Breaking News: Anne R. Allen Knows How to Find Lorelei

I know—I’m in the middle of our August writers conference month, including 3 Ways to Make Friends & Enemies at Writers Conferences and 5 BS Indicators for Writers Conferences (with its up-coming sequel next week).

But I have to take a minute here to report on a conversation I just had on Twitter here and here with writer & blogger Anne R. Allen, whom I know you all know.

Anne R. Allen: California Coast Writers Conference

Anne is involved with the California Coast Writers Conference in my old hometown of San Luis Obispo, California—actually held on the Cuesta Community College Campus, where I earned my AA degree.

I’ve never been to that particular conference, but I know the campus pretty darn well and I know Anne! And I do still know English professors at Cal Poly.

In fact, my professor Kevin Clark gave me a fabulous blurb for The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practioner’s Manual.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

As I recall, the year I was with them at Cal Poly, Kevin Clark and my English mentor Robert Inchausti nominated me for the Student of the Year Award in the School of Liberal Arts, but I was disqualified because I was only zipping through the English Department in two semesters—taking 23 credits per semester, whee, doggies!—and would therefore not be there for the full required Year.

I’d already earned most of my degree (and then some) in the Computer Science Department.

By the time I hit the English Department, I was like Wiley Coyote, my legs just a circular blur.

Linnaea’s Cafe, SLO

And during that last, hectic summer before my final non-year year in the English Department, I worked at those two bastions of downtown SLO culture (whom everyone remembers): Linnaea’s Cafe and the Earthling Bookshop.

I’d been bouncing in and out of Linnaea’s Cafe for a few years, and we were all family down there. (In fact, I just looked it up, and it’s still around. Apparently I was working there only a few years after it opened. Now it’s been 26 years, and it appears the tradition of staff as family that we started—actually behind Linnaea’s back—continues to flourish.)

I used to work all day Saturdays and our hoppin’ Saturday nights at Linnaea’s, serving the weekend crowds that peaked at midnight when the brewery across the street closed their doors, and everyone surged into Linnaea’s like a tide of lemmings.

The Trees of Mystery (with an addendum re: Burning Man)

in fact, my close friends, the local-sensation rock band The Trees of Mystery, lived directly upstairs and used us as their family kitchen—which makes me glad now I sneaked Paul Robert Dubois II all those freebie desserts, since years later he married Harley Bierman, one of the owners of Burning Man, and now I have an unending supply of fabulous behind-the-scenes Burning Man stories in exchange. . .

There was a dance joint at the far end of the alley from Linnaea’s, and our manager would give the three of us on-duty permission to take our break all at the same time on Saturday nights because we were friends.

We’d run whooping and a-hollering down that long alley in the dark toward the bright neon lights in the distance. We’d slip in at the head of the line waving our Linnaea’s aprons as proof we wouldn’t be there long, and then dance like crazed primates while The Trees of Mystery blasted their weird mix of Jim Morrison/noir jazz/punk rock from the stage.

Rob would lean over with his microphone and cry with delight, “You’re here!” and then laugh his manic laugh while we threw our aprons on the floor and stomped hysterically around them in a circle.

Then we’d toss back a quick beer, kiss the boys, and run up the alley again, shrieking at the tops of our lungs, to find our manager exhausted but smiling as he tried to handle orders from dozens of customers at once.

Wonderful summer nights.

Earthling Bookstore, Children’s Room Director

I happened to live in a tiny studio apartment in downtown SLO then—a lovely town, a lovely time in which to live downtown!—so I’d wake up Sunday early, reeling and groggy and sometimes still in the dress I’d been wearing the night before—and dash blearily around the corner to my Sunday job at the Earthling Bookshop.

I worked there other days of the week, too, but Sunday was the real challenge. . .as you might imagine.

I was the Director of the Children’s Room, a large room in the basement with two entrances, where I went in every morning and turned on the lights over the bookcases one-by-one, as though lighting up a stage. I loved that moment so.

