I'm not sure that my old roommate, Lauren, would guess that I would lead the post that celebrates our 30 year anniversary of our move to San Francisco with this video of Royce and Marilyn. My younger sister brought it to my attention last winter and just today my older sister found an LA Times article that gives some background on the two women. I'll pause now, to give you time to watch the clip and read the article, because I know that you'll want to know more, as we did.
Don't worry Lauren. I don't think that this clip in any way indicates our future (but if it did, which of us would be Royce?). What it did remind me of is my first few months in San Francisco in 1979. Lauren and I packed some garbage bags filled with clothes and a lamp in my 1974 Mercury Comet and headed into San Francisco from Louisville, Kentucky with few plans and little money. We rented our first apartment on the outskirts of the Tenderloin. Within a few weeks, Lauren found her first job in a publishing company on Howard and I worked as assistant to the President of a small engineering college on Nob Hill, now the site of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. We had both just turned 23.
Until I figured out how to walk around the city in safety and avoid some of the more sketchy parts of the Tenderloin, I got pretty familiar with the people who called the neighborhood home on my way to do chores on the weekend. And the minute I saw the video of Royce and Marilyn, I emailed my sister and told her it wouldn't surprise me if the clip had been filmed in San Francisco. I had seen those women many times, walking the street, sometimes dragging a shopping cart behind them. Hair dyed an unusual color, eyebrows dyed or penciled in the opposite color, heavy makeup and clothing that was hard to describe. Not threadbare, but of a different era. Elegance and poise remained as they walked among the drunks on the sidewalk. I would try to envision their past and wonder why they were now alone and living in a Tenderloin hotel. I would think of their life in the hotel, and imagine them cooking a meal by themselves and staring out the window in the evening as the city below them became active. A couple of times I met women in their 50s or 60s who were living alone in San Francisco and working as a secretary (that was what they were still called in 1979) and I would wonder if they might one day end up in the Tenderloin, alone.
I wrote Lauren last week and mentioned that it had been 30 years since we drove our car up Taylor street to park on Bush Street and begin our new city life. We shared some still vivid memories of our first year together as single women in the big city, but the image of the lonely women in the Tenderloin wasn't one of them. Lauren is now an editor of a magazine in Indiana with two beautiful girls. I remain in the Bay Area with my family. The Tenderloin is still there and quite possibly the Royce and Marilyns that inhabit it are wheeling their carts around today - ever elegant, ever proud.
