After Three Months

It's funny how you can sometimes go for years without seeing a friend and then when you meet again, time melts away and you pick up the thread of the conversation as if you just saw each other yesterday.

My friend Ruth and I have been having lunch together every 2 weeks for a couple of years now.  I won't explain who Ruth is because I don't want to repeat myself and bore Jim of Jim's Journal, who has probably already read it in a couple of places.  But if you want to know who Ruth is, follow the link above.

We meet at The Great Wall of China, a Chinese restaurant which has a reasonably priced Chinese buffet.  It's not a great buffet, but it's affordable and it's not the food, it's the company.

Ruth is an interesting, fun person with whom I usually discuss theater, movies and old Hollywood (and sometimes other things).  She is one of those rare people who is older than I am (by a year or two) and so, like all of us of a certain age, she is playing the organ recital game like we all are.  It's a tooth here, a lesion there, weakening body parts that need to be strengthened or replaced.  

Sometimes those threads and patches take time to complete and sometimes other things intervene (like my own threads and patches and the times when I've had to cancel because of having to go help my mother).  But we soldier on and reschedule, reschedule, reschedule.

The last time we had lunch together was before Christmas.  I can't believe it's been so long, but we have been rescheduling for a long time.   However, today was finally the day.

I arrived at the restaurant exactly at our appointed time and the guy at the front desk indicated our usual booth and I walked over there, but I had just come in from the bright sunlight and I couldn't focus well and I started to say hello to the woman at the booth, but it was a thinner, older-looking woman and I thought it might be a stranger and started looking around the restaurant for Ruth...but when my eyes focused, of course it was Ruth, having lost a lot of weight in the last 3 months (which may have been her plan).

But it felt awkward.  I don't know why, but it took us several minutes, and a lot of chow mein and egg foo yung before we slipped comfortably back into our old groove again. By the end of the meal, we were our old selves again and chatting away about Dial M for Murder, which we had both seen last week (on different days) at Sacramento Theater Company.  I even got a chance to use my new Droid phone when I was trying to remember the name of an actress who was in the stage show of Deathtrap that I had seen years ago.  She was impressed when I called up Wikipedia and checked it out right there over my Kung Pao chicken.

So, I'm glad we're back on track again and I should mention here that Ruth, who is the author of "The Weight of Gold" which tells the story of a widow who finds herself in Sacramento in 1849 and has to figure out how to support herself without a husband.  In the telling of the story, you learn a lot about the history of that period, insofar as how people lived.

She has now started broadcasting The Chambers Street Theater on the Davis radio station KDRT (95.7 FM), but the shows are being streamed and can be listened to at http://www.kdrt.org/station/archives/8481.   I listened to the first episode and was delighted at how having it read by a real actress (Ruth) brings those gold rush days to life.  Give it a try.  Be forewarned that there is a glitch in Episode 4 which, Ruth tells me, results in a blank space of 13 minutes.

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After I left Ruth, I had my regular dental appointment and have been scraped and polished and flourided and rescheduled.  I really do love going to my dentist.

On Monday, I have my annual eye exam in Sacramento.

And my doctor called to schedule my annual exam and lab tests.

I feel like an old car which just went in to have the oil changed, the tires rotated, the ash trays emptied, and the windows washed. 

My Friend Ruth, a Preview

A year ago, I took on the job of reviewing the book, "Weight of Gold," written by my friend Ruth Chambers, with whom I have lunch every couple of weeks. For one reason or another, the review never got written and I have been feeling very guilty about it for a very long time, because I know Ruth was very disappointed.

When Derrick left The Enterprise, I met with my new editor and brought up an idea for doing a special article on Ruth, which would include things about her book. (I must make clear that Derrick was in no way responsible for the article not getting written in the first place.) Today I finished the article. I'm worried about her, though, because I've been trying to reach her by phone and e-mail for two days, to get additional information before I submitted the story to the paper. She's been so excited about the article, that it just seems very strange that she would not respond. I'm concerned because she has had to cancel two luncheon dates because she was not feeling well.

