Bill Haskell and Liv Schaffer: An Intergenerational Conversation

00:03 Cool. Well, we are recording. How would you like to start off? Do you want to just jump in? We're going to ask whatever ones we're feeling drawn to.

00:18 Shouldn't we at least introduce ourselves so that for posterity we have our names on this thing?

00:23 So smart. Yes, of course.

00:25 Who are you?

00:26 Who are you? My name is Liv Schaffer I use she her pronouns. I'm an artist and educator in the Bay Area, and I'm just joining the San Francisco Village board this year.

00:41 And my name is Bill Haskell and I don't really do that very often, but I use the pronouns he, they. Not sure. I've been a member of the San Francisco Village board of directors for about nine years and a member for about ten. So I'm a longstanding aficionado of SF Village.

01:08 Love that.

01:10 So why don't you ask me a question and then we'll trade off and I'll ask you a question.

01:15 Okay. I'm going to start at the top because I do actually really love that first question. What did you want to be when you grew up?

01:24 I don't think I had a clue. I don't really, I don't. As I was thinking about that question, I don't think I really grappled with it until I was in college, so I don't really have an answer. I think I was grappling with growing up and nothing. So what about you?

01:55 Well, I have a few more follow up questions I was going to ask. Go ahead. I was going to ask you what you were studying in college. Like, when you arrived at college, what were. Did you, did you go on declared? Did you have an area of expertise?

02:08 I didn't. I had the best education in high school and I had a difficult time in college. I studied sociology and religion. Didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was having some emotional challenges having grown up in an alcoholic household. And I really couldn't let go of all of that baggage to focus a lot. But I studied sociology and religion. Really? Not again. Knowing what I wanted to do in life.

02:36 Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's awesome. Where did you go to college?

02:41 I went to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

02:45 Okay. Is that where you are? You from the east coast?

02:49 I am from New Jersey. From Montclair, New Jersey, 17 miles from midtown Manhattan.

02:54 Okay. I did not know that. That's pretty neat. I was a religion minor in college.

03:01 Really? Interesting.

03:04 Yeah. But for me, I mean, I always wanted to be a dancer. That was, that was kind of. That was it for me, as long as I can remember, I know that my mom snuck me into some, like, dance classes at the local y. Local community center when I was just, like, two and a half. And I'm pretty sure you had to at least be three, if not four, to join those things. But I apparently just really wanted to dance. And, you know, all throughout my life and my training, like, anytime I'd be like, hey, I kind of want to do swimming, or I kind of want to do soccer. I kind of want to do something else. My mom would be like, cool, but let's take a break from dance this whatever season, and we'll put you in one of those things and see how you feel. And I was like, oh, what do you mean, take me out of. What do you mean, take me out of dance? Like, if that's the trade off, then that's not happening. So I. I just kept staying with it. Staying with it, and just wanted to be a professional dancer. Yeah. Kind of bites you in the butt once you get to the age when then you're transitioning into what careers look like outside of that, because then you're like, oh. All of my imagination was focused on dancing and nothing else.

04:22 Were you a professional dancer?

04:24 I was, yeah.

04:25 In New York. Where?

04:27 In Chicago and here in the Bay area. Yeah. Yeah. I danced for a company called dance Works. Chicago. In Chicago. And I danced for a company called Robert Moses Kin here in the Bay area, and another company called Axis Dance Company, which is a dance company that combines folks with and without physical disabilities. So it's an inclusive dance company.

04:49 Very interesting.

04:50 Yeah.

04:55 And now you teach.

04:57 Yep. Teach dance. Teach community engaged dance practices. Still make. I like to choreograph, so I like to make a lot of dances. I still do perform. I perform currently with a company called the Dance Exchange, which is an intergenerational dance company that started in Tacoma Park, Maryland, many, many moons ago with kind of an intergenerational dance pioneer. And so now I actually just got back two weeks ago from a week in rehearsal in DC, and then we'll perform in Michigan in November.

05:33 That's really interesting, because I have this idea that dance is really a young person's profession and that after a certain age, you age out. Is that wrong?

05:47 No, you're totally right. But that's kind of like we're getting at the nugget of exactly what I do with my, like, the nugget of my work, really. Bill here, is that the dance company I have over at USF is an intergenerational dance company that combines students in training as well as older adult volunteers from the Bay Area. So if you ever want to come onto USF campus and dance with us, you know you can.

06:14 I haven't danced in a long time.

06:16 That's okay. But, yeah, no, you're right. And it's so much to the point where they actually say, like, you know, you should retire from your dance career before you even get to a certain point because you want to be remembered at your peak. It's really ageist and ableist. Kind of very ageist. So I think a lot of what I do is trying to carve out some spaces for older voices, or just voices across different generations to still be dancing, because I think there's a variety of movement vocabulary that exists in an aging body that is really rich to what dance could be.

06:57 I have a personal trainer.

06:59 Nice.

