Just as I was placing my bid on an autographed photo of Courtney Love on E-bay, I got an instant message from an acquaintance I made online about two years ago, a girl named Shaira who shared my enthusiasm for Courtney and other things and contacted me by e-mail and from there things blossomed into a fun little tit for tat online relationship. We would share our latest woes with men, trade Courtney gossip, discuss various counter-cultural and artistic entities of underground note, and just generally kvetch. It had been awhile since I heard from her and she was just bursting with the latest sordid Hollywood saga Courtney is embroiled in. Before she divulged I asked, “This isn’t the fact that Courtney made Mr Blackwell’s worst dressed list is it?”
“Oh no, this is much better,” she responded.
It seems that Courtney Love’s sudden departure from a John Carpenter film called Ghosts of Mars last summer wasn’t due to an ankle injury she sustained during physical training for her first action/adventure feature as was reported initially. Love did suffer an injury but it wasn’t her workout that caused it, no it was something much more delicious! It seems Courtney’s current beau, music industry executive Jim Barber, had a wife with a bun in the oven whom he left for “the girl with the most cake” and the said party went into a bit of a funk/rage over the loss of her man and did what any girl in that situation might do, she went into full-on stalker mode and ran over Courtney’s foot with her automobile! But that is not all…apparently this ex-wife Lesley Barber also tried to burn Love’s house down, stalked her daughter Frances by hanging in a car outside her school, and tried to plant cocaine in Loves car. The litigiously experienced Love has filed suit against Lesley Barber, saying that the injury sustained made her lose out on a film role that would have paid $500,000. Friends of Barber claim the relationship had begun to deteriorate well before Love came into the picture
This little tidbit seemed so ironic to my friend and I because all those things the ex-Mrs. Barber allegedly did sound completely and eerily like something Courtney would’ve or could’ve done in a second during her less illustrious pre-Hollywood days. In fact, not too many years have passed since the time when Love went running down Hollywood blvd. barefoot and in a slip because she heard Mary Lou Lord, a former love interest of her very deceased husband Kurt Cobain’s, was playing a gig somewhere on the strip and she wanted to kick her ass. Oh well, you know what they say…people change.
On most other fronts Courtney is sitting pretty, as was exemplified perfectly by a brief interview recently in the chronicle by Liz Smith. The two blondes talked about the steady serious and impressive film projects Love has lined up for the near future including Hello, Suckers!, the Martin Scorsese produced Scott Elliot directed biopic of legendary prohibition-era star of stage and screen Texas Guinan, followed by the Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) George Clooney produced, Russo Bros. Directed Welcome To Collinwood, a comedy caper about a pawn shop robbery in working class Cleveland orchestrated by Loves character in the film. After reading the interview, one could almost assume that the delightful LSD-taking, out bull dagger Liz Smith was unduly impressed by Ms. Love’s intelligence. She couldn’t have been more glowing and obviously taken with Courtney’s capacity for knowledge on great women in film history. I’d say Smith was probably a bit starry-eyed and even smitten. Also smitten, I soon learned, was my friend Shaira who couldn’t wait to tell me that in the many months since we had spoken, she had found true love on the internet with a proper British gentleman who came to the states to meet her, they truly fell in love and he went back to collect his things and is moving here for good.
I remarked that it was an odd coincidence that another friend of mine recently met her true love online and he was British also, and he came here and married my friend and took her off to his homeland. The friend I speak of is Omewenne Grimstone, the actress, playwright, musician, and an incredibly creative and prolific force in the S.F. underground theater scene over the past decade. You might best remember her for her amazing play about the life of Nico which she wrote and starred in called Nico, My Empty Pages, and more recently the bloodbath of brilliant theater she directed and starred in at the Café DuNord entitled The Grimm Guignol, an unprettied-up adaptation of three stories by the Brothers Grimm. Still others might remember her numerous roles in many Sick and Twisted Players productions over the years as well, many of which I had the honor of playing in also. She was magnificent in the Piper Laurie role in Carrie and I recall her in the first ever S&T version of Halloween in the Jamie Lee Curtis role, and when that slasher classic hit’s a certain point in the storyline, the Jamie Lee Curtis character pretty much screams for the rest of the film. It was at that moment when the screaming begins that I knew Ommewenne was an epic and monumental talent. In rehearsal she always saved her voice by just saying in a normal tone “scream, scream, scream more, stab him…scream again, etc” but in performance her blood-curdling scream sent shivers like an electrical charge through my entire being. She claimed to have applied technique learned from watching Faye Wray in King Kong. This was a powerful talent, and a consummate professional who was never less than a joy to work with. She also played the Margot Kidder role in The Amityville Horror and then years later ironically was cast in the last film project Kidder completed before she went missing and was found delusional and mumbling to herself in someone’s back yard in southern California. I believe she played a love interest of Margot’s character. At the time of her sudden departure from San Francisco she was hitting on new levels of creativity with her music and adapting another batch of Grimm’s Tales for the stage, but love came her way on the internet and before too long she was married at the courthouse and then gone to live in England with her husband, a nice polite gentleman with the surname of Frost, a properly gothic name for Omewenne to happily take on. I wish her all the best for her marriage and just hope to God she continues to create and perform, wherever she is. This little burgh has lost a wonderful person and one of our most brilliant and unique talents. I hope she shares her magic liberally with the people of her new home. An occasional visit would be nice as well, but I’d travel great distances to see her perform, or to just see her. I miss her already.
Gee, all of these internet-born romances blossoming all around me, you’d think that maybe my knight in shining armor should be just around the cyber corner as well, but no, none of that for me—just a few tawdry lack-luster chance meetings and an ever-growing number of no-shows not to mention a fair amount of winning bids on minor treasures spotted on Ebay and an occasional member of my high school class contacting me. Oh yeah, I just remembered, I got an e-mail from the original cowboy from The Village People the other day. A search engine probably brought him to my website at www.donbaird.com where I’ve been posting all of my old columns, one of which was on the first Village People reunion concert. The note alerted me to his more recent work, a musical project involving some form of an Alien cover-up scheme. No lie. Tongue in cheek or not, maybe I can sell it on E-bay.