An undisciplined genius
These are top-of-the-head recollections of Leigh Ann's life and circumstances, written down as they occur to me, because a number of people have asked for information. I'll probably need to edit it later to correct things I misremembered. Please feel free to spread this around.

[18 May 13:00 - edited to add, correct some details of previously included material.]

[Incomplete because I ran out of time. Will edit later, so check back.]



Leigh Ann Hussey: 31 July 1961 to 16 May 2006

Born in Berkeley, Leigh Ann was a fifth-generation Californian who never left the state except for brief visits. Except for a few married years, she lived in the house her great-great grandfather bought for gold coin in 1920 [1]. (She couldn't remember its exact purchase price, $400 or $600.) That house was previously owned by the area's first female dentist. Leigh Ann's computer room was in the dentist's operating office, which still has the windows frosted to prevent gawkers from seeing in.

Her family's history was quite important to her. She spent a couple years tracking them down, and had an incomplete genealogy all the way back to their arrival at Plymouth Plantation in the 1660s. She has quite a lot of family in the SF Bay Area -- in fact, when we went to Walnut Creek to see a production of "A Christmas Carol" in which her brother Colin played Ebenezer Scrooge, we were startled to find our [purchased through Bass, assigned seating tickets] seats bearing plaques dedicated to her grandmother, placed by her aunt and uncle.

Leigh Ann never could decide what she wanted to be when she grew up. She was interested in almost everything, but her goals extended approximately into the middle of next month; and when the next thing caught her attention, the previous thing would be abandoned. This was likely the product of a near-genius level intellect and a copious memory[2] coupled with an attention deficit.

The intellect and memory gave her a gift for languages and for mimicry. Her second language was French, which she began learning in grade school; she was extremely proud of a French dictionary she was awarded as a prize in school, but despaired of her accent, which she picked up from her Belgian teacher and could not subsequently lose. After French, she learned a smattering of Japanese, and enough Swedish that she was hired by Lucas Arts to play-test a Swedish language Star Wars video game[3]. She knew at least some of all seven of the Gaelic languages, and at one point could converse in both Welsh and Irish Gaelic. She knew some Persian and could write in Arabic; ditto Hebrew. She had spent the last few years teaching herself classical Latin and Greek. She was considering learning Vietnamese, had begun learning Spanish, and wanted to tackle something truly outre such as Urdu.

All through public school in Berkeley, she was the unathletic little fat kid, teased and tormented by her schoolmates. She used to hide from them by climbing the "bee tree", a tree that always had a swarm of bees surrounding it, and sit in its branches: the other kids were afraid of the bees, and wouldn't attack her there. This, I suspect, was one of the things that gave her her lifelong rage against those who she felt had wronged her. It was also in grade school that she became a musician, studying the viola with a private teacher.

She attended college at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1984 as a music major with a minor in Celtic Studies. She was a founding member of a Gaelic Studies group, along with Dr Jim Duran and others.[4] While at University, she met piper Sean Folsom and began busking with him on campus. That was her introduction to Celtic music; previously she had been a classical violist playing in youth orchestras.

At UCB she also became engaged to her first serious boyfriend, Greg Poole[5]. He died of cancer shortly before her graduation, leaving her devastated. As a condolence, her grandmother gave her plane fare to England and a 30-day BritRail pass, so she spent a month post graduation on a walking tour around England and Wales. While there, she slept a night on Taliesin's grave[6], an act that is supposed to give the gift either of second sight or of madness. I won't claim to know which she got.

That combination of college experiences was also her introduction to Neopaganism. She joined NROOGD's[7] Silver Star coven in Berkeley, and spent some while there until she became disenchanted with what she thought of as their too-unserious approach to their religion. (One complaint she lodged against the Neopagans she knew was that somewhere in the backs of their minds, its members knew that their religion was invented and were vaguely embarrassed by that, which prevented them from doing it with their whole will -- she felt that a part of them was always tittering at themselves from behind their hand[8].) From there, she founded her own coven, Black Oak, with the goal of making it the coven that Did Serious Magic. Although that coven did gain a reputation as the coven that sang, it too never got to the level of intensity that she craved, so eventually she left it too. When she left, she did it in a blaze-of-glory ritual: we wired Wildcat Canyon for sound, covering a valley in more than a quarter mile of speaker wire, and she led her coven on a partly-blindfolded journey up the Tarot's major arcana from The World out through The Fool. This ritual, unlike any I have seen before or since, was one in which IT WAS POSSIBLE TO FAIL the initiation: at The Wheel of Fortune, participants had to choose between three paths, of which only one -- uphill toward me, The Hermit -- allowed one to continue the ritual. Only two chose correctly. And of those two, it was only George Hersch who eventually even understood what the ritual had been doing, when he saw Leigh Ann pick up her bindle and walk away through a garland of flowers, whereupon he backtracked through what he had seen and connected the dots.

Side note: during her time in NROOGD, she wrote a pamphlet explaining Neopaganism to outsiders, more or less tailoring it (perhaps unconsciously) to try to make Christians more accepting of it. That pamphlet became one of pagandom's standard handouts, finding itself translated into several other languages. For all I know, it may still be in common use.