07:00 And she's only works with older adults or primarily works with older adults. And her approach is not to try to get you the body you wanted when you were 25, but to get you the body that's right for your age. I mean, to keep you mobile, to keep you moving, to keep you vital and involved in life through mobility, which is, you know, not dance, but it's not bad.

07:24 Yeah, it's not not dance.

07:26 No, it's not.

07:30 Yeah. That's awesome. I love that. It's nice when I see trainers that are working like that, because I've seen kind of a few in some gyms sometimes where I've seen this guy, like, make an older adult woman and do these sprints back and forth in the rec room, and I'm like, dang, that's gotta be terrible for her joints. Why is he clearly not thinking of the variety of bodies that he's gotta think about?

07:56 Age appropriate exercise.

07:58 Yeah, exactly.

08:05 Well, I have a question for you. Okay. What has been the biggest influence in your life? What lessons did that, or who has been the biggest influence in your life? And what lessons did that person or people teach you?

08:21 Yeah. I am thinking about. Thinking about a past, past boss of mine, a mentor, really. Her name is Julie Nakagawa. She was the artistic director of that dance company that I danced for in Chicago. And, you know, she really, to just call her the artistic director of that company or to even call her my boss or to call her my mentor, doesn't even do it justice to the level of humanity that this woman offered not only me, but really everybody, every person that she comes in contact with, especially those of us that had the pleasure of dancing for her company. She taught me what integrity was. She really cultivated a space where she brought artists together that were intentionally quite different from one another. And traditionally, in dance companies, it's more like there's some homogeneity in, like, how they look or how they dance, you know? And this dance company was really clearly built to challenge us in a healthy way of, like, how do we collaborate across differences? How do we navigate conflict when it comes up? How do we stay true to ourself but also respect others? You know, how do we. How do we present ourselves or kind of package or communicate ourselves within a group of people who have different values than us? And I'll never forget this. I had. I had a lot of, you know, I had a lot of pressure and stress and everything in dancing. And, you know, she always had us do this thought for the week where each person brought in, like, an article or a podcast or a radio show or something that we would share with the rest of the company each week, and it would just sort of be a kind of percolator of, like, what is on top of mind, top of heart for each person that you're sharing your work environment with. And that allowed us, it's such, like, a small thing you would do in your company culture, you know, but that allowed us to, like, put the work down for a second and just be people with each other. And then it would ultimately start coming back up into our work, you know, and the ways we were allowed to just process together, you know, consider our humanity and our artists selves sort of simultaneously parallel to one another really dissolved a lot of that stress, dissolved a lot of the pressure of trying to be a certain kind of artist or a certain kind of success. It was, like, more organic to follow yourself of how you might unravel versus, like, have a specific goal that you need to be that maybe is a mold that isn't yours.

11:28 I can understand how that could be really valuable, because when I look at young girls and dance, they all look pretty much the same in terms of hairstyle and body posture, and, I mean, body shape, carriage and posture. And I can imagine that when you have different cultures and different races and ethnicities, there might be a lot of pressure to be a certain way that might not be their way, right?

11:56 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. She. She was a true genius in the development of the artistic voice. Not was. She is. It's still happening. There's still people that are going through her doors. So I'll never forget this one thing, this one thought of the week article we brought in or she brought in, I think, was a review of a symphony concert in Chicago, and it was about this very famous, I think, like, very famous flutist or clarinetist, I forget which, which instrument he played. And apparently he made a giant, like, he missed a giant note or something. Like, in the whole audience, all these, like, people who really knew the music of what they were playing were kind of, like, aghast by what had happened. But apparently, after that flub, this musician ended up playing, like, a brilliant rest of the concert, to the point that the reviewer, the critiquer in this newspaper, said, like, the best concert of their life, really. And we had this whole conversation about how it's not the mistake you make, it's the move you make right after.

13:07 So interesting.

13:08 And that's like, that's the lesson that I think this woman really taught me, because that, of course, applies in actual dance steps. Like, if you mess up a step, it's like how you. How you work with it and how you dance the preceding steps that really show your character. But, like, also in life, like, that's such a human thing to make amends with. Like, everyone's gonna make mistakes. Everybody's gonna. We're all gonna mess up sometimes, and that's okay. And just sort of like, how you handle it and how you reflect and respond to it. That is really telling.

13:42 So what a great answer.

13:44 Yeah. How about you? You want to answer that one, too? It's a pretty big question.

13:49 It's a pretty big question. Yeah. There's been so many people. But I was, I mentioned earlier I had the best education in high school.

13:59 Yeah.

14:00 I had an art english class. It was 2 hours, and we had an art teacher and an english teacher, and we'd study impressionistic painting, and we would try impressionistic writing. We would study expressionistic. And so we would do different painting and writing that would complement each other and try to understand the styles and the differences between these styles of painting and writing. And we even had a greek play out of Moby Dick, search for truth in the white whale. I mean, it was this amazing class.

14:32 Yeah.

