Ann came on strong sometimes, starting around the time she was 14. The metamorphosis was overnight it seemed to me. (It occurred virtually overnight.)


In the fall of 1972 I was away at university. As a senior in high school I had been awarded the (rather prestigious) Francis C. Rocheleau Scholarship. My background—altho’ this may be stretching it—was privileged. (Both my parents grew up on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.) My background was middle class. In November 1972 I got a call from my friend Trzenska, a Westbrook friend, who had also gone away to school but who fled his school often and was likely to disappear from it on weekends. And it was on a weekend he bumped into Ann. At Bradlees in Westbrook (one of a vast chain of department stores, dead and defunct, all of them, since 2001). My friend said with a kind of fervor, “Ann is getting so cute. You’re not going to believe it.” My friend was cynical and a satirist and someone who gave praise always with difficulty. His statement meant nothing to me. I thought he was being inane. But when I arrived at my house on the day before Thanksgiving—at my mother’s kitchen—I learned that Ann was at the Stultzes (neighbors). I yakked and schmoozed with my mother for a bit but I was itching to go to the neighbors’. I wanted to see Ann. I had missed her. It was something like 5 PM and dark out. I ran to the neighbors’ house.


Ann was sitting by a “picture window” and bathed in a peculiar indoor light. My friend Trzenska had spoken aptly. For a moment I couldn’t believe my eyes. I almost gasped. It had been 3 months. In the first week of September Ann was overweight and clumsy. On the day before Thanksgiving she was taller and thinner and more self-confident. It looked wonderful. There was something quite dignified about her, suddenly. I don’t think I am mistaken, her expressions were dignified. Her face at rest was dignified. I was jubilant. My siblings and I had been lucky I think in respect of childhood environments and childhood perks. At the same time there had been struggles. (Maria Callas saying: “If you live you struggle. There are no exceptions.” In my adult life I have met a great number of persons who believed they were going to be the exception. And of course they never were.) Ann had had her struggles. I knew what some of them were. When I walked into the neighbors’ house and found her looking poised and dignified I was happy for her, I felt like cheering.


Patty Peisel, daughter of Mrs. Stultz, was Annie’s friend. Patty Peisel was, to a lesser degree, my friend. Actually Patty and Ann seemed not to have a lot in common. The thing that was the real draw for Annie I believe—the cannabis plant. Cannabis they had in common certainly. And Ann and cannabis were a kind of love affair. Ann came close to saying it a few times. (All this was foreign to me. Reefer did zero for me. It actually made me depressed.) How Ann loved to “get high.” An expression she used again and again in her short life. It would seem perhaps that a “dignified” bearing and the habit of “getting high” might never make bedfellows—were fairly remote from one another. I don’t know. I would say then that Ann seemed very dignified in between the getting high episodes.






Westbrook Junior High School. 1972. In the 8th grade Ann was cast in a musical variety show and given a solo part. She sang, with good enough Italian accent, “Josephina Please No Leana on the Bell.” Wally Hayes, math teacher, gave her the song. Per the song text Josephina is a young woman who goes on dates. She’s Italian-American. She’s an apartment dweller. She’s superbly healthy but a little ditsy. Dippy?








Josephina’s backside crashes into doorbells when she receives her end-of-date kisses, at ground level.


Per the text it’s not Josephina who’s singing. Josephina is being sung to. I had never heard the song until I heard Ann sing it. I have never heard it since. The song should be forgotten possibly.


Many were the wild notes her merry voice would pour. Ann sang “Josephina Please No Leana” often, very often (ca. 1971 and 1972), would break into song, that song, at the tiniest provocation, at the drop of a hat—as she moved about the house—going about her varied business.


The song has some kind of association with performers Eddie Cantor and Louis Prima. I found the song at YouTube the other week. I heard it for the first time in almost 50 years. It was shocking. I was electrified for about 8 seconds. Then my hyperstimulation diminished and decayed, almost as quickly as it came on, and was gone.


I didn’t see the show, “Annie’s show” I called it, at the junior high. I did see the next one.




  At 14






It’s a syndrome one might say. Ann auditioned for everything (in part because she thought it was expected of her). At Westbrook High School Ann auditioned for the plays, got parts, was the undisputed star of at least one of the school’s theatrical productions (while she was still a freshman).


All Westbrook Night was a bit of musical variety froth, or foam, given every year at the Westbrook High School Auditorium. It was a lot of high school kids singing and dancing and doing sketch comedy. Mostly singing and dancing. In 1973 Ann was Mae West. The profoundly anticharismatic Mae West. I don’t know whose idea it was. I don’t think it was Ann’s. To musical accompaniment—to stripper music (there was a small band that included piano), Ann strode onstage in a big blond wig and voluminous and bejewelled dress, exchanged risqué banter with the master of ceremonies (musical variety entertainments always have masters of ceremonies), and belted out “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The dress had a nineteenth century look. Almost a hoop skirt. Perhaps the persons putting on the show and she, Annie, were trying to channel Klondike Annie—or perhaps Diamond Lil. Two nineteenth century dames.


