid back into my Alice B. NoKids existence.

Until the phone call four nights ago.

Saturday morning:

Led the Mellow Marin wombat ride

Hosted a small tea for four in the Habitat

Swabbed myself down with Opium

Threw my gray crochet minidress into a backpack (plus stockings, high heels, olive paste for Betsy –no doubt a discerning cook herself–a ceremonial chinese jacket for little mini-Paddy, bike light, oh piles of stuff…) It’s twenty five (beautiful tail wind sunny) miles into town.
With fifty mph winds on the Golden Gate bridge. Wind AND sun, a rare combo.

Really glad I left the banjo at home. (Ed: so were countless others!)

Dare I attempt to describe stepping into that lavish party?
The fact that the birthday girl looked younger than when she was thirty?

The red velvet cake, the savory ham sliders, the three sauces for dippping, the veggie stew, the free-flowing liquor, the gaudy tie-dye outfits?
Verily, twas a SIXTIES theme party, and the peace signs twinkled on every chest.

Dare I mention that my name-recall chakra was a bit off kilter, and I called one fellow the Wrong Name for most of the night? Highlights included a few minutes of genuine ‘face time’. The kind of looking that real moms are so familiar with and us poseurs just dream of, where you unblinkingly gaze into the soul of that grown up human, and see…that little person again.

I think I must have ticked off something on my ‘to do’ list of life, without knowing it had been listed.

I MEAN CHECK, not TICK.

Well, maybe tick.

After all, after leaving a party–in my case in high heels, dress, backpack, wobbling into the almost starry night on my skinnyHam–one has no clue what ripples one leaves among seventy people from all over the country. For me it was a gay time: mingling, blethering, and sometimes alighting to make a concerted effort at lip-reading, while efficiently packing in the plentiful provender.

Gliding on, wondering :”why am I here?”.

OH, right. So I can look into familiar eyes, and reforge that connection between two earlier beings, and pull some loose threads into that braided coil that all our stories are, before they converge at the very end…

Posted in Cycling, food, Jacquie Phelan, Ride
Tags: "Betsy Aubrey", "P stands for Paddy I suppose", "Paddy Aubrey", party

Still Connected To Scotland

•August 1, 2008 • 1 Comment

Looking at the world (in this case, Aran Island, Scotland) through rose-tinted, cow-spotted 25 yr old Oakley frogskins

Edinburgher Anthony Robson just notified me that I’ve got a feature piece in his latest issue #38 of CityCycling UK.

A few years ago, I’d I written a letter to the American trade publication Bicycle Retailer & Industry News (aka BRAIN) about how maybe Giant DIDN’T really introduce the ‘compact geometry’ in 1998.

I allowed that Charlie (the guy asleep upstairs in the treehouse) might have done it fifteen years earlier.

My slope-tubed road bike received a surprisingly hostile reception back in 1984, the first year women were permitted to race bicycles in the Olympic Games (which were conveniently being held in my home town, L.A. Calif).

I was training madly to qualify for the US Team that spring, in Texas, with the best riders in the states (plus a few Czechs who’d somehow gotten over for warm-weather practice. March in Austin is marvellously warm most years). You have already read the story in “Cunntributions to the Art”.

If not, click on the above bit for a good a read/ it’s way nicer looking than this blog!
The rest of this online magazine is wonderful, too. Reading it will put you squarely in the UK’s most progressive bicycle city, “Eden Burrow”.

CityCycling’s motto: “No matter what you ride, as long as you do”

Cheers 2 U o Scottish Cycling Brother/Sisterhood. See some of you in three weeks at SSWC 08, the rest of you in May 09.

Posted in Cycling, Jacquie Phelan, Scotland, Single Speed, Technology
Tags: "bicycle retail and industry news", "compact frame", cityCycling.com, cunningham, oakley frogskins

Marin County Mountain Rendezvous

•July 30, 2008 • 1 Comment

View from the deck of the inn. Trees frame a southern view of Marin, SF, Oakland

It has come to my attention that people are dying to come to the “Mount Tam BIcycle Bed ‘N Breakfast (and lunch and dinner) up at WEST POINT INN, just above Mill Valley in Marin County. But they want specifics…
There are two sessions

I. (4 day Aug 13-16, WED THROUGH SATURDAY)

II. 3 day, 2 night, August 26-28 (TUESDAY THROUGH THURSDAY, ie. mid-week)

SSWC08 –which is being held in Napa–is a mere three hours away by bike+car. Remember, this inn can only be reached by human power.

IF you only want to do a single night, cost is $130 per person.
You can’t make up your mind?

Would LOVE to go but…??
Nah, I understand. We’re all slow to commit. Something better might come up.

I do it all the time.

The first one, the four-day “STAY-Cation” (i.e. don’t leave the County, you locals) is only 2 weeks away… I want you there. Now I’ve said it. Picture a queen on (slightly) bended knee, playing role-reversal with her subjects, requesting their presence in this unique opportunity to hang out in a WICKED PRICELESS, barely-known but very very venerated HOTEL with little old me.

Do I detect a few eyes seeking the exit?
Am I not being subtle?
Is your summer already fully booked?
I understand.

Just get yr buns up there, and don’t forget sheets and a flashlight.

Relive the magic of 8-8-88, where two frightened bikers promised not to drop one another in the long, profoundly technical double track known as…”mudrimony”. That’s right.. Charlie and I had our ‘welding’ up there…and hey, miracle of miracles he still endures my bad puns, overweaning vanity and hellacious flatulence.

Am I saying too much?
That last thing?
Oh, all right. I promise to stay in my own cabin…and as long as I don’t have ice cream, all will be well.

—

More verbiage?

Well, you can send checks to Box 757 Fairfax CA 94978 as long as they arrive the 9th and the 22nd respectively (planning, shopping etc). I need food restrictions

Menu and Itinerary
Scattered arrival time means an afternoon long reunion…raid kitchen fridges, check room assignments, stash stuff, and search for chore list, sign up for one chore– yes, just like a hostel, only more picky.
12:00 day ONE
lunch (Jacquie on kitchen duty most of the day)
Lavosh sandwiches with feta and herbs
Calistoga soda and Sierra Nevada pale ale from our back fridges (help yourself, it’s all ours)

Check out the deck out front!

For four sunny days, the mountain is your home for four days. This inn is your ‘vacation cabin’!

3:00 Snack: Jacquie’s patented shredder cheese and tortilla chips, salsa

4-5:30 Musical moment on porch

6:00 Dinner
Choice of Wombat soup: Fresh tomato or
Creamy fennel & ginger
Milan style risotto with mushroom sauce
Sourdough bread

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Cheesecake with lime glop on top
8:30 KP (everyone does five min at the sink!), dry &put dishes away leaving empty rack
Aperetifs , music, story hour, reading til bed.
———-
(JP or other Inn member turns on the gas lights & shut them off)

Day #2
Dawn: go jogging (joke alert)
8-9:30 breakfast : cereal, bread, butter, fruit, strange veggie “Vruit”juice that will facsinate the novelty-seeking grown ups. OJ for traditionalists
Coffee, tea
(Leave front door LOCKED until eleven. Use side doors to get to decks, to prevent accidental entry by lemonade seekers who are early. We don’t sell before eleven or after five)
10-11:30 Paint a picture of the inn, it’s a tradition! Watercolors, crayons, anything….*(another joke: you ‘ll be out riding, hiking or just lazing)

Noon lunch (you make and pack along with you wherever you go –if you go)

MORE sandwiches (do them yrself, we’ll lay out the ingreds if you help put ’em back) PB, cheese, lettuce, mustard, eggplant, on assorted sliced bread
drinks (help yourself to coolers)

7:00 Dinner:
Hors d’ouvre: stuffed dates, crackers, cheese
Salad, garlic bread
Pasta with two types of tomato sauce, veggie and carny. Roasted vegetables.
Dessert a la Laurel…I think
9:00 clean up
9:30 music til the wee hours, no, not really. Banjo til the wee hours.
Day #3 breakfast
French toast, and the usual other amenties
Pack a lunch
Dinner (final night) Roast Beast, plus vegan risotto, summer vegetable ratatouille
Big choco cake
Final breakfast and big clean up
Force primeval bars (basically a mitochondria-shaped bagel) toasted or raw, with butter and
killer goo: a spread made of date syrup, honey and cream cheese
fruit, juice, coffee tea
The final clean up (see list you signed) is the most important. We have to achieve perfection.
Day four (first session is four days) same as above.
Cost for this package: 500 per person, non-refundable for the first one, 400 for the second.
Does not include transportation to Inn
No smoking, no candles are permitted anywhere near the inn. This means ‘brownies” only, or you take a ten minute ride to light up….failure to honor this means loss of lifetime membership at Inn for JP.
No dogs (not that you’d bring yours)…no radios . Available instruments: banjo and piano.