14:33 Amazing class. And when I graduated from high school, I was looking, actually at my yearbook the other day. It was a bizarre thing to do, but I still haven't. And I saw this note from my english professor, and he said, bill, it's been great over the years. I hope you come back and visit from Bucknell when you return to Montclair. He said, the surface is almost perfect. There are a few cracks. And if you'd ever like to explore what's below the cracks and the perfect surface. The almost perfect surface. I'm available to talk to you. Don't be too proud to ask. And I was gay, and I was hiding it, and I was trying to figure out every which way to look straight, be straight, act straight. I was pretty masculine and popular and all of those things, but I was acting every minute of every day.

15:42 Yeah.

15:43 So I took him up on it, and we had a conversation, and it kind of opened the door to a life of learning how not to act and how to be present in this very moment. But it didn't happen overnight. It took me a long time that opened the door, but it took me a long time to not give what I thought the situation wanted, either because of the alcoholic family or because of my being gay and trying to figure out, well, how do I present myself in an honest and real way. And actually, it wasn't until I got an Al Anon many, many years later. Do you know?

16:24 Yeah, I do.

16:25 When I realized I could listen and not talk until I felt like I was being honest. Talk from my true self. Not an easy thing to learn, but I did learn it eventually. But that was the opening.

16:38 Yeah. The invitation. And, like, what a great. What a great person to. To make it as an invitation versus, like, somebody trying to tell you something.

16:47 It was great. And it's also me talking to you. Me being 77 and you being in your, what, twenties and 30.

16:55 I'm 31.

16:56 Okay, well, you're. You're young.

16:58 Close enough.

16:59 Close enough. And the difference in those 50 years or whatever number of years that is, takes you back before you were born into a time when being gay or being alcoholic in my family weren't talked about. I mean, this is an upper middle class family. It wasn't discussed. We didn't take it outside. We had to pretend everything was fine. And the same was true with my sexuality. It wasn't discussed. We wouldn't talk about that. It was, you know, it was anathema. It was awful. You couldn't talk about it. So it's a different time today, and that's why I bring that up, because you might not grok what it was like back then. Totally different time.

17:44 Absolutely.

17:45 I mean, so that's a difficult question and a difficult answer, but there it is.

17:50 No, I appreciate your sharing. Thanks for sharing that. And I absolutely recognize that it was a different time with a much more challenging relationship to both of those things. And mental health. Mental health care in general.

18:08 Yeah, very different.

18:11 And, you know, even just saying, I understand or I see where you're coming from. Like, I could never. I don't, because I've never been there. Right.

18:19 We don't understand anybody else's pain. You know, we don't understand. We don't feel anybody else's pain. We don't feel anyone else's experience. All we can do is have empathy for any other person and their experience. I know a woman's having her shoulder replaced, and she's had a problem with the surgery, and I did not feel that pain. I'm sympathetic for her situation, and I'm trying to be supportive, but, you know, I can't feel that pain.

18:49 Yeah. I had a religion teacher lecture one time on the concept of imaginative empathy and, and how we can. We. We can spend, you know, some time with the tool of our incredible imaginations, trying to kind of visualize and put ourselves in those shoes and notice. And what I like about her, that philosophy or that tool, I guess, is that I think that's an embodied practice, because in order to try that on, then you have to start to notice the sensations in your body or what comes up for you in order to then have, oh, I understand. Or, oh, I can kind of see what that person's experience may have been like.

19:37 It's deeply embodied curiosity.

19:40 Hmm.

19:41 I'm gonna. Sorry.

19:46 That's okay. Okay. Shall we do another?

19:51 Sure.

20:05 What are you proud of?

20:07 What am I proud of?

20:09 Yeah.

20:11 Well, I mean, there are many things I think I'm proud of. I'm certainly proud of being on the board of San Francisco village. But I'm going to go back to an earlier moment of pride when my mother died of cancer and we had her in a hospice program at home in New Jersey. Once she died, I came back to San Francisco, and I went through a bereavement program with Hospice of San Francisco. And I got more deeply involved and I joined a bereavement program where I was a volunteer trained to work with, essentially women whose husbands had died of cancer, and at that point, men whose partners died of what was then called grid gay related immune deficiency. The name pre aidsenheid.

21:01 Yeah.

21:02 And then I went to a training program through visiting nurses and Hospice of San Francisco, led by three people. And I had this experience of. I was just spiritually pulled in to this moment and this experience, to the point that I made a decision to change my careers in life. And I left city planning. Not right away, but I did eventually leave my career in city planning, and I went to graduate school in home and community based long term care. And I started a career with visiting nurses in Hospice of San Francisco in their development department. And then within six months, the director of the agency came to me and said, we're going to develop the first AIDS hospice in the United States. And you're going to do it because you have the experience of licensing and city of regulations and laws and all of the stuff you did as a city planner. And so you're going to be the one who's going to convert this vacant convent within the Catholic Church.