Mae West of course was pure appetite—the public persona and I believe the woman. Pure appetite is not charismatic and in fact cannot be.


Pierre Corneille (b. 1606) and Adlai Stevenson (b. 1900) in the courses of their respective pursuits said more or less the same thing. It is the interval in which appetite is suppressed, obfuscated, or denied in which all charm is born.


As personification and reification of pure appetite, West had as little charisma as W. C. Fields—possibly why Universal Studios paired them in a film project (My Little Chickadee) in 1940. West was funny at times—some of those times inadvertently. (Humor I believe can be charmless.)


Ann’s impression of West wasn’t terrific—and it wasn’t half bad. Ann was 14. (For an impressionist Mae West is an easy one actually.) Ann was a “good mimic”—something my mother used to say often. She, Ann, did Jimmy Carter well (when Carter was in power). She did Jimmy Breslin well. In my apartment she would enact the “It’s a good drinkin’ beer” commercial (from ca. 1981)—Ann standing and leaning against the desk in my room—myself sitting on the edge of the bed, snickering, tittering. Her best (and most accurate) impression perhaps: Nancy Kulp as Miss Jane Hathaway.


I’ve never encountered the word “rubber-faced”—except as in apposition to “comedian.” Rubber-faced comedian at age 2. At 2 going on 3 Ann was given to impersonating Frank Fontaine as Crazy Guggenheim. That’s going back a way. Ann had a zany feature, a zany aspect—a zany side. She didn’t have to work at it. It was just there. It was the way she was. A bit like Lily Tomlin perhaps Ann had a repertoire of characters—each of them her own invention. These she would do often.


Peculiarly in her films West would groan, or grunt, at the ends of sentences. I think it was supposed to suggest orgasm. [?] Actually she would groan or make an ooooooo sound—at ends of sentences. Ann did it to a T—that portion of the West schtick.


The discussion, the “banter” between Mae and the master of ceremonies was insipid. It was entirely scripted. It assumed the form of an interview. The master of ceremonies interviewed “Miss West.”


The script, all of it, was centered on West’s double-entendres—the ones she spoke in films. West was the author of some of them. (They were usually written for her.)

I mentioned: insipid. It was the line that got Ann into a teeny tiny bit of trouble. (It was “the way she said it.”) Westbrook matrons said: “Too suggestive.”


At ends of punchlines, drum rolls. At ends of punchlines Ann ground her hips, discharged Westian orgasmic sound, patted her hair (her wig), and smiled at the audience.


I was sitting in the second row near extreme stage right. When Ann, with music, paraded onto the stage from behind a massive curtain I was thunderstruck (for about 30 seconds). I couldn’t believe it was she. I was slightly nervous for her. It was said at the time Ann didn’t suffer from stage fright—but I thought I could see traces of it (during the first few minutes) lying just behind the eyes. Then I believe it started to dissipate.


A few more minutes slip by—Ann seems to be having fun. At one point—when she was casting one end of her feather boa (like someone’s casting a fishing rod) toward front row members of the audience—she shook with laughter. Ann stood near the edge of the stage, gloved arm fully extended. A small number of front row persons, front row guys, were grazed or almost grazed by the feather boa.


I don’t know if it was scripted—all the tomfoolery with the boa. I got a sense on that night that it was not.


As Ann started to get real playful—from the audience there was hooting, tooting, whooping, gaffawing, catcalling, whistling. A few in the house were having a ball. Much of the gaffawing came from a guy I knew sitting many rows in back of me, a Westbrook guy, slightly older than I, almost a friend of mine—someone who knew Ann and was fond of her. His laughter rang out. (He, certainly, was having a ball.) I hadn’t seen him. I recognized the sound of his laughter.


Ann was often funny by virtue of her facial expressions. Little kids are very attuned to facial expressions (without their realizing it). When Ann was in high school (and beyond), little kids went toward her and thought her funny.


When Ann sang her song on that night, her expressions were funny. Almost anyone who sings publicly wants to convey a certain—je ne sais quoi—a certain aplomb, a certain suavité—as he sings. Ann would go in that direction but when suavité had been achieved she would break from it for just a moment, for a split second, assume an expression of confusion (as if she had no idea of where she was or what she was doing, all of a sudden)—assume sometimes a kind of complaisant hebephrenic grin—a real goofy look—and then return instantly to suavité. It was always funny. I think Carol Burnett did something along those lines perhaps, I think Kaye Ballard did it perhaps. I think Martha Raye used to do it. (I’m not sure—with any of these funny ladies.) West never did anything of the sort. Therefore Ann was breaking character. Not good in someone performing an impersonation.