Checks go to Jacquie Phelan Box 757 Fairfax CA 94978 USA

Single night stay? Please haggle with JP. Cost: 150,
Where else will you find such a deal?
Answer: nowhere.

I need to know DIETARY RESTRICTIONS
TEA?COFFEE person?
SPOUSE COMING? The cost is per person and includes food and lodging but not transpo.
You ride up under your own power.
There are only 2 rooms that can be called “single’. We can accomodate ten to twelve people.
There are five cabins, each sleeps three , the lodge sleeps another ten or so.

Posted in Cycling, food, Jacquie Phelan, Night, Ride
Tags: "West Pt Inn"

To Possess Other Eyes

•July 29, 2008 • Leave a Comment

little wonder I need help from 'orderly types' with that book, eh?

The comfortable clutter of my corner chez Helen. No wonder I need help from editor with that book, eh?

Whether by accident or on purpose the subtitle of the blog is Inside the Mind of The Wombat.

Marcel Proust said,
“The only genuine trip…would be not to visit new places but to possess another’s eyes, the eyes of a hundred others, and see that hundred universes, which each sees, and each is.”

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est.

Hard as it is with my fleeting attention ( SIMPLE magazine has a contest I MUST enter…”the day that changed my life”…and WIN.
Yah. So, my books. The Year of the Wombat. Upstart Crone….and The Amuse Buch.

Three fucking books, all to be pasted together and trotted around and around, then finally self-published, possibly with design help cos it will be disastrous if I do the design (see above photo of contents of room while in Edinburgh).

Love you readers, truly do

Posted in Uncategorized

SHOCKING NEW DEVELOPMENT

•July 28, 2008 • 14 Comments

PHELAN GOES TO THE LIGHT SIDE!

And somehow, WordPress let me do it without any punishment…READERS please let me know if you will read me even when it’s black letters on white non-paper. VOTE EARLY and OFTEN.

READ MY CRAP. I am trying to get my book in gear an’ I respond well to the whip.

Oh, and if you want to read non-crap ABOUT fabulous me, try the current Women’s Adventure Magazine (July/Aug issue ).

The story is called Trailblazers, and it isn’t about coats.

I am touched that the author remembered me. Bear in mind, I am still either

a) not a sell-out,

b) sponsor-proof

Hats off to MC O’Connor for including me in the piece.
Ahem, are you done vaunting, Ms P?

Quite.

If any of you can help with image flipping or changing that one at the top, lemme know.

PS. Not getting any yay or nays about the changement de theme….it’s Monday, you’re at work…write!

Posted in Uncategorized

The great Joshua speaks

•July 27, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Whenever Josh Thayer drops by, we put him to work!!

Josh is now 30ish, but Charlie and I met him and his pal Paul on a gray New Year’s Day, 1993. Charlie noticed some helmeted riders circling in the street below us, and when I went to open the door, there was a teenager standing at the door.
“Is this the house of JP and CC?” he inquired politely.
“Ye-e-e-s….”
” I wasn’t sure….we knew the neighborhood but not the house. We would like to interview you for a story in our magazine Strange Chicken“.
“Sure–come out to the Airstream of Consciousness. ..I’ll make us some tea…”
And thus did celebrity stalkers Paul Walker and Josh Thayer enter our lives.

Several months later a black & white folded and stapled zine arrived (see above).

Fast forward fifteen (ulp) years. No longer is Josh a ‘fledgling’. He’s soaring, whirling, having a life, oh god, thank you for dropping those guys on our porch. Now Charlie and I won’t wither unnoticed….

And like every parent…we had chores for him…

“HELP WITH THE ^%^&%&%&!!? images on WordPress. I can’t tip them over (so you have to tilt computer)…

At which Josh cheerfully tackled the keyboard until I begged him to limit his time. Like. Ten minutes.
Ciao cruel cycberworld.

It's cold and empty

Posted in Cycling, heinous name dropping, Jacquie Phelan, Single Speed
Tags: "Joshua Thayer"

Phelan My Oats At SF BIKE FEST

•July 26, 2008 • Leave a Comment

How I celebrated Bike Week:

1) Ride into town. Note fine grafitti even before arriving at gallery.

2) tell Gary Fisher that the Joyride Art Show at “Bottlecapp Gallery” might be worth a look.

3) Do same with Eric Roman (SSWC05 creator, the one in State College Penssylvania), who just moved out west.

4) Also tell the only pleeceman I ever knew that I’m in town for some Art Thing.