22:13 Wow. And what a poignant place for it to happen. Oh, my gosh.

22:17 Right? So we developed coming home hospice, which you may not have heard of, which was a huge imagination effort because it had never been done before, to raise money on an idea. And we did, and we worked with the Catholic Church, the gay community, and my political mentor was Libby Denebin, and she was from the Pacific Heights community. So she brought together the Pacific Heights community, the gay community, and the Catholic Church. And I had to develop the facility, and I had to go to talk to the church every Sunday morning. And it was a two year wild ride. And I had the coming home organization on me like gangbusters wanting to see this facility completed before some of them died of AIDS. And so I had this great emotional pressure as well as the practical realities of contracting and getting the licensing from the state of California for the facility, creating the licensure, because it didn't exist, working with all these volunteers. It was an exhausting, wide two year period, but it finally opened, and we had the surgeon general of the United States come to the opening, and then it cared for many, many, many people dying of AIDS.

23:44 Bill. Holy shit.

23:50 That was my most. I'm most proud of that understanding.

23:55 You're a legend.

23:56 Pardon me?

23:57 You're a legend.

23:59 Well.

24:02 Yeah. Cheers to you, Bill. Goddamn.

24:10 When we were working on it, we were putting in an elevator, and I hired an elevator company to install the elevator and build the shaft and install the elevator. And it was a second stage, so there were people living in the building. We created the shaft in the first stage, but the second stage, we had to raise more money for it. And we did raise the money, and we were installing the elevator. And when the company. When the men who worked for the company, who realized who was living in the building, they left the property, burned their clothes, and never came back. And so I had to contend with the fear of AIDS and had to hire another company. And then I got a catholic nuns order. It was actually the order of Mother Teresa.

24:59 Wow.

25:00 The Sisters of Charity or the Daughters of Charity. They used to be out on Church street, out around the church, the catholic church out there, and they'd be walking around in little blue and white outfits. I don't know that they're still there, but they came to me and they said they wanted to volunteer and help out. And I said, well, that's wonderful. What would you like to do? Well, we would like to bathe feet and wash hands and sit with people. And I said, well, that's really a lovely idea. Yes. And we would like to have them cleansed of their sins before they die. And I said, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, they're homosexuals, and we want them to die and be able to go to heaven. So we want them to be free of the sin of homosexuality, and they'll die with mortal sin in their souls. And I said, sisters, thank you so much for your offer, but I'm afraid we won't be able to use your services.

25:57 Wow. How did they respond?

26:01 I don't really remember, but I got out of there fast. Yeah, I could. I mean, I was so angry, I just couldn't. I don't remember how she responded. I worked with the mother, the woman who ran the order in San Francisco, and I just said, no, I'm afraid this will not work.

26:18 Yeah, absolutely. So that tenacity of yours, huh?

26:23 Right. Yes. And after this was all done, I went to Italy, and I thought I'd enjoy Rome, and I didn't speak Italian, and I had a contact from the catholic church in San Francisco with a priest in Rome. And I called him and I tried to talk to him, but he barely could understand English. So he put me on a. On a train to CZ, and I stayed in a convent, literally, because it was a cheap three days flat on my back until I could regain some energy from the trip and the whole experience, and then I could enjoy my travels.

27:00 Wow. So, and then what, how, how did things evolve with the hospital and your, your, like, role there?

27:11 Well, once we finished the second stage, my role there was overdose.

27:15 Oh, yeah.

27:16 I might have continued raising money for it in the development department, but people came to visit and they wanted to see the facility. So my boss and I would take them over to see the facility as guests. We had visitors from England who wanted to do something like this in England, in London. So they came. I then was asked to help create a position in the department of Public Health to look at an AIDS long term care facility. And I said, well, I can help you write the position description. But, you know, I want to apply for the job. And he said, well, of course you do. And so I wrote the description, and I applied for the job, and I got the job.

28:07 Hey.

28:10 And we investigated developing a long term care AIDS facility in a vacant marine hospital out in the presidio, which is no longer there. It's now a very upscale rental project at 14th and lake. And at the time, it was going to cost $500,000 for asbestos mitigation, and so it never happened. But I stayed in the Department of Public Health and the AIDS office to. As an assistant hospital administrator to oversee the development of the AIDS model of long term care, which then was all these nonprofit organizations, all these men and women, lesbians and gay men, mostly coming together of all races to support men who were dying of AIDS. At that point, AIDS was primarily in the gay male community. No longer, but was then. So that, again, I had people coming from Japan and China and Europe who wanted to learn about the AIDS model of long term care. And so I give them presentations and talk to them, and it was just, you know, it just went up and up and up. It was just this amazing ride that went on for ten years for me.

29:18 Wow.

29:19 And then I started. I retired, and then I started my own career in community based long term care services for older adults and adults with disabilities. And I hated it. I hated it because I was working out of my house, and at that point, we didn't have Zoom, we didn't have computers, and I did have a computer, but I was up working at the computer before I brushed my teeth. And my partner would come upstairs, and he'd look at him and I'd say, what are you doing? I'm working. You're in my office. So I didn't have any separation, right?

