Andrea Canaan

Andrea and I met in 1977 as volunteers with the Rape Crisis Center in New Orleans. We were both writers, mothers, performers, dreamers of a better world. Her daughter Leslie and my son Seth were playmates, both children much loved by a large activist community. In 1980 Andrea and I toured the USA as a benefit for the Feminist Writers Guild, performing poetry and drama together, and at that time we were both students of Audre Lorde, who encouraged us and introduced our performance at Hunter College in New York. 

Both before and after our tour, Andrea worked as a therapist. She lived in California, moved to the Boston area for some years, bounced back home to New Orleans, and settled in California twenty-five years ago. She became a professor of social work as I became a professor of theatre, and our lives swept us away into such intense activity that we lost track of each other for some years. Now she is finally doing what she always wanted to do: writing a novel and a memoir, working toward a second Master of Fine Arts degree in writing. She's now sixty-five, and a month ago she had a second knee replacement, and our day together was her first day of cooking in months, her first day of walking in the house without a cane. Our reunion was loud, loving, boisterous, and intense. We met each other’s partners, laughed and cried and deeply reconnected.


I’m not satisfied with my portraits of her. She’s an ebullient storyteller with a mobile face, always changing expression and using her hands to make her points. I would need more time to get a real portrait of her. I haven’t yet gotten the portrait I want. A couple of extras, still not quite there.