At some point in 1981 my girlfriend Pam moved to Milwaukee to join a theater company. I would commute by train once or twice a month. We carried on our relationship for another year before she fell in love with one of her directors.
There was a great music scene in Milwaukee and Chicago but it seemed that all of the bands were using drum machines instead of drummers. This made for very boring theater.
There were a lot of parties there and I had a blast. I loved the theater crowd because the women were beautiful and the men were gay. There was a serious shortage of heterosexual men.
It was at this time I moved into Lafayette Park with a woman named Nancy Theodoro. My friend Sharon had just moved out and introduced us. We would spend hours talking in the kitchen and once my cat walked in with Nancy's bird in his mouth. The bird survived but a few weeks later my cat died of kitty leukemia.
Nancy was a recovering alcoholic but loved to throw parties. She bought her favorite booze and had me drink it. She was a hypochondriac and was always heavily medicated. One evening I came home from work around 3:00 in the morning. A naked woman came screaming out of Lafayette Park. She had just been raped. I brought her inside and it became clear she was mentally retarded. I gave her my bathrobe and called the police. There must've been at least 12 police officers in the apartment. At some point in the morning after they left it occurred to me that I had lost my robe. As I was about to go to bed Nancy walked out of her room, rubbed her eyes, smiled and said, ”good morning roomy” . She could sleep though anything on whatever medication she was on.
She has since died and I always thought she would have been a perfect case for the headstone that read, “I told you I was sick”.
I remember a stranger walking in to one of our parties. We were tripping at the time. The stranger found a corner, sat on the floor, pulled his hat over his head and fell asleep. He had what looked like bird shit covering his hat. We began to panic thinking he had wandered in from the highway. We were finally told he was the Chuck Auger’s landlord. The splotches on his hat was paint.
I don’t want to get tedious but Nancy was a fascinating woman and she deserves more than one installment. I’ll have more about her.
2 comments:
I knew Nancy, she was something else. I knew her in the mid-90's. She at that point lived off Grand in the Hutchingson apartments.
Nancy was a wonderful friend to me in the early to mid 80s. She was one of those really colorful characters that Soulard and Lafayette Square was known for and was one of the most creative people I ever met. Her masks were incredible. Before I left to come back to my own country, England, she gave me a beautiful batik jacket. I still wear it today. I was Hilary to her and I think of her often. Love you Nancy.
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