One Can Make a Difference (24 page)

I had had back surgery and I wasn't working, so I offered to help get people organized. We formed a club, had meetings, and became a force to be reckoned with. Funnily enough, I wasn't able to join the club, as I didn't have a dog then and you had to have a dog to be part of it. But they let me go to meetings. At first, someone else was president, but then I got a husky named Killik and they made me president.

This was my first taste of civic activism. It took a lot of work. I didn't mean to get into it, but I felt useless sitting home after my back surgery. With this project, I could do things even though I had an odd schedule, and it made me feel useful. We found all sorts of allies, including at Animal Control and in the Parks Department. The head of the Parks Department started out worried but in the end, got to know the dogs and became a big advocate. By 1983, the City had heard all our arguments. They made the decision to see how the dog park idea worked, to make it an experiment.

Just before opening day, trees were delivered to make the park look pretty for the opening ceremonies with the mayor and everyone. But because it was fall, when the trees arrived they lost their leaves overnight. So, we spent hours stringing leaves on them, orange and red leaves like those on an artificial Christmas tree! On the big day, it took the head of the Parks Department a while to realize the leaves were all false.

It turned out that we weren't home free, however. In fact, it's been a constant struggle to keep our dog park. You have to be vigilant. New people move in, knowing there's a dog park, and then complain to the City that dogs bark and the park makes them nervous and other stupid things. I mean, if you move in next to an airport, expect airplanes. One day, the City posted an innocuous little notice, just one little notice in the park. Someone took it down, investigated it, and found out that the City wanted to transfer the land to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). We had another dog fight on our hands.

We fought like hell to keep our dog park. We incorporated so as to get more clout. We knew we had to stop being just a casual neighborhood group. And we lobbied and lobbied. At the same time, we knew BART and Berkeley hated each other, so we quietly negotiated with BART. At the hearing, ninety of us from the club showed up at the council meeting in teal blue T-shirts with our dog park association name and paw prints on them. In the end, there was a unanimous vote to leave the dog park alone.

The Parks Department installed a monument to me in the park and a plaque for my years of service. A lot of people thought I'd died! It's a genuine fire hydrant painted blue and put next to a tree where chasing dogs won't run into it. People said, “Doesn't she know what they'll do to this?” I think that's funny, and it's fitting.

One day, I was visiting Flagstaff, Arizona, with my friend. We saw a sign for a dog park. It was the first one outside Berkeley I'd ever seen! I thought “Whoa! This is delightful. This has really caught on!” I asked, but they'd never heard of our Berkeley dog park. Now I get calls from all over. I even helped people in Finland get their first dog park. Someone once asked me if I were reborn as a dog, what kind I'd like to be. I think I'd probably be a Sheltie because I like to organize people and make up the rules.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL

When the Chips Are
Down, Do It Yourself

Rachel Rosenthal is a powerful performance artist and the founder of the Rachel
Rosenthal Company. Her performances have a way of dancing around in your head
for days after you have seen them, much the way Rachel herself dances on stage.

She has appeared at Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center as well as on campuses
across the United States, and has enraptured audiences from Sydney to Brussels.
She leaves those who watch her thinking or rethinking their ideas about human
behavior and obligations because her work is so provocative. Her empathy and family
experiences (including fleeing the Nazis during World War II) have contributed,
no doubt, to her desire to wake up the world, which she has done with a creation
of electrifying performances that combine various mediums, including music, words,
videos, costumes, paintings, lighting, and dance. In 2000, Rachel delivered her last
performance in Wales, before, as she puts it, “throwing in the towel.”

At eighty, Rachel still teaches, directs a company, and paints, the latter bringing
her life full circle, for she began her creative life “with a continually active pencil/
brush/pen/pastel/chalk between my fingers,” drawing fairies, angels, and marquises
and designing magic wands. A sometimes quiet, often dramatic, powerhouse of a person,
Rachel is impressive for another reason as well: She practices what she preaches.

She takes personal responsibility, something she has challenged her audience to do from
the stage. I believe her work and her forceful determination are epitomized by this little
story of how the “private Rachel” would not take “no” for an answer when something
vital needed to be done. This is clear in the story of her rescue of Dibidi, the cat who
became her inspiration and an inspirational motif for Rachel's students worldwide.

I
n 1979, I began to feel there was a lot of despair in this world, both individual and collective, that could be assuaged in a different manner than I'd thus far encountered. Therefore, I gathered up every technique, every method, I'd learned or taught myself over the years and melded them all into what I call the D.B.D. (Doing By Doing) Experience. A D.B.D. workshop takes place over a weekend and incorporates body exercises, breathing techniques, communication exercises, vocal experimentation, improvisational dramatics—all of which is nonverbal—alone and with others. What I try to do is separate people from their everyday lives. It's like taking a bath in Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. And it's done through body movement, relaxation, awareness of letting go, guided imagery, and guided meditations. I work to help people bring consciousness into the body instead of being like a disembodied head and I must say I've seen some magnificent results. And while I hope to inspire others to live fruitful, powerful, and joyful lives, it's truly one precious being who inspired me to reinvigorate and reshape my own life.

When lived in New York, I was given my first kitten whom I called Dibidi. One day Dibidi disappeared. I searched for her all over the streets of Lower Manhattan, and the roofs over and adjacent to the loft where I lived. This went on for three days and nights. On the third day, I was on the roof, where several chimneys had been bricked over in my absence (I didn't dare think that she could have fallen down one of these and been buried alive like in a Poe story) and, leaning on a still-open chimney, I wept, watching my tears falling into the five-story chimney shaft and disappearing within its darkness.