But anyway, I decided to share the article with you, giving you a jump on what will be published, perhaps next week, in the paper.....

Ruth Chambers arrived in Davis from Los Angeles in 1994, after the death of her father, for whom she had been the sole caretaker 24/7 for two years following his massive stroke. Prior to her father’s incapacitation, she had worked with civic theater, produced several shows and was a newspaper photographer. Following her father’s death, she had to ask herself what she was going to do now.

"My friends were leaving Los Angeles. They were middle aged people who were leaving for a better life somewhere else. So I started going to where they had gone."

Her travels brought her to San Luis Obispo, which she decided was too upscale for her so she decided to push on to Davis.

"I got here at midnight and I looked around, like an LA person does. I cased the joint in 15 minutes. It had trees. It was quiet. I liked it. So I wrote down the name of a realtor, went home, called her the next day and said ‘find me a place to live.’ She did and I put my stuff in a van and I moved up here."

Chambers lost no time in making a name for herself. The name was "Granny Muffin," a woman of indeterminate age, with bright red hair, who wandered around Davis in her bib overalls, put on puppet shows at the Farmers Market, drove a car covered with astroturf, with dozens of tiny figurines decorating the dashboard and she hosted "Granny Muffin Reads" for about six years in the early days of DCTV.

"Ruth is a lively woman who puts her full heart into all that she does," says Kari Peterson former executive director of DCTV.

"DCTV was the perfect platform for her talents. She produced shows, she helped others with their shows, and she was out on the street with a camera to cover anything any time. She had a ball. She's generous, funny, very multi_talented and has crazy, unbounded energy."

Her unbounded energy led her to old Sacramento and the Living History Program.

"I thought I could do a little street thing somewhere on a corner, a puppet show of some kind because I was already doing puppet shows here in Davis. I went to Old Sacramento because I knew they had street entertainers. But you have to wear something evocative of the period so I had a dress made by someone who knew what she was doing and then I heard about the Living History program. I started going to the meetings and there were all these people dressed up like 1849 people and I just kind of got into it. It was wonderful."

"Sometimes there’s a path for you and you don’t know it until you’re actually on it. It’s just interesting that way. I now do a gold rush puppet show. I do it anywhere, but mostly out of the Sacramento history museum which is on I St., by the River. I cover the gold rush period all the way through the transcontinental railroad so it’s not your usual puppet, it’s history."

As she got into her role, she became even more authentic and made her own dress–by hand, without the use of a sewing machine. "I started with an apron, no pattern (the women of that period had no patterns). It took me six hours. I thought well, that’s not that bad. I can make a dress. I have time. It took me 32 hours to do the dress and the apron."

Now she’s working on her third dress ("because I’m an idiot"), though she points out that most women of the era only had two dresses. " Can you imagine only having two things to wear? That’s smelly. But they were smelly people."

Her work with the Living History program has led Chambers to write her first book, "The Weight of Gold," which is available at the Sacramento History Museum, and locally at The Avid Reader.

The heroine of her story is the "Widow Chambers," who travels to California from New York with her husband, who dies en route of cholera ("It was very typical of the time. 40% of people died on their way to California," she explains).

"That leaves me a widow who will have to support herself. When I get to Sacramento it’s mostly young men between 18 and 24, very few women, and of course I’m too old to be marriageable. I already have grown children back east. So I start gathering berries in the foothills and making fruit pies and selling them on the street, which is one of the ways women could make a living back then."

Chambers explained that women could not own property during that period, so a woman couldn’t buy a farm. "If you were a widow you could be a housekeeper, you could be a cook, you could run a boarding house–you couldn’t own the boarding house. You’d have to get a man to own it and then you’d rent it from him. So then I come up with this pie thing because I didn’t want to do the other things, and probably because I was kind of feisty because of my life with Mr. Chambers. The women back then were supposed to shrink back, but because Mr. Chambers and I supported ourselves together with the Chambers St. Theater, I was used to maneuvering a bit. So I started this pie business, building my own outdoor oven."

