Chapter 1: Chicken 1980

It was July 1980, and I’d just landed in Los Angeles a week earlier, fresh from the flatlands of Ohio and brimming with dreams bigger than the cornfields I left behind. That Fall, I’d start at UCLA, my sights set on the film school, and maybe, just maybe – the rest of my life. 

The morning after I arrived, I pulled a stack of recipe cards out of my bag. My mom’s leftovers from a church swap. They were blank on one side, perfect for the purpose I had in mind. I rolled them into my Smith-Corona typewriter and tapped out the same message over and over.

“Free Crew Member. Available to Work on Student Productions. Eager to learn. Hard worker. Will need transportation.” 

Then I took a bus to UCLA, my heart racing, and pinned my cards to every cork board at the film school like tiny prayers. 

I got the idea during summer break while still in high school and visiting my oldest sister Margaret who lived in L.A. She dropped me at the film school where I snooped around like a spy getting intel on what my future could look like. Now, a few years later, I was living that future.

Then the call came. I was going to be a P.A. (production assistant) on a student film shoot at Melnitz Hall, the building that housed the UCLA Film School. One of the sound stages had been transformed into a fog-filled, strobe-lit Studio 54-style disco. I couldn’t believe it. My new life was already beginning. 

When I arrived, the production manager asked, “Do you know how to work a microwave?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, not sure what a microwave had to do with making movies.

He opened a cooler filled with pre-cooked chickens. And I had my first job: lunch duty.
“There’s a food court behind the building. About a dozen microwaves. Pop them in, four minutes each, and bring them back when they’re hot.” He pointed to a corner of the lobby where several crew feeding tables were set up.

This was not the glamorous film set job I had imagined. But I was seventeen, in L.A., and about to handle chickens for cinema. 

On my way out, I caught my reflection in a wardrobe department mirror: dirty blonde pixie haircut, brand new Levi’s, a bit baggy on my 105 pound frame, a fluorescent orange polo, nice-girl Ohio smile, and eager as heck. I looked like a girl trying to blend in and stand out at the same time. 

Out in the alley behind the film school, surrounded by humming appliances, I loaded chickens into six microwaves. My nose wrinkled from the smell of burnt popcorn and the sight of blackened kernels glued at the bottom of each unit.  With assembly-line precision, I clicked  the latches and punched in times.

Then I heard a voice. 

“You’re with that crew, aren’t you?” 

I turned and faced a man in his mid-twenties, tall, blonde ringlets framing his face like a Roman emperor. We were alone, and he was staring me down. 

“Yes,” I said, unsure we should be talking. He sounded hostile.

His face twisted. “So you’re with those faggots. Fucking queers. I see I got myself one here, too. Fucking queers invading this place. I wish you’d all fucking die.” 

I froze.

“Did you hear me?” he shouted, louder now. “Fucking die, queer bitch!”

I didn’t stop to think. I dropped everything and ran. 

By the time I made it around the corner and back into the Melnitz Hall lobby, I was breathless and shaking. When I saw the production manager, I collapsed forward, palms catching kneecaps, throat burning as I tried to breathe.

His eyes widened, “You okay?” 

“I-I left the chickens,” I stammered. “There’s a guy. In the alley. He was scary. Told me I should die.” 

“Forget the chickens! I’ll get them. Let me call security. You stay here. It’s safe. The crew is around.”

Another crew member handed me an Orange Crush and told me to breathe. I drank the soda in big gulps and tried to slow the thudding in my chest. My limbs were heavy, and words circled my brain: queer, fucking queers, die bitch, like an incantation I couldn’t unhear. 

My biggest question of all…

Why me? 

I didn’t have time to answer. I was sitting, looking down, when a man’s belt buckle came into view.

“Are you doing anything right now?,” the student director asked.

My eyes shot up to his face. “No,” I said, still trying to calm down.

“Good. I need you for a scene. Actually,” he looked me up and down, “you’d be perfect.”

The crew member who handed me the Orange Crush reached for my empty bottle and tossed it in the trash while I stood, trying to steady myself.

I followed the director numbly through a maze of soundstages. We stepped into the nightclub set. Men in metallic shirts, dress pants and women in slinky dresses milled about under hot lights and pulsing fog. He led me to the edge of the floor and pointed to a woman across the room. 

“Do you see her?” he asked.

I squinted through the haze. She was tall, radiant, Black, with a soft Afro and Bohemian-style dress that floated around her. 

“That’s Maya,” he said. “You’re going to walk across the dance floor, meet her, make eye contact. Then take her hand, guide her up the catwalk stairs, lean in against the railing,  trace her arm,  then hold her close. Got it?”

I nodded, heart galloping again. What was this? What is he asking me to do? Is this romantic contact between two women?

As if reading my mind, Maya offered me a warm smile, walked up and whispered in my ear, “Follow my lead.”

The director called, “Action!”

I walked. Couples spun around me like glittering planets but cleared a path. When I reached her, I took Maya’s hand, warm, buttery soft, and led her up the stairs. Her scent wrapped around me: patchouli or some earthy scent like lavendar.

I leaned in and touched her arm and glided my fingertips up to her shoulder, cupping and pulling her in. My body lit up.

“Cut!”

We reset. Did it again. Then again. Once more.

With every take, I sank deeper into the moment gazing into her eyes, analyzing the curve of her smile. There was no script for what I was feeling. Only sensation. Only “yes this feels fine, but it shouldn’t. She’s a girl!”

After the shoot, I trotted up to Sunset and caught the Big Blue bus to my sister’s place in Brentwood. My forehead pressed to the window, I watched palm trees float by like dancers of their own. My skin still tingled from Maya’s touch. My mind replayed the man’s voice in the alley. ‘Fucking queers.’

Two strangers. Two weird encounters. One terrifying. One electric.

Relaxing, the cool air conditioning blasted my face, a nice contrast from the hot sound stage, I reassured myself with all of my seventeen-year-old  wisdom,  “Don’t worry. No day will ever be this weird again. What you felt didn’t mean anything. You were just acting.”