29:56 Yeah. Yeah.

29:57 So anyway, enough about me.

30:00 Oh, my gosh, Bill, I feel like. How do you feel? And maybe you don't need this, but, like, was there an experience of recognition for you, for all the work that you did, like, from your community or from San Francisco or, like.

30:20 No, I mean, when I retired, there was acknowledgement, and that was very nice, but it, you know, I mean, but it wasn't. These things were cumulative over different jobs or different periods in my life. So you're going. From the time I'm 34 until I retired from the city, I retired at 50, and then I worked again and for another 718 years and 69, so 19 years more. But I started to get longer and longer contracts. It weren't requiring me to work only alone. I don't, I'm much better working in community than I am working by myself. And so here we are on the board of San Francisco village where I'm doing what I used to do for money, but now I do it for free.

31:12 I just feel like I want like a plaque with your name on it and like all the world to hear your story.

31:18 Well, they'll hear it because of this.

31:20 That's true. That's true. That's true. Storycorps for the win. Wow. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing. I am so honored to know you, what incredible work you've done for this community.

31:31 You know, well, it was interesting to follow, I was thinking about this conversation between you and me and what have I learned in my life? And I think I've learned to follow my intuition and to take risks and to go where my truth led me and where I could speak and bring myself and my skills and my talents into the community arena to make a difference. And I feel like I was doing that in my career all the time, but more and more as I got older and I feel like I'm doing that at San Francisco village on the board.

32:09 Yeah. Yeah. So that it continues your, your legacy really continues.

32:15 Right? I got this wonderful, don't twist your back out of shape bill article called letting go.

32:27 I love that.

32:28 It's a wonderful article by Jack Kornfeld from Spirit Rock. Do you know spirit Rock?

32:35 In Marin?

32:36 In Marin, yeah. And it's a buddhist meditation retreat. And it's really amazing. He's saying, you know, when you die, you're really not going to be asking yourself, how much money do you have in your banking account or how many books you wrote? Did I love.

32:51 Well, yeah.

32:53 Did I live fully? Did I learn to live in community? Did I learn to let go? These are all life lessons that are really the most important on our path, I think.

33:07 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, there's so many little intersections, Bill, and what you've just shared. I mean, I've also been a hospice volunteer.

33:18 You have?

33:19 I have with hospice, with continuum hospice over here. And there's an office in Oakland and I've volunteered at a few places near the lake. I was the primary caregiver for both of my parents who've actually also passed away from cancer. And so I kind of did that. And then I had a similar sort of reckoning of like, well, this is a skill that I have and also a place that I now have deep curiosity about others who might feel more alone in that kind of state. Than maybe my parents got the privilege of being with their families around their own deathbeds. And it actually is also what draws me so much into intergenerational dance, because I love the ways that seeing younger and older bodies together kind of hold us accountable to our own realization that time exists and, and mortality exists and, and things are ephemeral. We are ephemeral. And, yeah, that just those letting go lessons are very resonant with, with how I try to. Try to live my life. Absolutely. So thank you for sharing those. I've never gotten the pleasure of going over to, what is it called again?

34:50 Coming home hospice?

34:53 No. What is the buddha?

34:55 Oh, you mean spirit rock.

34:57 Spirit rock. Have you ever gone over?

34:59 I've been there to several retreats, not in recent years, but the village has a woman who leads our meditation sessions, Rachel Lanzarote, and she's a devoted spirit rock tender at retreats. And right now she's actually becoming a teacher and leading retreats at spirit Rock.

35:22 Cool.

35:23 So she's got, I think, deep wisdom and spiritual practice there. It's quite a beautiful place.

35:31 Yeah. I've always driven past on the route over to Mount Tam, you know, kind of seen the signs and been like, huh. I wonder. Yeah, I wonder someday. Yeah, someday for sure. How did your, like, when you had your studies in religion, you know, how did those play into some of these experiences you had setting you up for hospice work, interacting much with the Catholic Church then in the AIDS hospital way?

36:05 That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure I have an answer. I can only say that at the time, I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic.

36:12 Yeah.

36:12 Which I actually left. We all, many people leave their religions of their growing up years, and I did for a variety of reasons. I actually don't really care for the catholic church these days, but, yeah, me either. I'm trying to be polite here. Trying to be polite. But there was an attraction to me of curiosity, I guess, about at that point in my life, about situation ethics, about catholic brothers that would go work in foreign countries and try to make a difference in the lives of people who were poor. There was just a curiosity about different ways of being in the world. And religion is one avenue to explore that difference. And so we would explore Judaism and Christianity and atheism and Buddhism. I mean, all these different paths. And so it was an exploration of a path, I guess it was for me, and I guess it set me up to be curious, to be curious about did I need or want a structure, a vehicle to guide me in my explorations, and I guess I've had many vehicles that I didn't even expect. One was Al Anon. I fought tooth and nail, but I did stay with Al Anon, and that's not a religion. I don't mean that. But it's a practice. It's a spiritual practice.

