The Wednesday before last was the final screening of Independent View in the KQED studio.

When I arrived for that last screening, the front door was locked, and a security guard let me in after I told him I was coming to see Michael. A very nice girl came down to walk me to the studio. Brightly lush, rather beautiful, brilliantly colored hair, shoulder length, worn straight and loose and cut unevenly so it seemed torn at the edges. She asked if I’d eaten and when I said I hadn’t, she took me to the Green Room where there were some snacks. I munched on cheese and crackers and drank some port and tried to make conversation with a lean brown woman in her twenties or thirties, a documentary film-maker.

I watched the show from the controlroom, sitting in a chair pushed against the back. Very dark, two rows of people at consoles with their backs to me, facing several TV monitors showing shots of the set and a nature show involving lizards, seals, segulls and other fauna that seemed to be on a permanent loop. After the show, Michael, as the host, made a brief, very nice speech to the cast and crew about what a pleasure it had been to work with them. We left quickly after that. He said he couldn’t bear to see them dismantling the set.

Everyone walked to a nearby bar, where we sat at a long table and ate and drank. I spent a while talking to the hostess of that party we attended in Bernal Heights. She was among the people who, in the drunken farewells on the sidewalk outside the place after it closed, threw her arms around Michael and swore eternal friendship.

Shel was in town again, and we returned for what, when I walked in, looked like a repeat of last April. Everyone in the kitchen were in the same places. As at the last party Shel spent most of it talking rapidly and pouring drinks. A British friend and I talked politics in the kitchen. He’s about to become an American citizen, and he said he was going to vote for Nader. (I wondered if he were becoming a citizen just so he could vote for Nader.) He’s hoping for a stock market crash that would enable the left to walk in and pick up the pieces. I pointed out that the far right is more numerous and better organized would be in a much better position to exploit such a situation.

Again, we stayed late. Milford beame loud and rambunctious. Donna kept snuggling up to him, kissing him, whispering softly in his ear, probably imploring him to take her home. Shel had to get up early to catch a flight back to New York. Mark, the actual host, sat against the wall nodding off. By the time we left it was only Mark and Shel, sitting silent in the living room like two drowsy islands.

Our British friend is still here, 25 years later. We spotted him last year being interviewed in a local documentary, so obviously he didn’t skeedaddle when voting for Nader resulted in… Ah well. There was a time when rereading this would have made me furiously angry. Now I just feel resigned.

He was a young, handsome, blackhaired computer geek, a British working-class red. He once told me that when he played Sim City, he spent a lot of time blowing up the churches.