As I tried to focus through my tears, I saw a small, almond-shaped green light way down in the chimney, soon joined by another. I saw her eyes and she spoke to me. I yelled at her in French (because we spoke French to each other) to be patient, and that I would get her out. No one could help because it was Saturday afternoon and even the SPCA [the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] never responded. The police came but laughed at me and I threw them out. I calculated visually that she must be at the level of the second floor. I took some tools and broke into the mimeographing store and began to hammer a hole where I thought Dibidi might be, into a bricked-over fireplace, running up to the roof intermittently to remind her to hang on because I was coming. Finally, I had a hole large enough for my head and one arm. I looked inside the chimney, but I had miscalculated by about five feet. I tried to send down a makeshift dumbwaiter, but Dibidi was hanging onto the chimney wall for dear life, because it was the spot where the incline of the shaft became vertical. She was covered with the plaster of my hammering and wouldn't dare let go to jump up on that diminutive elevator.

I knew I should get her up with a noose around her neck but feared of doing it wrong and either killing her or dropping her back into the depth of the remaining chimney shaft. I got up my courage, made a noose, got it around her neck after a few tries, and hauled her up. I grabbed her and ran up to my loft where I had food and drink waiting. But Dibidi didn't eat or drink until she had truly thanked me, with her backside up and her head on the floor. This she did several times, falling over in her weak state, keeping me within her vision. I couldn't hold and squeeze her enough as she purred and purred. Her rescue had taken five hours.

But that was not the end of the Dibidi saga. One morning, after we had moved to California, I heard scratching under the cantilevered part of the house and realized in a flash that Dibidi, awakened from sleep on the porch by a passing dog, had made the mistake of climbing a trellis instead of jumping inside through the open window. She hung onto the underside of the cantilever as long as she could, with the dog below. I was down the steps and in the street in one jump just as Dibidi fell, hitting some rocks at the bottom and breaking her back.We raced to the vets, a white hankie tied to the side mirror, announcing to the traffic that this was an emergency. Dibidi was in shock, between life and death. Soon she was out of shock and into a body cast within which she had to be turned from side to side every two hours, night and day. The vet said she might have six months to live: “Cats can't live without any leg mobility.”

Dibidi lived another twelve years and died at age eighteen. She had me where she wanted me: as her constant and perpetual slave. We went everywhere together, including New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, etc. When her cast came off and it was obvious that she was a paraplegic, she learned to do her business over the toilet, lying on my knee after I raised her tail. She went through the Laurel Canyon fire of 1959, the earthquake of 1971, and countless storms and adventures, with our connection growing with the years. I ran with her, one hand under her belly, following where she wanted to go, I helped her jump on beds, chairs, and sofas, and she developed strong chest muscles to pull herself forward when I wasn't holding her up.

Dibidi taught me the most important lesson in life: how to live with limitations. She did everything in spite of becoming a paraplegic! During the years she was a paraplegic, I was developing acute degenerative arthritis in my knees. Inspired by her bravery, I continued to perform and live an active life in spite of my near-infirmity, just as she did. It is because of her that I have been able to teach so many people the importance of individual action, the beauty of loving relationships, and most of all, the importance of “Doing By Doing,” or D.B.D., the esoteric meaning of Dibidi's name. And when I tell Dibidi's story in my workshops, people always cry because this little cat's soul and her perseverance touches them like nothing else. They leave with the image of Dibidi to help them through their lives.

DAVE SEEGAR

Everyone Needs to Eat

Margaret River, Australia, is touted as one of the prettiest spots on that continent,
which is saying something in a land where spectacular waves crash onto
pristine beaches and you can travel through miles of natural beauty that is the
Outback.Thousands of visitors journey to Margaret River, and over the years,
a growing number of those with enough money to do so have put down roots
and put up homes there.

When he left college, Dave Seegar moved from England to Margaret River,
a town he loved for its jaw-dropping flora and fauna, its sunshine, and, most
particularly, for the birds he loved to study. Margaret River seemed the perfect
place to live, a truly friendly community. But then something happened. That
“something” was an influx of the rich and the subsequent gentrification of the
town. As if overnight, people who had fallen on hard times found themselves
unable to afford to live or eat there. They were being forced out of the area
where many of them had been born and raised. David saw a need and decided
he could do something about it. He founded a “soup kitchen” of sorts where
hearty meals would be served, somewhere to eat for those who couldn't keep up
with the Joneses, called The Soupie.Today, Dave himself is also known as “the
Soupie.” His good deed has blossomed from a seed of thought into a magnificent
enterprise that serves the community's neediest residents. That sort of idea
fits the bill and this book perfectly!

In postwar England, the naval ship-building industry was in sharp decline and many people lost their jobs. So, in 1963, my father, a ship builder, accepted an offer from a company in Calcutta, India, and off we went. My memories of those days are of swimming in the streets during the cooling monsoon rains and feeding monkeys nuts from brown paper bags. Then we went back to England, and I missed all the wildlife and the sun. Luckily, when I married, my wife and I decided to move to Australia, to a beach town called Margaret River, where the trees are full of beautiful birds and the sun shines most of the time. To us it was paradise. We settled down and I started to study the birds that interest me. But in short order, things took a nasty turn.

It happened when a new editor took over our local newspaper. Our town is a fairly unique country town, or it was. It has always been colorful and fairly accepting of differences, all sorts of differences. It's attractive to seasonal workers, backpackers, surfers, and tourists alike, each to his or her own. The new editor, however, didn't like “hippies,” he didn't like “ferals” (the wild animals who were here first), he didn't like homeless people, and he didn't like people who weren't able to get a job at the moment—and he was outspoken in expressing his opinions on the newspaper's pages. He thought he knew what was best for this town better than the locals did. A growing number of residents, the newcomers, apparently agreed with him, and tensions began to rise.