Eulogy

My farewell to Kathleen

Hi everyone.

I’m here to talk about Kathleen. Kathleen Lee Kotcher was born Kathleen Crawford, to Cindy and Frank. She has a brother, Travis. That’s them there. I’m Ivan. I was with Kathleen for 5 years, and married to Kathleen for 15 years more.

All of you here knew Kathleen, or heard about her from me. I’m going to share some memories of her with you. I have a lot of them, because I was luckier than most. I got to spend half our lives together, which is more than anyone could ask for…some might say more than anyone deserved.

There’s so much to say, so many memories to share, but where I really want to start are hagstones. Here’s a hagstone. In fact, it’s one of the first ones Kathleen found. Hagstones are one of the last things she taught me about, and is typical of everything she was about.

For those who don’t know, hagstones are an old English folk tradition. They’re supposed to guard against bad fortune in general, and witches and fairies in particular. If you look through the hole, they’re supposed to remove any glamours or illusions…and to allow you to see fairies. They’re magic, you see. And that’s why they’ll always remind me of Kathleen…magic is the first thing Kathleen showed me, and one of the many things she taught me.

I first met Kathleen in 1992. We worked together. I helped interview Kathleen for the job, and knew within 5 minutes of talking with her we were going to be best friends. Sometimes you just know. Kathleen told me later she knew, too…that was the first magic Kathleen showed me. I’ll go on the record here, though, and say she got the job because she deserved it.

The first thing I ever found out about Kathleen was that she was INTERESTED. She had a rabid interest in the world. She was hard to keep up with. She had so many things to show me when we first met…so many movies, books, places, so much music and art. Raising Arizona she showed me early on…it was one of her favorite movies. Scientifically the most hilarious movie ever, she told me. And then she laughed. All 4000 times she watched it.

Because that was the second thing. Kathleen laughed. Constantly. She knew how to laugh, how to make other people laugh, how to use laughter to make people happy, and how to laugh at other people’s jokes. Nobody who knew her will ever forget her laughter.

It took awhile, but eventually Kathleen and I started to spend all of our time together because she had so much she wanted to say and just not enough time to catch up. That never ended over the rest of the time I knew her. She was constantly interested in new things…and constantly looking for new things to be interested in. And she never did catch up, either finding new things or telling people about them.

Part of telling people was through writing. Kathleen was a writer. She wrote all the time. She was very cautious about showing people her writing because she was a real perfectionist about it. She wrote in college, as a reporter for her college newspaper…most of what I’ve seen from then was reviews. All of which were hilarious and showed how deeply she was concerned about showing things to people they didn’t know. She wanted to share the joy she found, the magic of finding something new to enjoy.

Kathleen loved new things, but she was always happy where she was. She loved the places we lived… some more than others, but she always threw herself into wherever we were. Baltimore was the first place I saw her fall in love with…when she first went there, she went to go to school. But she found a whole new world of friends and things to do. Most of all, she found people who created.

Kathleen herself loved to create. She worked hard at it. She did a lot of things herself to create in the world. Writing, building, sewing, cooking. A lot of experimenting. She found her greatest creative expression and partners in crime in her time in Baltimore, though, and she never left it behind.

Baltimore was where she really flowered, and the friends she made there were friends through the rest of her life. Kathleen was constantly engaging people who she thought were creative, and didn’t really have much time for people she thought were just consuming. She loved talking with people about creating…what they were making, how they made it, what they had made before. She loved watching people grow…watching people create themselves.

Baltimore was where she found the great love of her creative life. Shocked and Amazed. Just saying it makes me think of how many lives she touched through it…how many folks she inspired, and how many people she gave a voice. You’ll hear more from her partner in crime there later, but all I can really say is that Shocked and Amazed was part of her soul.

Kathleen was a friend and a fan through Shocked and Amazed, just as she was in the rest of her life. She met and knew so many people who started their careers in sideshow and carnival, and many who had finished them as well. She always wanted to let people tell their own stories, and wanted desperately to make that happen for people she knew might otherwise be forgotten. That’s why she joined Shocked and Amazed, and it’s what kept her going on the ongoing project. She met so many fascinating people, and I can’t think of a single one who didn’t open up to her honesty and her genuine love for what they brought to the art of performance and the art of being human. Especially being human.

Kathleen was the biggest fangirl. She was never prouder than when she was helping someone believe in themselves and their art. I can’t tell you how many people have told me she was their biggest fan, and SHE WAS. She was always there to bring people up when they were down, and remind them when they did a great job. Again and again, she saw folks start from nothing and become stellar performers…stellar people.

Kathleen loved, and loved fiercely. She loved her family, she loved her dogs Perro and Cuy, and she loved her friends. If you were lucky enough to be her friend, you couldn’t possibly have a better one. Kathleen always had time for her friends, and was the first to come to their rescue or to their support. She didn’t suffer fools or foolishness lightly, and wasn’t afraid to tell people she loved when they weren’t living up to the incredibly high standards she set. She was the first to help people meet them, and was all about doing anything she could to make people feel they could achieve them as well. She was the first to tell those she loved when they were deceiving themselves in a way that would prevent them from becoming the people they wanted to be.