In recent years I have asked myself: how was it that Ann was sexy at 14 (going on 15)? I wasn’t sexy at 34, or 44.





In the summer of 1973 Ann (just turned 15) auditioned for the Children’s Theatre of Maine. She got in. In 1973 and 1974 two photos of Ann (and others), onstage, in costumay, appeared in the pages of the Portland Press Herald. Ensemble photos. Captioned. In one the actors were uncredited.


Ann is a kind of journeyman actor at the Children’s Theatre. She appears in many productions. She is not with the Children’s Theatre for long. Two yrs. or something like that. Ann never stayed with anything for long perhaps (I seem to remember, all of a sudden). She experienced boredom easily. She suffered a greater than average need in respect of (need for) novelty infusion. (Perhaps I am wrong.)


And in the summer of 1973, toward end of summer, Ann (as I see it, as I understand it) receives lessons in the general ugliness of things, brute force (its near ubiquitous presence, its sudden visitations), and possibly the nature of physical reality. In summer 1973 she is schooled in alternate horsemen of the apocalypse—randomness, meaninglessness, futility, weirdness (perhaps quantum weirdness). It, the episode, held not much importance in Ann’s life I think. I had not thought about it, not once in 30 years (after Ann’s death), yet when I did think of it it all came back, the memories cascaded.


Quantum scientific principles pertain to the very small—the microscopic and submicroscopic. And scientists don’t like it much when nonscientists (such as myself) extrapolate upward: use quantum mechanistic principles (and terms and jargon) to interpret observable phenomena (occurring at the nonquantum level). Nonscientists such as myself are fond of doing it anyway.


Physicists raise objection to the kind of physics for poets I have just pointed to—not because the “extrapolation” is inherently fallacious but because it is a staggeringly difficult exercise and beyond their (the poet–physicists’) capabilities.




Toward end of summer Ann auditions for a part in a film. I may have driven her to the audition. The filmmaker’s name is Jon Pownall. Pownall is making a film in Maine and wants to use local actors—particularly young local actors.


Ann doesn’t get the part. (She may not have been the right age for the part—I seem to remember.) Instead she gets a letter in the mail. From Pownall.


On a hot August morning—my mother and I, my sister Ann, and my sister Joan are standing in the kitchen. Almost in a circle. We pass the letter around. Each of us reads it 2 to 3 to 4 times. I read it perhaps 6 times. It is handwritten on legal paper. Pownall wrote in the letter to Ann: she didn’t get the part—but she should not read anything into that. He said he liked meeting her, liked talking to her. He told her she was a talented and interesting youngster (“youngster” is my word) and he wished her luck.


It was a nice letter. Ann seemed a tad bored by it actually. But I think she was pleased by it. (I could tell she was.)


Forty-eight hours later. (It may have been 24 hours later.) Another hot August morning. The same 4 of us. Again standing in the kitchen. More or less in the same spots. Again passing around a document. This time it is the front page section of the Portland Press Herald. On the front page: FILM DIRECTOR MURDERED IN PORTLAND. Pownall had been slain in his office in Portland.


Each of us in his own way is horrified by the news. Ann seems quite traumatized by it. Ann cries.


I don’t know how Ann “processed” it on that day. I had a hard time in processing it. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” I said over and over, to myself and to others. For several days I was saying it. (It was the best I could come up with—at the age of 18.) The killing of Pownall seemed so irredeemiably and almost absurdly brutish and senseless.


Pownall was 39 on the day he died. That didn’t seem particularly young to me—at the time. Absurdly I thought: Well he almost lived a full complement of years.


At 6 P.M. Ann seems A.O.K. (We were just receiving the news about Pownall at about 10 A.M.) At 6 P.M. I see her going out the door on her way to meet with a friend—yet another Patty. (Ann knows a lot of people named Patty. No Kayla’s. No Destiny’s. Lots of Patty’s.) Ann seems—O.K. 






1981. Ann and I are living in a small apartment in famed Greenwich Village. There are arguments but it is going surprisingly well. Ann goes out on Friday nights. She meets her friends somewhere and they bar hop on Bleecker Street. (At least that’s what I think she’s up to on Friday nights.) On a few occasions—as she would be going out the door at around 9 PM on a Friday night (she would get rather late starts), she looked so good I almost gasped. She once or twice took my breath away. Her style was—hipster. She wore things like—spike heels and ankle socks (simultaneously).


A conversation that took place in the apartment—not a small number of times.

“You gross pig!”

Harvey was a fine photographer who collected vintage cameras. He had the patience and discipline to repair cameras under a microscope as he examined and manipulated each part as if it were eye surgery.