I have no idea what I offered Gwen. Maybe I was someone in her life more levelheaded. I was definitely capable to of doing things none of her friends liked to do – for example, riding 50 miles through the hilly western Massachusetts countryside. We didn’t even use cycling shoes that clip into pedals. We just pushed down with our sneakers on the pedals, missed out on half the power of very stroke.
In many parts of life, she offered me a sense of adventure that I never would have found myself.
We met when we were hired to work on the same project, a big grant the University of Massachusetts had gotten to “teach college students how to drink responsibly.”
Which was absurd because UMass was a notorious party school.
Together we were supposed to make 5 short “trigger” films to set up situations where students would get into one situation or another, but then not resolve it. We’d then show these films to small groups of
students at dormitories and fraternities to “trigger” discussion about how the situation could have been prevented in the first place.
It made no sense that they had hired the two of us to work on the project. Neither of us of, had drunk our way through college.
I wrote the scripts.
The first morning that I stepped on the set, I asked myself, “Oooo, what’s this?”
The crew was deeply focused on technical things, physical things, creative things. They let me run the clap stick before every scene started, commanding that I jump out of the frame ASAP to save on film. I have so much energy; this was the perfect job.
I spent the next year showing the films to groups of students and guiding the discussions. Some scripts stimulated the intended conversations. Others didn’t.
When the films were finished, Gwen went left Massachusetts for San Francisco, with the impossible goal of finding a cattle ranch to work on.
After about a year, I heard from her, “Hey Nance, I’m on a ranch. And the horses gallop over rocks as big as footballs.”
I didn’t know how to ride a horse, but I wanted to gallop over rocks as big as footballs.
I quit my professional job and joined her on that ranch. She wanted to make a documentary about those old fashioned ranchers. I used my skills from that UMass project to help raise funds for the film. She taught me to ride a horse.
That friendship changed my life. I fell in love with a film editor in San Franicsco and never returned to Massachusetts. Gwen and I are still friends.