The magic of books coming alive!

During the week I’d spend my days zooming on my bike to the town Hobby Shop for flannel and ink pens, and then I’d cut out flannel-board stories on the Children’s Room floor for my Sunday morning Story Time. On particular days, I was also working at the local alternative newspaper right up the street, so I’d be dashing up to their office to drop off the instructions for the Earthling ads that I’d have to typeset and paste-up later for both sets of bosses.

I also had a wildly busy weekday nightlife.

It was a splendid era.

Lorelei

So by Sunday mornings, there I’d be with my big stand-up flannel board and box of flannel-board stories, barefoot, still in my party dress from Saturday night, and looking just a teeny bit over-the-edge—face to face with a whole crowd of eager cross-legged children ready to get into some serious storytelling.

My friend Lorelei would be in the back with a couple of boxes of cookies and a jug of apple juice that we’d acquired, sitting on a table and swinging her legs merrily. She was my official Story Hour ‘assistant.’ Lorelei used to hang around with me all week as I went through my frantic slapstick routine of mixed jobs—being very funny and amusing.

And I’d tell flannel-board stories to the kids. . .long, involved, highly dramatic stories of a Bunny who changes costume every few seconds in its endless, inventive efforts to become a Runaway Bunny, of King Bidgood taking a bath as his friends one-by-one decide to join him, of a little boy and a yellow ducky who discover in their bath a whole ocean of strange and wonderful creatures. . .

Then at the end I’d stand up and sing a capella a very lovely Nancy Griffin song of love and hope and tolerance that I’d just learned, “From a Distance.” And the children would clap and dance. And afterward Lorelei and I would serve them all cookies and apple juice with much gaiety and wit.

Then I’d go upstairs and collapse on a stool behind the front counter.

And my pal Jerry—a wise, fatherly type in his fifties—would let me spend the rest of the day being the person who sat down ringing up sales while he walked the aisles directing customers to books. Because Jerry knew I couldn’t stand up anymore.

Lorelei and I once took a drive to Santa Barbara in her mother’s convertible on a sunny summer day, pausing at random spots to take photos of ourselves horsing around. I stood on the hood of the car and threw my arms wide to an audience of rather bemused cattle. She posed comedically in front of downtown window displays. I jumped straight at her off a flight of steps—flapping behind me the 1940s herringbone jacket I’d ‘borrowed’ from Rob Dubois, who is about twice as big as me in all directions—and she caught me on film in mid-air.

For musical entertainment, we brought a tape I’d found in the glovebox of a used car I’d bought a couple of years before, although I’d never listened to it. We popped it in and bobbed our heads to the music, singing along with the lyrics, all of which—it turned out—we knew by heart.

“Heart of Glass,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Le Sheik,” “Voulez-vou Coucher Avec Moi?” “She Works Hard for the Money,” and Peaches & Herb singing their impossibly treacly but entirely familiar, “Reunited”. . .which we belted out with some real enthusiasm, I’m telling you.

We hadn’t been able to read the scribbled writing on the tape, but we realized none of these songs had come out any later than 1979 (we knew all the release dates, you see, and in many cases the seasons), and we could tell they had been taken off the radio. When we double-checked we realized it said, “Hits of ’79.”

So fabulous to be young and zany and completely, totally out of our ever-lovin’ minds.

Anne R. Allen: Reprise

Which means you’ll all appreciate the enormous significance of it when Anne informed me this morning that she still knows Lorelei!

Lorelei!

How I would love to see Lorelei again, after all these years.

Is life not a wonderful, convoluted, inexplicable, and extraordinary thing?

And won’t it be wonderful when Anne puts me in touch with Lorelei, and we can all appear together as Patti Labelle and her back-up singers here on this blog. . .thereby proving once & for all that history is beautiful and coucher-ing with abandon in three-part harmony is just one of those great, hilarious hobbies the 1970s left to all of us as their eternal legacy?