37:56 Absolutely. Yeah.

37:57 As is Buddhism. And my partner Bob is buddhist, and I. So we have that to share. Didn't practice Buddhism because of Bob or didn't study it because of him, but because it was my choice. So I guess it's really the answer is it set me up to be curious about ways of being in the world and spiritual guidance on the journey of living.

38:27 Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that.

38:32 Yeah.

38:33 I still feel pretty curious about becoming a death doula.

38:39 Oh, really?

38:40 Yeah. You know, like birth doulas, obviously, to help bring the child into life, but then also, you know, without being a social worker, without being a chaplain, without being somebody in one of those roles, helping folks process or kind of creatively process, depending on the family, coming up against that transition in life. And also just. It feels so intrinsic for me to honor death as a part of just met one of the stages in the cycle of life. You know, I think so often it kind of gets the. The outlier cat. You know, it gets the outcast vibe as, like, the part of life that we don't really want to talk about. But it's actually just as much of the cycle as birth is.

39:30 Of course it is. I mean, the lights of beings are born every day, and the lights of beings die every day. It's just a cycle of living and dying, but it's also something that many people fear. And especially as we get older, I think it's both an acceptance and probably soon. How many years, you know, Sarah Kent. Sarah has had death doulas give presentations for village members.

40:06 Beautiful. Yeah, I love that.

40:08 So she's opened the door.

40:09 Yeah. Yeah. And there's, like, lots of other really cool resources out there in terms of, like, you know, getting everything. There's literally a website called get your shit together. And it's called, like, gist.org or gist.com or something. And it's literally a kind of link and guidebook through, like, the paperwork that you might need for an advanced directive or for a will or to find a notoriety in your notary, in your area or things like that to kind of help you organize, you know, all those administrative steps that you need to put into place that, again, those aren't even really talked about, you know, well.

40:48 They are at the village, and I will tell you, because of the village and what Sarah organized pre pandemic in 2017 with a presentation by a lawyer named Deb Kinney and a fiduciary named Rebecca Paul from Jewish Family and Children's Services, which I attended. They blew me out of the water. They knocked me out.

41:11 Incredible.

41:12 As a result, Bob and I hired Rebecca. Rather, I hired Deb Kinney to work with her to write our living trust. She convinced us to get married, and we had no intentions on getting married. And she said, bill, you're leaving a lot of magic wands on the table and all of the tax benefits that you will not benefit from if you don't get married. She said, I don't care if you believe in marriage as an institution, but get married. No, she didn't say that. She said, you should think about getting married. Bob and I went to city hall. We got married. We had a witness, and we went out and had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, and that was it.

41:51 All right. I love that.

41:55 And so we have a living trust, and we have all the notaries you could imagine. And we are working with Rebecca Paul, jewish family and Children's services, as our fiduciary, and she will oversee the execution of our trust once both of us have died. And that's all because of the village.

42:15 That's incredible. I mean, you know, I feel like the work that the village is doing in that regard, then, is just life changing, really, because I think not everybody has an awareness, you know, and I would say without participation in a community like the village or maybe folks living in other kinds of, you know, senior housing communities, that's not always readily available or readily shared information.

42:42 I worked in community based long term care for years, and I will say that the village is unique, totally. The village movement is unique because there's so much creativity. It doesn't mean that there isn't creativity elsewhere. I don't mean that, but I mean, Sarah and Kate and Jessica and Jill are amazing in what they bring to this organization. They are just gifts to us. We are really blessed to have them. And the creativity that Sarah comes up with and the deep wisdom to explore certain topics is just awe inspiring. And I've told her that every so often.

43:24 That's good. I mean, I think that's healthy to do. And I'm thinking, I'm just reminded that Sarah is, you know, raising two young kids right now while also considering what deep wisdom and programming she might offer to folks 55 plus. And again, just that intergenerational piece, you know, just that duality piece of like that. She's icon of holding it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

43:53 Well, I want to ask you another question. I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask you to tell me your version of it. What has been the most significant experience in your adult life?

44:14 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to pick anything other than the, than the loss of my parents. Absolutely. It's, it's definitely, I've tried many times to find a different story to tell, but this story continues to want to be told. And it comes up in a variety of intersections of who I meet and the topics that become, you know, that just start to unravel in conversation of like, this is a truly a part of my journey and it is a part of, you know, to your point, living my truth and living just kind of just continue to follow what that truth is wherever it may lead you. But I lost my, my dad was diagnosed with esophageal cancer when I was a senior in high school, and he died my freshman year of college. And then my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer my senior year of college and then died a year after I graduated college.

45:13 So you were, your parents were both dead by the time you were essentially 22.

45:18 23. Exactly.

45:20 Yeah, 23. You had great loss young.

