(Extra)Ordinary People

In 1971, in Los Angeles, California, while on my way to a film production company to discuss a screen play I had written, I was in a taxi about to pull onto the expressway, when a shabby-appearing old woman emerged from roadside overgrowth and approached the taxi. Her physical appearance was shocking! In a soiled, tattered dress, arms and legs filthy with visible cuts and sores, she had the haunting sad, hollow, near-lifeless look of someone who had endured the extremes of depravity. She stood staring at me through the taxi window. She was wearing on her chest the cardboard shown in this frame. I knew I would never get this shocking image out of my heart and mind! As the woman turned and walked back toward the overgrowth, I got out of taxi and asked the driver to wait while I offered the woman some money. “Hey man, I’m not waiting while you waste your time on that old broad; she’s just another nonentity.” She having already disappeared, I went to find her as the taxi pulled off.

I could not locate her in the maze of paths through the brush, and staying with friends not far from there, I walked back with that old woman’s dirty, sad face etched in my mind. I asked my friends if they knew her. “I’ve seen her over in the park digging through dumpsters and sleeping on benches. I think her name is Rose, ‘cause sometimes she can be heard mumbling ‘A rose is a rose is a rose….’” The next day, my last day in LA, I went looking for her, while putting up fliers asking for any information about her. I left my Ohio address, offering twenty-five dollars for information.

That night I went over to the park, for one last search for her. As I neared park there was a police car and a gathered crowd. Making my way through the crowd, I suddenly stopped in shock with the sight in the gutter of that filthy, tattered dress, dirty, sore-filled arms and legs of Rose! The young cop was flirting with a bystander, as a witness tried to tell him some youth had run over her on purpose.

When I angrily told the cop to listen to the witness, he turned to me with a smirk on his face. “Listen buddy, she’s just a bag lady, a homeless nonentity!” It was the second time I had heard Rose referred to as a NONENTITY! In emotional exhaustion I sat down on a bench and through tear-blurred eyes I watched two men who had arrived with an ambulance, load Rose into a body bag like she was a piece of trash picked up at the curb. As the ambulance pulled away, I asked someone where they would take her? “They dump them in a a pauper’s grave somewhere, I guess?”

It was the word “dump” which brought more tears to my eyes. It was then, as I got up to leave that I spotted it! There in the blood-spattered gutter, amid the food and drink containers, and cigarette butts of the curious, indifferent onlookers, there amid the filth of that city was THE SIGN! The sign which Rose had been wearing on her chest the day she had approached me, staggered toward me in that taxi. The sign on which Rose had printed the desperate words “HUNGRY NEED A ROOM PLEASE.” As I picked up the sign, I knew I was not going to allow the memory, the story of Rose die!

Once back in Ohio, I could only hope someone with personal knowledge of Rose would see my fliers with address/phone number and mail or call me with information for reward. When weeks went by and I had heard nothing, I was forlorn. Then the phon ecall! The caller, Mrs. Bradstein, was a former worker at the Public Health Department in LA. Her voice was and like a voice from Heaven, when she said, “Her name was Rose Thatcher. Unwed. No children. She had come to Hollywood to become an actress. But her farm parents unhappy with her decision to do so, told Rose that if, against their wishes, she followed this dream of being actress, never to be welcomed back to her Midwestern home! Once she had arrived in LA, she had her actor’s portfolio photos made and started going to auditions.” Then she tearfully told the Public Health worker, she had been invited to a supposed private audition for a film role which turned into a “casting couch” incident. “She did not describe what had actually happened, but being so young and innocent the older man’s sexual aggression struck fear in her heart and made something in her mind snap. Rose said she just could not recover from this tramatic moment! Unable to hold a job because of a growing extreme mistrust of men, one misfortune after another lead to her homelessness, her living on the streets!” Mrs. Bradstein closed the call by informing me, because she had been so kind to Rose, Rose had given her a portfolio photo. “Jim, I’m mailing it to you to show audiences when you tell Rose’s story!” When I opened the envelope from LA; I was looking at Rose with the same emotion it will inspire in you when you look at Rose’s face.

People have asked me over the years the same question, after looking at the photograph of Rose, why, if this is Rose’s portfolio shot prior to the life changing/tramatic sexual incident, does she seem so sad in the photo? My answer has always been the same. “Perhaps, it’s because Rose is a young person setting out to gain her life’s dream, but the price for Rose’s loving pursuit of that dreamed-of future had been the rejection of the parents she loved, having been cut off from her past!” Then the evil of a city like LA, a place like Hollywood which her rural Midwestern mother and father had warned her about, had fatally bitten Rose!