Poet, actress, and performance poet Linda Albertano died today. For well over 40 years, she worked the stages of Los Angeles as an exemplary spoken word artist whose recitals left audiences buoyant about their immediate prospects, no matter how grim they might have felt walking into the theater.

I first heard her perform at the Powerhouse Theater as part of a set of presentations connected with the Olympic Arts Festival. IN the years afterwards, she was a central member of NEARLY FATAL WOMEN, a troupe of women who performed their poetry with subtle layers of theatrical cadences. The other members of the ensemble included Suzanne Lummis and Laurel Ann Bogen.

Today, Jean-Luc Godard also died, and the director of such classics as “Breathless” and “Contempt” (my personal favorite) certainly deserves to have his lifetime of work acknowledged for its extraordinary impact.

But grief is ultimately about proximity.

And Linda Albertano, it the is image of the final time I saw you performing at Beyond Baroque that flickers on the screen of memory right now. Granted, your fortitude in reading at the L.A. public library just a couple week ago, as weak as you were, also plays alongside in a double screen, but you were someone that Godard should have made a film in which you were given the most memorable scene, which no doubt might have been startlingly brief. A tiny moment of time was all it ever took for someone to remember you the rest of their lives.

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022

NEARLY FATALWOMEN — featuring Linda Albertano

(thank you, Phil Taggart, who says. he recorded this in Oxnard around 20 years ago)

Phil Taggart
www.PhilTaggartPoet.com

Ventura County Poetry Project
www.vcpoetryproject.org

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