As she discusses the book, the line between Ruth Chambers, author and The Widow Chambers, character sometimes blurs. But her enthusiasm for bringing stories about the Gold Rush, particularly about the people who didn’t go searching for gold, but who provided the support back in Sacramento, is strong and her book is replete with bits of homespun information you are unlikely to find elsewhere.

Unable to find a publisher for her book, Chambers self-published and has been marketing the book herself. "I wanted my book to be a family book as all of my TV and radio stuff was, where the family gets together again, because what I see if families falling apart. Everything I’ve been doing for the last 20 years is trying to get families together. Here’s an opportunity to read together and it could be entertaining for the adult and entertaining for the child."

She is now working on a sequel and still excited about sharing tidbits with her audience.

"Ruth enters your life in a big way, and smiles and laughs all the way through. What's not to love?" says Kari Peterson.

(Photo by Sophie Flaherty)

Meeting Mike

My friend Ruth and I had an adventure today.

Some time ago, she read that author Michael Connelly was going to be signing copies of his new book, "Reversal" at a book store in Half Moon Bay, which is about a 3 hour drive from here. She decided we should drive down there and get books signed. I decided we should make a day of it. (We later found out that this was his only book signing in No. California.)

Now, bear in mind that when I decided that driving to Half Moon Bay to meet an author would be a great idea, I hadn't thought through the fact that I would be on Washington DC time and would have just returned from a 5-day vacation. I groaned a little when I got up this morning, but the groaning quickly stopped.

We went first to San Francisco. Ruth had lived there many years ago, for a year, but didn't have a car at the time and so had never really seen much of the city. I decided to give my tour. We came in through Marin County, because the view of the Golden Gate Bridge on a day like today would be spectacular, and then we went out to the beach and back through the Golden Gate Park, before going to Twin Peaks for a city overlook.

Then we made our way, over many hills, to my favorite restaurant, Green's, with that view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We had a fabulous lunch (we both had an open face sandwich with pears and cheese which was delicious) and couldn't resist the lure of the dessert menu. I had a huckleberry cake with huckleberry ice cream while Ruth had a chocolate pound cake with whipped cream and berries.

We did Lombard Street and Filbert Street and then plugged in Nigel (our GPS voice) and headed for Half Moon Bay, which wasn't as far away as I remembered it as being. Connelly was scheduled to speak at 7 and we got there around 2:30!

It was too hot to sit in the car and there was no place to sit in the book store, so the clerk suggested we drive north a bit to Sam's Chowder House and she recommended their key lime pie. So we headed off north and I turned when I saw the sign, but it was the wrong turn, merely a billboard. However, if I hadn't turned, we would never have seen this cool house.

We aren't completely sure what it is, but you can walk through the yard, and I had in mind the witch from Hansel and Gretel. I was afraid we would be locked in. But Ithink it is an artist's home and s/he just lets people wander around to see whatever is the current project.

We did eventually get to Sam's Chowder House, which had a wonderful view. We thoroughly enjoyed watching a Labrador Retriever playing in the ocean, chasing sticks and balls. Reminded me of Lester. So full of joy!

Ruth had a "cup" of clam chowder which we thought must surely be a bowl until we saw the bowl, which was big enough to feed a litter of piglets. My crab cocktail, in comparison, was minuscule (and expensive), but tasty.

We lingered as long as we could, but we still got back to the book store way too early. They were starting to set up, though, so they put out a couple of chairs for us, while they moved other things around and got ready for the onslaught of customers.

As people began piling into the book store, "things" started happening. A man passed around trays of cookies and cakes.

(don't you love the pumpkin hat?)

And they also passed out rubber gavels as a promotional piece of swag for the book.

Finally the man himself came in.

He was very nice, very articulate, and had that "rumpled author look." He gave an overview of the new book and answered lots of questions, and finally signed books.

It was just a delightful event, a lovely day, lots of surprises, lots of incredible food, and best of all, I didn't fall asleep on the way home. Now I have a big book to read! I'm so glad Ruth had that idea!