Ride to city, going from burning heat to chilly fog. Smug that I packed a nubby thick sweater, triple smug that I still had a bottle of Odwalla to pitch in my messynger bag. Fast food, easy exit. These days, somehow, photo shootin’, sick relative wranglin’, garden tendin’ and er, yes, STARING at my book in pieces on the floor…there seems to be no time.
A by product of having fn.
The only thing missing is U.

I packed a camera in case you were curious.

First stop, pleece station for a visit with NAME WITHHELD.

Then off to (RESTAURANT NAME HERE) to have a couple UNDISCLOSED BEVERAGES and soak up the ambience (Thursday afternoon on a fine sunny day in the Mission). Notice every single detail in the restaurant at the same time, and realize that I am in a stimulating (and safe) environment. Let it happen. Keep noticing stuff.

Enjoy the banter, let the stories unfurl.

Imagine NW’s surprise when a shaggy whitehaired gent reached past my nose and shook hands with NW. Turned out to be a retired pleeceman who worked with Nw’s FATHER (NW is a third generation cop)

At that I cheerfully introduced myself as N’s friend with “authority issues, working out my compulsions for shoplifting and storytelling”.

The Irishman.e was nonplussed. And a tiny bit tanked, sipping his hot toddy with some brown cloves floating around in the bottom of the glass.

I suppressed the urge to ask for a taste.
Even more impressive: suppressed the urge to STEAL one.

This is what I call “good behavior”.

It all fell apart when a hand (I recognised it as my own left hand in a mental playback) shot out and grabbed a plastic pitcher with a couple inches leftover strawberry margarita l. Before the bartender could say, “hey wait a minute!”, I was tilting it in.

Ooh. ICY. Slow down, girl.

Riding into town (about 2 hrs) can get a person’s…er…’electrolytes’ all out of whack. Pounding a margie on top of UNDISCLOSED BEV can throw your vestigial decorum out of whack (and deliver a lightning kick).

Later, the bartender passed me a glass with a properly mixed margarita.

I gave him an autographed card. Same with the Irishman. Same with the man who lent the pen. Oh, dear, this fame thing is ridiculous…the boast cards! The NERVE!

Walking with maybe extra care, I rolled the bike through the teeming Mission, recalling an era full thirty years ago. Night time. Stolen evenings at La Rondalla, playing hooky from my night watchwoman’s job at Blue Cross Pet Hospital

LONG before I envisioned a two-wheeled world. Even though I was riding for transpo then, only a tiny handful of other SF people were doing the same. The S.F. Bicycle Coalition was perhaps fifty riders strong, with a mere dozen regular members flogging the policy part, the hard part of getting anywhere with the City…

While reminiscing, I was admiring old buildings (half of them owned, apparently, by the shaggy white haired gentleman), silently taking in the sights, and totally forgetting to notice if crack dealers blanched visibly to see my un-uniformed pal strolling along the beat. There must be another dimension to hanging out if one is a career criminal.

We stop sign skatin’, small-potatoes trail poachers have NO FLIPPING IDEA what that world is like…other than that in Marin County, the authorities have precious little to do, other than (selectively) enforce the Evil Bike Menace To Social Order.

Then in the middle of Capp Street’s hooker-and-gunplay zone a dozen cyclists circling their rigs…I leave mine to the ‘valet’ (what a luxury!) and allow my escort to retreat without having to go inside the Bottlecapp Bar-Art Space to be…battered by…loud punk conversation?
And what I saw was fun art, not strong work (well, Talia Lempert’s always strong) But the REAL fun was people watching. Esp. when Fisher made his entrance. He looked happy to be there, natty in his iridescent glasses and suave ensemble. So where’s my picture? Oops.

There was Anita, the photographer. Brendt Barbur the nervous dad (of Bicycle Film Fest) that lives six months everywhere but home, and wished he had ‘something constant’…

The gathering swelled to a very raucous hundred or so rider/artist/punks. The bar at the far end of the barbell-shaped warehouse/loft space was quite impressive, with at least four tufted couches and a few chairs and many votive candles….tres gai.

Bailed at around ten for some grub. Stayed up way past my usual hours, and watched the world grow drunk just as my fleeting inebriation dried up. Rode helmetless to Fisher’s, spent the next three hours trading stories to get Mary up to speed on the History of Jacquie And Gary.

One conclusion she drew: we have a deep history (tis true). Another postulate: he got his sartorial style, costuming flair from me.

I know it to be so.

I doubt he would agree, though.

But I do not recall him being a peacock back in those few months in 1981. Gary, what do YOU say?

Will you share the name of your tailor?

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: "gary fisher", "S. F. Bike Film Festival", Jacquie Phelan