Places Where I've Lived: Magnolia Court 6

I did have quite a full and busy social life when I lived at Magnolia Court.  Doreen (I shall no longer refer to her as Dopey) and I remained friends despite some of our differences.  She actually succeeded in staying friends with all of us: me, Dianne and Doug.  She also very successfully played us against each other.  She was by this time well-established in her new apartment, a small but very charming one bedroom suite on the second floor of a renovated heritage mansion next door to St. James Church.  I became her cleaner and once a week I would clean her apartment and she would pay me generously.  I was also spending time with my friends from Café S'il Vous Plait, the warmed over hot spot that still attracted various punks and creative folk, and they added some of their friends to our little community.  We were a kind of bohemian clique and the conversations never ceased to fascinate and at times annoy and irritate.  Others became added to the mix: a dancer, an artist, an actor and more.  I was an artist and that was my own cachet for membership.  I painted assiduously, and did a number of commissioned portraits.  With my slim employment earnings I barely squeaked by.  I also threw lots of dinner parties.

The folks from the Green House or St. Chiara's Community (so sue me, Lane and Cathy!) became ever and increasingly present to me as well.  One of their members, a rather perplexed young man, became a close friend, along with his girlfriend/fiancée.  Some of them were part of a weekly discussion group reading together works of Plato in the home of a Philosophy graduate, Travis, who also became a particularly close friend.  Travis alone was not a professing Christian and the discussions and debates around the subject matter were always interesting and sometimes not a little bit frisky.

I found the mix of people in the Green House interesting and in some ways very annoying.  They were a self-identified prophetic Christian community who lived together and participated in activism and actions of protest.  I was thoroughly in agreement with them about their stand against global capitalism and nuclear weapons and war.  Where I drew the line was concerning their rabid anti-abortion activism.  I actually found them embarrassing, pig-headed and very black and white in their thinking as well as incredibly self-righteous.  Some I thought were absolute douchebags.  Some were particularly nice and kind people and they did a lot of good in their work with the poor and through their antipoverty work.

Still they were very difficult people to befriend and often hurt, alienated and drove out particularly vulnerable and emotionally fragile individuals: their crime?  They asked too many embarrassing questions.