until 1975, when I went off to the University of California
at Berkeley. Cynthia Wooley, now a writer, photographer
and translator in New Mexico, was two years older than
I, a tall good-natured girl. We pretended to be Gudrun
and Ursula Brangwen from Women in Love, treasuring D.H. Lawrence's descriptions of their clothing and
searching thrift shops for 1920s dresses and stockings
to incarnate them.
Cyndi had spent the summer of 1972 in Oaxaca, Mexico, staying in a house in the mountains owned by two
former art teachers in the L.A. public schools, James
and Veralee Bassler. James, a textile artist and Veralee,
a ceramicist, had left Los Angeles and now lived and
worked on a small estate. Each summer they would invite about fifteen teenage girls from throughout the U.S.
to experience Mexican culture and, while living in their
house, to paint, weave and throw pots.
Girls who went to Oaxaca returned with gold filigree
earrings and finely embroidered dresses, hand woven
shawls and their own glazed pots. Perhaps I'm making this sound like a hippie experience but it wasn't. If
anything, the architecture, decoration and artifacts we
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