45:24 Great loss young. Yeah. And I think that really started without my knowing this intergenerational feeling. Right. Because I was having this experience, I was going to bereavement support groups, and I was amongst women who were 55 and 65 grieving the loss of their 85 year old parents, 95 year old parents. And, you know, I was feeling both my youth and then also feeling like another age, you know, like I was having the experience of a college kid needing to be a kid, but also having the experience, very much of a parent defined child than in those roles of, like, taking care of my parents and just trying to get ahold of, you know, that, that whole, the world of the legalities, the logistics, obviously, who you are. Then on your own, I will say that there is an incredible, incredible organization called the Dinner party that offers. Yeah, they offer support groups, basically kind of participant run, community run support groups for people in their twenties and thirties who have experienced loss. And they used to pre pandemic kind of geographically.

46:54 Right.

46:55 Locate people. And during the pandemic, once everything went virtual, they introduced this idea of affinity group. So you could kind of sign up, you could either start or sign up a group that was particular to your kind of loss. And so I figured, what the hell? And I actually started a double parental loss group. And I was like, let's just see who comes up. And I've been meeting since the June of 2020 with this incredible group of about eight women who we've all lost both of our parents. And I think the oldest one in our group might be, like, mid thirties or I think, actually she might be turning 40 this year. But anyway, all that to say that having. Having this group of community as a result of this kind of giant tumble around reorientation has been a super blessing. I think that I. I learned a lot about those lessons that you're talking about with letting go and what it means to me to truly live a good life. That. That is honestly what started to pull me away from concert dance and bring me into community engaged dance practices, because I began to feel that. I began to feel a spiritual connection and community engaged work because it was about helping folks who maybe didn't have access to education around their bodies or dance education, you know, or having, like, artistic education. And, like, the more and more people that I could share that with, you know, the more I felt in alignment with what I felt was to live a good. To live a good life. To live a full and good life was to help as many people as possible. See themselves as dancers, see themselves as artists. It's not that you have to have a profession in either of those things to identify as such. And I think that's what ends up making the world, you know, a better place. Um, and it's also, I think, impacted. Impacted the way I very intentionally now design conglomerates of chosen family, you know? You know, which is, of course, something, especially in past generations of. Of the gay community in terms of not being able to identify with our parents, but being able to be like, this is my family now. You know, there's an alignment there, I think, between me and my ancestors in that way. Yeah. Always feeling. Always feeling like now. It's always something that I carry with me. You know, it's like it almost never goes away. It's always in the back of my mind that I don't have them, but I appreciate the way that it shattered. I guess it's masochistic of me, but I appreciate the way it kind of shattered expectations I had about what life looks like.

50:18 Yeah.

50:18 How that kind of catalyzed my own rebellious questioning to go, well, what else could be? What other stereotypes and structures and things could we. Could we shatter then? You know what I mean? Like, once you kind of have the great permission of, like, your parents, really? Then you're like, huh. It's all kind of made up. We kind of. We kind of get to make everything ourselves, actually.

50:45 It's our choice. It's our time.

50:47 Yeah.

50:49 But you're also very brave and very curious and willing to open the door to your exploration, and that's really a wonderful and rich experience, but not many guidelines.

51:07 That's true. Yeah. It's hard to, like, I spent a lot of time thinking about dance and death as partners and kind of using dance as a way to research death and, you know, creating classes called mortality in motion where I could help people reflect on their own mortality through a physical movement class. You know, things like that. And it's a tricky situation to, like, tie in your own personal grief and loss into something you professionally do. You know, it's a hard line to walk, but it's filled with education around boundaries that is, I think, super important and also filled with an experience for me that, like, I'm not pursuing a profession or a job. I'm. I am, to you, the best way that you put it. I am seriously just, like, following my truth. Like, following the truth. And I have no idea. I never expected to be in intergen practices, to be working in low income and senior housing communities. You know, like, I had no. I had no plan of this, and I have no idea where it's going to go next. And it's really just like the 1 st after the next of, like, well, let's see.

52:22 Well, aren't you lucky to be able to explore it?

52:25 That's true. Yes. I am grateful. Super grateful.

52:29 Wonderful. Do you know who Jeff Hoyle is?

52:32 No.

52:33 Jeff Hoyle is a local treasure. His son is Dan Hoyle, who performs over at the marsh. You ever heard of that? Maybe you don't live in the city.

52:45 I live in Oakland. Yeah. I don't know what the marsh is.

52:48 Oh, the marsh is a wonderful performance space on Valencia street about 22nd in Valencia. You can look it up, and they have amazing. I don't know how it is now during the pandemic, but my partner Bob had a piece of playwright, and he had a play done there years ago. But Dan Hoyle performs there, and he is spectacular. He creates all these characters and he goes through America. He just does amazing things. His father is Geoffrey Hoyle, and he's also a mime and a person of movement. I don't know whether he's a dancer, but I remember going to a fundraiser for a nonprofit, and he was performing and he performed, I don't know that I would call it a dance, but it was a movement performance where he nonverbally performed the birth of a baby. The baby crawling, the baby standing up, the baby tottering, the baby becoming a teenager, the baby becoming a young adult, the baby, you know, the baby growing through life, the human being growing through life, and eventually the human being getting older, the human being getting a little more bent, the human being, and then eventually the human being died. So it was a powerful, you couldn't even talk when this thing was over, but it was this amazing performance.