But always in a private way. Because Kathleen was also about keeping secrets. I was with her every day, and I’m still learning things she knew that people had told her. More people treated Kathleen as a confessor than I knew, or will ever know. She was good at that, and good at offering the kind of advice people need but not always want to hear.

Let’s be clear on this…Kathleen had strong opinions. On everything. She knew exactly what she knew. Those who knew her best know the Iggy Pop Dollar as the only arbiter which could cause her to yield. However, Kathleen would only confront wrongs in the world that affected other people… no matter how much she might have disagreed with someone’s personal behavior, she would never judge them as a person and would always fight to the death those who would. She was the ultimate libertarian that way. Freedom was her credo.

Kathleen was a questioner. She always asked why things were the way they were, and why they couldn’t be better. She constantly strove to be better at everything she did. I could go on and on about her getting better at things, but the best example was her cooking. Those who knew her cooking may not have known the days she could only melt, boil, and toast. However, they sure found out what happened when Kathleen decided she needed to be better at something…damn, she was a good cook.

Kathleen was an adventurer. When I met her, she wanted to travel and see the world. She had grown up in Herndon, a sleepy suburb of Washington, DC. Her first adventures were into DC, probably the first place she loved…certainly the second place she made most of her friends and the place she made her home.

I met her not too long after she left Herndon, after the first flush of her love for DC. She wanted to go further and further, though, because she wanted to seize experience with both hands. We got to see the world together. Easter Island, Chile, Peru, Central America, Spain, Ireland, China and all around the US…she just couldn’t get enough.

Her adventures led her to come to her final place, Brighton. Brighton…how can I begin to talk about how much she loved it and how much the city loved her. 20 years we spent together, and I can say unequivocally that it was the only place she responded to as much as Baltimore. Some of you have seen it with her and through her eyes, and those who have know it was her place. I’ve never seen a person have a love affair with a city, but Kathleen sure did with Brighton.

Kathleen loved Brighton because it embodies possibility, just as she made happen for the people she came into contact with. For those who don’t know, Brighton is primarily known as where the UK comes to play. But it’s also the only place in the UK where you are encouraged to be anything you want to be…Brighton constantly supports it, and most importantly doesn’t judge unnecessarily and by judging crush people’s dreams about themselves and make them settle for mundane mediocrity. That’s exactly what Kathleen aspired to…helping people realize who they wanted to be, not who the rest of the world wanted them to be. It’s why Kathleen fell in love with Brighton the minute she recognized what the city’s about.

In return, Brighton responded to Kathleen’s love affair. Brighton gave Kathleen presents and responded to her requests. Every day she went into the city she would bring back a story. Sometimes the city would give her gifts…I still have jewelry she found on the street. Kathleen reignited her creativity in Brighton, and I’ll show you a movie in a bit that was the beginning of that process and gives just one example of why Brighton reminded her of transformation and why she herself had so much to offer in telling the story. Brighton was the least likely friend, but one of the last and best ones she made.

Finally, Kathleen was magical, and taught me a lot about magic. She didn’t believe in magic as a rule, and generally laughed (sometimes out loud) at any time people seriously talked about anything being magic. She loved magicians, though…at least ones who didn’t lie about magic. Kathleen was the first person to tell me that all magicians are liars, some of them are just more charming than others…some more honest about their lie being about showing people something cool, not about demonstrating what nobody can actually do. The ones who lie about not being liars are the ones to hate. The ones who hide the work behind the lie while entertaining and making people believe they can make magic too are the ones to love.

Brighton brought magic to Kathleen, every day. She learned about hagstones in Brighton, and heard that you could only find one if it called to you. As with so many new things, she was instantly obsessed…she had to have one. At first she couldn’t see them, then she found one. Then she found two. Then she found them at will…walking in her favorite place, the beach, plucking them from chance and opportunity. Brighton reminded her that way about making magic. I didn’t realize how much she was entranced by hagstones until I found a bunch on our bookshelf after she passed away. She learned the spell of finding them, and wanted to share the glamour of hagstones with her friends.

That’s the last lesson she really taught me…the one I’ll always remember. She taught me that the magic we make is the magic we least expect, the magic of combining serendipity with desire and work, maximizing the possibility that results, and sharing the results with other people. Magic from cutting through a bunch of ignorance to what you can really find that’s worthwhile, keeping a little glamour for the rubes who want or need it, and cutting up jackpots afterwards to compare notes with those who make it and understand the same.

Nothing to creating real magic, really. Just a little work and the unremitting belief and support from those you love. That’s all.

Thanks Kathleen. Thanks a lot for teaching me magic.