The great and growed Helen Foley

I’m a newbie to the whole Molly Tuttle / Gryphon / Redwood Bluegrass vortex but in it with a passion, so I totally tripped out when I recognized the former little girl from next door, all growed up and plugging a bass and singing an original old timey song, jamming with the very close to stardom A.J. Lee and Blue Summit featuring Sullivan Tuttle.

I kind of geeked out and sent AJ a long text explaining my glee and surprise.

If Mom mentioned this to me, last I saw her, it was just before it clicked who Molly was — I saw her picture on the wall at Gryphon where her dad works while shopping with Jimmy Vivino who played July 6 in my concert series. I saw to Jeannette that I had seen a picture of her son in the student newspaper — the Gunn Oracle — about a band or recording project and if she mentioned to me all this it didn’t register so much.

Now I’m forgetting if CJ or Helen was a water polo goalie.

I had seen the mom jamming before a show at Redwood Bluegrass at a church on Cowper in Palo Alto, a couple years back.

Interestingly, at least to me – enough to stick it up here on this welltraveled blog — I also found out recently that Rupa Marya of Rupa and The April Fishes was also our — Helen and my — neighbor for many years growing up. More true for Helen, in that I think i moved to SF for four years when Rupa was in high school — at Castilleja — then Rupa would have been off to college when I came back.

We all lived near where Wallace Stegner lived for many years, when he taught at Stanford and wrote about the west and the land. and some stretchers.

I wonder if anyone else has ever mentioned “Helen Foley” and “Wallace Stegner” in the same breathe. I’m a gonna invite Helen into my songwriting project, Women On the Walls, based on the short stories of WS.

Wallace Stegner, Rupa Marya, Helen Foley — suss them out.

I’m likely the only person on the planet who knew all three of these creative people: Rupa Marya, Wallace Stegner and Helen Foley; the three of us grew up near Stegner’s longtime abode.