I’ve known Kathy—who’s older than I am by the way—since the late-70s. You know, when Jimmy Carter was still president. At the time she was dating Glenn Berkovitz, a friend and fellow theater manager at UC Santa Cruz where we were all going to school.
She was a writer even back then and she has always had a talent for repurposing her experiences. She calls it storytelling. I think of it more as oversharing.
So, for instance, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, she blogged incessantly, talking us through every development of her diagnosis, condition, treatment, state of mind, and recovery. Then, realizing she never wanted to go through that experience again, she decided to become more physically active and bought a bike thinking she’d ride even if only a mile between every chemo treatment.
But, the other thing about Kathy is that she has a tendency to take things a step too far. So three weeks after radiation, she rode her first cycling event—a 25-miler in Palm Springs. And just one year later she rode in her first AIDS/LifeCycle fundraiser. As of today (March 2024) she’s ridden it every year it’s been held since. And because Kathy is a writer with a tendency to take things too far, she is currently working on a musical about AIDS/Lifecycle called The Ride.
And now that we’re doing this together, of course she had the idea that we should blog about the experience. Which, soon became something we could maybe expand into a book. No wait, a play! A(nother) musical! Maybe a podcast? How about a screenplay? But that’s just Kathy being the quintessential Kathy—taking an experience to its improbable extreme and then oversharing—I’m sorry, I mean turn that experience into a story. Like I often tell her, “You just keep thinking, Butch.”