54:26 Is he still alive?

54:27 He is, as far as I know.

54:30 You don't know him personally?

54:31 I do not know him personally. I'm like, you know him, but I don't know him. You can probably Google Jeff Hoyle.

54:37 I know. I'm like, I want to. I want to talk to him next. I have thought about a dance like that before, for sure, in my head. I would love to see that. I wonder if there's some archival footage of that somewhere that I could, like, find.

54:53 Who's to know? Probably, yes. Now you got me curious. I'm going to google them. Jeff Hoyle.

55:02 That's a good one.

55:03 Well, it's 12:00. What else do we want to talk about?

55:09 Well, what else is on that?

55:19 For generations, listening to this conversation years from now, is there any wisdom you want to pass on to them? What would you like them to know?

55:39 Yeah, I think I'm just thinking about our conversation, this conversation in this present moment, how, you know, incredible it is to hear about your history working in San Francisco and in healthcare and all of the role, like, everything that you just shared about your career, really, and how I had no idea and how I love learning that about you. And luckily for San Francisco Village and, you know, Jessica's brilliant idea to put us together in these moments and how grateful I am to have been paired with you randomly. You know, I think that just speaks to the beauty that you could have even if you just connected with a stranger, you know, like, depending on who you meet, I guess, of course, there could always be a kind of terrible instance as well. But the possibilities, I think, have just as much chance for this kind of goodness and inspiration. And I think I'm walking away from today feeling, like, just really invigorated, you know, like, I feel. I feel your lust for life, Bill, and I feel like it's pretty contagious. And, you know, I'm inspired to continue to be working in our fields and our sectors and hearing about all of the impact you made, you know, in your lifetime. So maybe it's just the advice of, like, strike up. Strike up a conversation, you know, you just never know what you might learn and what might be reaffirmed in you when you do.

57:17 I think for me, it is taking risks, realizing that everything changes, that we're here for a relatively brief period of time. So let's take advantage of each and every moment. It's been richer than I ever expected. Not that I didn't anticipate a good conversation, but this has been really rich. And I've learned about you and your bravery and that you carry around this wound that will never go away, of losing your parents by the time you were 23 and how that wound is always there. It always will be there. And it's true for me. Mine were gone when I was 33, so ten years later. But it's a huge loss. And, you know, whether you love them or hated them or whatever your relationship was with them, they're gone. And so now you carry on in very interesting ways, obviously. Look at where you are and what you're doing and what you're trying. It's just phenomenal. So I guess the message, I would say, is take the risk of following your own truth and explore your life and live it so that when you do die, you feel like you've had a great experience.

58:35 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yes, yes, yes. Thanks so much for today, Bill. What a treat. What a great.

58:45 I have a question for you before we go.

58:47 Okay.

58:47 I've been thinking about your name, Olivia. And I think, alive. I mean, did your name come out of creation like that, or how did. It's not Olivia. It's Olivia.

59:01 Isn't this a part of. This is. What's part of the whole, you know, just. I'm just walking the path. Like, I'm just following the path. Olivia with her whole experience about death. The name is alive. I'm thinking about mortality. You know, it's all in the gamut there. No. You know, my mother, she was a saucy, spicy italian american woman who really wanted me to be an individual and wanted a unique name and wanted something a little different. And my. The other option was Andrea, spelled Ondria, and instead of being called Liv, I was going to be called Ria, which I'm still, like, kind of. I would like toilet, that version of me. But she ended up on Olivia. And I know they. They liked the name Olivia with an O, but they really did not want me to be called Olivia, you know, and Olivia is just kind of like most people phonetically pronounce Olivia Olivia anyway. But I think this was just a way to a give me a sense of special, give me a feeling of being special while also making sure people didn't say it like Olivia.

01:00:10 Right? What a wonderful name.

01:00:12 Thanks. I really appreciate that. Yeah, conjures does conjure the my mother and my parents in that way.

01:00:19 Beautiful. Very nice.

01:00:21 Okay. But we will have to chat Sam's storycorps again.

01:00:25 Okay, we will. I really enjoyed that.

01:00:27 You'll have to consider come dancing. You have to come consider coming by USF and dancing with us sometime.

01:00:33 I will consider that. It's scary.

01:00:36 That's all right.

01:00:37 All right. I'll think about it.

01:00:39 Okay. Okay. Have a good day.

01:00:42 You're going to cancel or end this recording?

01:00:45 Yeah, it'll stop out here. It'll stop now.

01:00:49 Okay.