Like Alice

Coming back to the Bay Area—I can’t describe it. Usually, I hate going down memory lane. I despise school reunions. But this trip. I discovered something. You can return. I ran all over the Mills College campus (I refuse to acknowledge that it has been taken over due to financial issues. It will always be Mills to me.) I dragged my husband to the dance studios, my old dorm, the library, El Campanil. Then, in Oakland, I saw my old home. Walked down Piedmont Avenue. Took a photo of The Alley, a piano bar where I first had the guts to sing in public. Tromped down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Smiled as I took in Amoeba Records, recalling the click clack of music lovers browsing the cd cases. I was a happy woman of 58 years looking back and feeling 28 again. To the time of overalls-paint-splattered with the knees ripped out, Winona Ryder, The Indigo Girls, and too young to think cigarettes would kill me.

But this trip. I fell back in love with California and the movie lover, horror specifically, found new haunts, and fell down Google rabbit holes learning about new things. The grit. What’s hiding in plain site in The Golden State.

First off, I’m staying on a houseboat in Sausilito. Cue Barry Manilow’s Ready to Take a Chance Again f

rom the movie Foul Play, 1978. I haven’t been able to get that song out of my head this whole trip! The first day, we headed to Bodega Bay, home to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, primarily filmed there. Then, in San Fransicso. Lombard Street. Chinatown. Again, thoughts of Foul Play but also, What’s Up Doc, campy chase scenes running through my head.

And the redwoods. Am I in Endor? Visited Roy’s Redwoods. Not the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi but this Preserve was used as the location for filming Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, 1984. I did step into a fairy ring, which can happen in Berkeley too. Away with the fairies … see it’s sucking me back in.

Yesterday. A horror happenstance. Quite by accident. Returning from a coast drive, we found ourselves on Bohemian Highway. There, that’s where I fell down, down, down. Searching. Discovering. The dark side (one of them) of the Golden State. I typed it in my phone, thinking there may be an artist trail nearby. Bohemian Highway led me to Bohemian Grove. (Eyes widening here.) Which led me to The Bohemian Club of San Francisco. A private men’s club. Of course it is. Then, I followed my all-weird-things-loving heart to the Retreat and the Cremation of Care ceremony. An owl statue. What can of worms had I opened? My brain (once in a menopausal fog now working like its old self thanks to a pellet in my hip) said, “Wait.” She types in Late Night with the Devil. Then the brain said, “Ah ha!” Something about Lily, or the demon in Lily, saying something about meeting Jack before, “We met amongst the tall trees ….” My heart had found its way back the horror genre.

Well, I started this trip with The Birds. Fitting to end it with an owl in the woods.