danna

Danna Throop was my girlfriend during the Summer of Love.

We were kids ... I had just turned 14, so I guess Danna was 15. We spent the summer lying around at her house, making out while Surrealistic Pillow and Little Games played over and over on the stereo. We barely did anything, just kissed and kissed and kissed and kissed. As I say, it was the Summer of Love, but that's just to set the story in its historical context; for us, it was just summer vacation before we began high school. We must have done a lot of kissing, though, because to this day, some 35 years later, I can still remember what Danna smelled like.

We were an arty bunch of kids back in the day. My main extra-curricular activity was drama, and I also played in a garage band ... Robin played the flute and took dance and worked backstage at our theatrical productions ... nothing remarkable, it's just what we did. Most of us went on to other things as adults, although Michael Sullivan never quit playing guitar and singing, and he's made a living for himself as Portland's own Dub Debrie over the years.

Danna was a dancer. She was a dancer in high school. Then she went to college, and she was a dancer in college as well. Then she did graduate work. Then she got a job teaching dance in Georgia, where her students included people like Michael Stipe and Herschel Walker. Finally, she went to work at Bucknell University, where she built their dance program into the highly-regarded institution that it is today. In short, unlike most of us, Danna kept at it ... she never threw off the excellence of her childhood dreams, but in fact achieved them.

Along the way, she met Bob Frangione, one of the most unique folks you'd ever meet. They fell in love, they married, they had a family. Thus it was that Danna Throop became Danna Frangione, which is the name you should use if you want to learn more about her on the internet. Back in the 70s, Robin and I spent many great times with Danna and Bob. We didn't see them much once they moved out of the Bay Area, but there's nothing but fond memories and good thoughts associated with them in our minds to this day.

Recently, Danna discovered she had cancer. It was already well-advanced; surgery meant to alleviate discomfort if not to cure was mostly unsuccessful. Last Thursday, so soon after the cancer was found, Danna passed away.

She emailed me after the initial word came down, and that email is one of the things that got lost when the old computer got trashed a couple of weeks ago. When a computer goes like that, you think about what documents you might have liked to recover, and stuff like financial info and Word files come to mind, but right now, the one thing I wish I could have recaptured off that mangled hard drive is Danna's last batch of email. If you saw Warren Zevon on Dave Letterman awhile back, you have a sense of Danna's attitude. She always was a good smartass, and she wasn't letting cancer take that away from her ... like with her dancing, if something was a part of her, she kept it a part of her through trial, tribulation, and joy alike. Her thoughts about her situation were as far from self-pitying as was possible; her concerns for her family were far deeper than any fears she might have had for herself.

One can always find sad irony in death, and it's almost too easy here to note that Danna, who made a life out of her ability to express the variety of human existence through dance, is gone now because her body failed her. In my memories, though, certain subjective moments will live on. Her way of laughing at you that was knowledgeable yet accepting ... that sounds odd, I know, but the thing is, Danna was one of only a handful of people in my entire life who knew me pretty much as well as I knew myself, and still liked me. She didn't let me forget who I was; that's why she was laughing. She just didn't let who I was ruin our friendship. It's hard to imagine a better friend than that.

But mostly, I remember how she smelled during the Summer of Love. A smell like that should live forever.