More Workshops -LA Style

So after I was fired by Beyond Baroque, I was deserted by wife and child and I was single once again. No car, no refrigerator, one pair of shoes that I had to break down and replace. Took the bus all over the city. Had a cooler in the apartment that I bought ice for and kept snacks in. Had a yard sale when it became very apparent that the ex was not coming back. So this TV writer that showed up at my Beyond Baroque Workshop had invited me to this Workshop that met behind the Federal Building in a rec building in the park. He told me it was run by the radical that was in and out of jail on protest arrests. I went.
It was Bobbie, a little lady who was a professional editor and had been an editor of Bachy magazine, a West LA Literary Magazine. (No radical at all, except for the maryjane in her back yard.) Bob, a shrink with CP, who wrote brilliantly and funny. Rod Bradley, who had sold his first novel to a big publisher, but had sold nothing since. Another Bob, a Probation Officer, who was trying to write like Mickey Spillane. There was a Polish or Russian Jewish lady that was writing really good stuff about how her parents hid her in a Catholic School for girls during WWII and how she survived even though all the other girls knew she was Jewish. And another Bobbie and Sandy who wanted to write. And David, the TV writer that had a long list of credits. This became the beginning of my social life after the divorce. We were mostly all mid-thirties and free. The second Bobbie had a Friday night artist party once a month. David and I became good friends and had a mutual respect thing going for a while. I fooled with the ladies. They fooled with us. I went drinking a lot with Sandy's crowd. I developed a better reality awareness of what fiction was and could be and outgrew trying to write like James Joyce. Was it every week? It seems so long ago, but it was great fun- I had come from several years of working seven days a week and having no friends to making a lot of friends and was like a kid in a candy shop- the women were all there.
I was doing open mikes at poetry readings all over Los Angeles too. Met a lot of good people. Thru David I met Marion whose friend had a relationship Paul Kistel, who brought me to the Chamber Pot Society.
I wrote my first real novel out of a conversation with David one night over wine and donuts. These folks were well worth knowing and my writing grew from it.