The Stations of the Cross

I pity the Fool who took a trip down the memory hole.

Pal George passed through the Bay Area this weekend and we decided to make the long awaited and often talked about road trip to our alma mater, UC Berkeley. While much has changed in 28 years, I was pleasantly surprised at how much had remained.


The Campanile. It's always good to have a big clock on a university campus. That's how I always new when I was blowing off a class.


Durham Studio Theater is where many of the student productions were performed. I spent many an hour in the scaffolds hanging lights as well as trodding the boards.


The Zellerbach Playhouse is where the larger productions happened. The production of As You Like It is where the aforementioned fool got his name, and also the location of our first meeting, which involved T.S. Eliot. A story for another time.


Sather Gate. Through these portals...


Kip's was the location of most of our drinking. When the barmaid heard that we hadn't been back in almost 30 years she bought us a beer. Life is good.


The Cafe Med is where Benjamin Braddock sat waiting for Elaine to get off of the bus and it is where Pal Ian and I wrote the film treatment for Futurballa, a series of vignettes based on the Futurist Manifestos, which later became his senior project at USC film school. Espresso fueled genius.

While drinking our espressos yesterday we saw the Bubble Lady, Julia Vinograd, who seems to have remained unchanged for the last 30 years and still hawks her poetry along Telegraph.


My old apartment. A studio on southside with a sliver of a bay view and a murphy bed. $160 a month in 1977.


Moe's, along with Shakespeare and Co. is among the last of the great independent bookstores along Telegraph since the demise earlier this year of Cody's.



The more things change, the more they stay the same.


We put our arteries on the line and partook of a Top Dog. Still great dogs on the most excellent buns, but they were better at midnight after smoking a bunch of weed. But what isn't?