Mike Anderson
I’ve lost a lot of old friends in the last 20 years, but it’s Michael who keeps rattling around my head these days. It’s probably because we shared 75 years together on this planet and no one else will be able to remember a lot of that stuff. I’ve heard losing an old friend is like losing a library. That’s really true of Michael, but it’s also like losing your stereo system. I really miss hearing his booming voice giving me shit. He was so good at that.
My first memory of him is on the St. Anselm’s school bus. We had this enormous off-duty cop named Sam Serio as our bus driver, and when he drove up that first day of school in 1949, I noticed there were a lot more kids on the bus than usual, most of them from this new development called Greenbrae. Mike would have been a first-grader that year, and I was the year ahead. His voice always stood out over the crowd. The bus was our bonding point for the next few years and we became as good friends as is possible with someone from a different grade.
in 1951, Kentfield and Greenbrae were split off from St Anselm’s to form a new parish - St Sebastians. This bonded Mike and me even closer because we were both gung-ho altar boys in our new parish and often got called upon to serve at weddings and special occasions.
Our paths crossed again for a year at Marin Catholic high school before I headed off to the seminary. The next summer we both got maintenance jobs at the school and that’s when we really got to know each other. I remember we were changing combinations on the lockers one afternoon and Mike started quizzing me about the seminary and telling he was thinking about going in after high school. A minute later he started telling me about all his girl friends and his plans to buy an old car and fix it up. Then he went on for about an hour explaining to me in detail how internal combustion engines worked. I remember coming away with several impressions of Michael: He was much more firmly grounded on the earth plane than I was; he was very knowledgeable about how things work in the real world; and there was no way a guy like him was ever going into the seminary.
Well I was wrong. Two years later he turned up at St. Joseph’s, and he fit right in. He had all the necessary credentials: He was a credible athlete, a good student, he had inherited his mother’s gift for acerbic repartee; and what was most important in an Irish Catholic institution - he was an excellent story-teller and bull-shitter. A couple years later the two of us ended up performing together in the seminary production of the Music Man. Michael got the lead role as Professor Harold Hill, I got stuck playing Gregory, Man of Integrity, a tortured seminary re-write of Marian the Librarian.
A couple years later, after we’d started to question and deconstruct the institutional church, a friend and I decided to make a film called A Ballad of the Church and the Modern World and chose Michael to play the modern world. We snuck into the Archbishop’s summer house adjacent to the seminary and used it as our movie set. Michael played a criminal who breaks into the archbishop’s house, finds him counting his money, chases him through the house, and then shoots him. The movie caused a huge outburst in the archdiocese and almost got us thrown out.
Michael left the seminary in 1965; I left a year later. We both ended up living in the Haight Ashbury a couple blocks apart, going to San Francisco State during the student strike, and then we both fathered daughters in 1969, two wonderful flower-children named Elan Vital and Lucy Blossom.
Michael moved to the East Coast in the early ‘70s to pursue a career in filmmaking and we lost touch for a while. Then, in 1973 Watergate happened and I quit my job teaching Propaganda at Lone Mt. College and went to Washington DC to follow the Watergate Hearings. Michael was already living there in a commune with a bunch of socialists and his new girl friend, a saucy nurse named SueEllen. We smoked a lot of dope, planned a lot of revolutions, and eventually went on with our lives.
Michael’s and my journey was in many ways a Catholic odyssey. We started out as altar boys, studied for the priesthood together and then got disillusioned and ended up as rebellious hippies. But during our time in the church, we spent a lot of time looking through the Vatican dumpster to see what they had thrown out over the years. We saw all the mystics and visionaries and women they had excommunicated and condemned and burned at the stake. Then like good hippies we jumped in and salvaged what we liked. Michael built his own unique dumpster spirituality out of social activism, humanitarianism and love for family, and he integrated all those values into his filmmaking. I think he was eminently successful. He would eschew any talk of sanctity, but I’d still like to toast St. Michael of Greenbrae, Dumpster Catholic extraordinaire.
I’ll definitely get shit from him for that one.