Since I Lost My Baby (About)

When everything you believe turns out to be a lie, how far will you go for the truth?

As far as I’m concerned, life began when I was fourteen years old and witnessed the explosive performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames at the 1964 taping of the TAMI SHOW, transforming me into a born-again convert to the power of soul music and a true believer in the lyrics of Motown.

Two years later I got pregnant and was exiled to the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in Los Angeles by my parents who made up a fake story that I’d been accepted into an elite East Coast boarding school—in November. My season at the home for unwed mothers was nothing short of psycho, and after giving birth in March 1967, my newborn daughter was whisked away for adoption. “Just go home and pretend it never happened,” they told me.

But on the outside, an insurgence was taking place: San Francisco was bracing for the Summer of Love while fed-up teenagers in Hollywood were rioting on the Sunset Strip. Captivated by the music, and now wounded by loss, I went to the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival where flower children and the broken-hearted blues of Otis Redding speed-dialed me into the counterculture and my generation’s angry tide of rebellion.

That pursuit was sobered in 1971 when, in a moment of felony dumbness, I was arrested and sent to Los Angeles’ Sybil Brand Jail where I met Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten—the so-called Manson girls convicted of the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders. From similar backgrounds as mine, the same age as me, and with our long brown hippie hair, the four of us looked like repeating mirror images of one another. As far as I could tell, the only difference between me and them was that I’d never crossed paths with Charles Manson.

Still looking for love and the big truth, I moved to San Francisco in 1973 where a smorgasbord of gurus and false prophets added to the encyclopedia of misinformation I was living by including what I’d learned from Motown (“I Could Never Love Another After Loving You” and “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”). Across the Bay in Oakland, I took African dance classes and became entangled with an abusive jazz musician. Only when my girlfriend was murdered by her similarly dangerous lover did I recognize the no-self-esteem part I was playing in the musician’s sick drama and end it.

Seeking redemption as an artist, I wrote a play, THE DADDIES, which was chosen for production at San Francisco’s Western Addition Cultural Center (today known as the African American Art and Culture Complex) by writer/arts activist Buriel Clay, who was also my mentor and friend. When veteran actress Lee Chamberlin agreed to direct my play, it seemed like things were finally looking up. Then, two weeks before opening night, Buriel was killed by a drunk driver on Geary Street, sending me into a void of despair. It was May 1978, and before the year ended, San Francisco would also lose more than 900 locals at Jonestown, and both Mayor George Moscone and trailblazing Supervisor Harvey Milk to an assassin.

In the decade that followed, I met one of my Motown heroes and the beautiful soul singer who would guide me to what I’d been looking for since the TAMI SHOW. Still, there was one more thing: opening my heart to reckon with the secrets and lies imposed on me as a teenager. Embarking on what seemed like an impossible search using detectives and bounty hunters, in 1991 I found my twenty-four year-old daughter in Oklahoma City. A week after our reunion, we were invited to tell our story on the Oprah Winfrey show.