Here I branch briefly into another of her fandoms, the medieval recreationist Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). This confusion of interests is necessary because their timelines are concurrent, both stemming from college and from playing with Sean Folsom.

I'm not clear what brought her near her first SCA event, an indoor midwinter feast. However, being the basically lonely and pessimistic person she was, she didn't go in. Instead, she sat outside, playing her pennywhistle and feeling sorry for herself. The feeling sorry part didn't last long: the local Prince heard the music, came outside, and asked her to come in and play for the assembled populace. She did, and that broke her internal ice: she suddenly had a hundred new friends, plus a brand new abiding passion that lasted many years and introduced her to some of the people who in all the world she considered herself closest to.

I'll say more about SCA later; but for now, back to religion:

Spiritually, she wasn't sure what to do next. What actually happened was nearly an accident ... and I swear I am not making this up. A couple years previously, she had rented a room to Tim Maroney [Famous Net Asshole[tm]][9]. While they were not lovers, they were bed buddies; and, though they parted on good terms there was a rivalry of sorts between them -- they were both extremely competitive and combative, and so naturally competed against each other. Tim had complained to her that he had spent years trying to join the OTO but couldn't find anyone who would initiate him[10]. So Leigh Ann decided to show him up. She called a friend and asked, "How can I be initiated into OTO?" The friend said, "Ask me." So she did, and they did, and that was how Leigh Ann came to join the OTO.

That joining opened new vistas for her. It showed her a Qabalistic streak that she hadn't realized she had, and helped reawaken her passion for High Church ritual, which she had never lost but which she had suppressed during most of her association with NROOGD. It also introduced her to Caitlin, who became first her gardener and then her wife[11].

[ Sidebar. I turn this over to Caitlin, to describe what happened. Caitlin:

It was a Rite of Jupiter in Glenn's garden. I was cast as Agave (the head Maenad) and armed with a wineskin. I heard the most beautiful music from the back of the garden, so I went over to give the musician a drink. I still remember her smile...and I think I fell in love with her right then.

End sidebar.]

[ ... There is more to come here. I will edit to add, and will put up a note saying that I did it; but I'm running out of time for this session -- we have to go feed Leigh Ann's cats, and there's one thought I need to get out. ]

Motorcycles ... in some philosophical or spiritual sense, one can claim that I killed Leigh Ann, since she became a motorcyclist through -- and perhaps because of -- me. In the middle 1990s, we were both working for the same company, and one of her coworkers was selling his Honda CB360. She was both fascinated and terrified by the idea of riding. We talked about it, and she decided that yes she really wanted that bike, so I bought it for her. It was her only bike for about a year, until she bought a Virago 1100 from a friend of a friend, whereupon the CB360 languished in the back yard, abandoned. As it happens, it rusts there still.

[ More to come after this point, obviously. ]

And, one last thing in closing: I love you, Leigh Ann. I have since I met you. I always will.

--
Notes:

[1] She was born at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, less than two miles away from that house.

[2] Copious, but not always accurate in personal details. She and her ex-husband David could never agree whether a banjo she owned was given her by her first serious boyfriend or was purchased from David's uncle's pawn shop.

[3] For which, by the way, she did find several errors, and corrected some translations to be more colloquial. Some of the original translator's choices were ... interesting.

[4] I believe that group has subsequently lapsed.

[5] Once Leigh Ann attached herself to a person, she did not let go. Those who remember her 2002 Vodoun Rite of Saturn may recall the top hat she wore as Baron Samedhi. That was Greg's top hat.

[6] She told me this story, and the dream she had on that night. I memorialized the incident in a song, "On Taliesin's Grave", which remains unfinished because the dream is incomplete: she woke up at a critical juncture, and could not tell me what should have happened next. She was wistful that the song wasn't finished, but it never became an important enough project for us to do it.

[7] New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn.

[8] I will say flat out that this is NOT universally true. During my own short-lived association with Isaac Bonewits, I took part in one ritual in which I watched an Asatru devotee guarding the north quarter of the cirle who, as a sacrifice during the opening banishing, cut a gash in his arm that subsequently took seventeen stitches to close. He stood dripping quietly for the entire ritual.

[9] Off-topic story. I had arranged to meet a friend for beer and food in Oakland, and while I was waiting for David to arrive, Tim walked by so I called him over. We were all computer geeks, so it seemed a natural fit. David arrived. They introduced each other -- "Tim", "David" -- and proceeded to spend the next several hours arguing good-naturedly. Eventually, Tim had to go. David asked me, "Who was that?" I said, Tim Maroney. Beat. And David asked, "_THE_ Tim Maroney?"

[10] Nonsense. That was just Tim talking, being Tim.

[11] Caitlin, Leigh Ann, and I were married August 11, 2000, in a ritual at Thelema Lodge, Berkeley, presided over by Mordecai Shapiro and Larissa Brown. Caitlin and I -- the legal marriage -- were married two days later on August 13, the ceremony to which we could invite Caitlin's family.