The One That Changed Everything

This show was toward the end of my stay in New Orleans. The Writer's Group met in the NO Public Library, was it once a week? I walked in and found Ralph Hudson and Meredith Nelson and Mike Halle and Melinda Frazier. A lot of folks came and went. Ralph was older, good-looking and had a southern gentleman's air about him. He became or was the resident wise man. Meredith (now Mike) beneath beard and general coloring looked and talked exactly like my buddy Jim back in Indiana. It was a bit scary, the resemblance, but we became friends right away. And I met his wife and we liked each other and we did things like take drives out in the countryside and we went fishing and down to the gulf together. Mike was a kind of well-off Med School drop-out whose father was supporting him for a year while he wrote a novel. I read the entire thing: "Jeremy Stopp" was the title. It was long and boring and nothing happened. I had dinner at his parents big house and met his little old Jewish granma. Melinda was a midwest girl and pretty as all get out and we talked with an ease I had never had with any woman. Lamont showed up, reading wonderful prose and he and I got to be friends and his painter friend Tom and Amy who Lamont married later and is still married to. Amy directed the thing above. I felt like Andy Hardy- we were putting on a show! Anyway, we worked. We read out loud and critiqued every word. We were all not that great, but we worked at it. A lady came that wrote for the weekly paper and had intended to make great fun of us, but then gave up the idea once she realized how seriously we were trying to do something good. And I was writing almost every night. Jan and Richard came later.

This was the program. It's a shame, I really don't remember any of the pieces except my own and the giant cardboard painting of bathroom urinals that Tom Kosbab painted as a prop. Of course, I still have my fragment of "The Lone Seeker" which became a 100,000 word manuscript that was long and boring and only occasionally did something happen. It never made it out of the first draft, though I was sure it was going to be just as good as James Joyce's Ulysses. What a time it was.

I left cause nobody that I wanted wanted me. Jan married Richard and had a kid. Lana divorced Mike and ran off with a professor for her first fling.

We are scattered. Mike's in Texas finally married to somebody. Lamont and Amy are Florida. Ralph moved to Biloxi and opened a art gallery last I heard (30 years ago) and married that girl I think. Melinda became a lawyer but never practiced and died a few years ago of cancer or some such. Don't know where Halle ended up. He's probably a doctor now. Kosbab is in New Mexico. Jan is out in the county side in Louisiana, painting, There's a link to her art here.

At that age, 22, I would only talk to you if you were a writer or painter or was living with one. Thank god I found these folks. It would've been very lonely.