Stories
We met on the long bus trip returning from the midwest to New York. I had come from Christmas 1962 in Neosho and she got on in Indiana. As we traveled through the night we made out deliciously as best we could in the cramped bus seats and exchanged phone numbers to meet again.
I went from New Haven to New York several times to see her in the spring of 1963. She was studying method acting at the famous Actors Studio of the Strasbergs that had such famous graduates as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Sidney Poitier, Karl Malden, Shelley Winters, and Sally Field.
Once I asked Patti if she could cry real tears just by willing it and she replied, "Which eye?"
Her best friend and fellow student at the Studio was Dorothy Farrell, the 60 year old ex-wife of the famous novelist James T. Farrell. They were a fun, but unlikely couple, Patti so young and pretty, Dorothy so old and matronly.
One of my page poems was written for her, "Throw me the key from your window." She lived in a 3rd floor walkup apartment in New York which required a key to enter from the street. So when I arrived and rang the doorbell she threw me the key from her window. In the poem I refer to my new life at Yale, well ordered with oscilloscopes, amplifiers, methods and procedures, histological verification and chronic electrode implants, and I implore her to "take off your clothes to the sun and dance on the top of my naked mountain to the sky." But she never did take off her clothes for me and instead she was with another pretty girl who I suppose was her lesbian lover.
Once at her apartment, she put on a new phonograph record and said, "Listen to this great new singer." It was the first time I heard of Barbra Streisand.
It was now the summer of 1963 and, inspired by Joayne, I started writing my novel Peace and I needed to go back to Rice Peak for the freedom to write. At that time Michael Kahn was teaching at Yale and he needed someone to drive his little Triumph sports car from New Haven to Seattle, because he was flying there in his plane and needed a his car there as well. (Michael was special, a handsome ex-bomber pilot in World War II, former Shakespearean actor, and former LSD buddy with Timothy Leary at Harvard.)
I asked Patti if she wanted a ride back to Indiana and to my great joy, she said yes.
So we took off together in the little Triumph, me newly bearded again and wearing a newly-acquired beret, Patti cute as she could be with her little suitcase. We stopped near Gettysburg for me to interview the editor of an anti-war newspaper for my novel. And spent the night at Oberlin, Ohio, for more anti-war interviews.
And eventually we arrived at her home in Indiana. But not quite, because they had dammed up a river to make a new lake in Indiana and her former home had disappeared under water. I left her with family and friends and went on to Seattle and eventually (by Michael's plane and his co-pilot buddy from the war) to Idaho and Rice Peak.
A year later, on September 2, 1964, I received a letter from her replying to a postcard I had sent several months before: "I am looking forward to seeing you again. There are several things I want to speak to you about. My family always asks about you in their letters. Also Dorothy Farrell asks what you are doing now. But on October 30, 1964, I received a telegram from her: "DONT COME TOMORROW. DONT CONTACT ME AGAIN EVER. I DON'T KNOW YOU. THE END. FINI. PATRICIA PALMER." I lost track of Patti after that and often wondered if she made a career in acting but could never find a trace. Maybe she became a stripper, since one of the most fun things we had done together was to go see the film of Joanne Woodward, "The Stripper". We saw the film in one of those old sleazy movie theaters on 42nd Street alongside of the street's strip joints. I think we were the only ones watching the film that day in the theater.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme