Last month’s blog post about the loss of Susan (Brooks) Sabo revealed some interesting coincidences and connections. I was friends “in person” with Susan from 1984 to about 1997 (?) when we both lived in Los Angeles. She first lived in Northridge, and then moved between various apartments, mostly centered around Sherman Oaks/Studio City, and I was in the house I’m still in now, in west Van Nuys. Starting in 1995, Susan published a ‘zine called REALGirls, and distributed it to bookstores (much more numerous then) around the San Fernando Valley and some in Hollywood and Silverlake, wherever she could get counter space for them. One of those bookstores was the Sherman Oaks Crown Books (a discount remainders chain, now defunct).

In 2004, at age 48, tired of the freelance life and of the constant changes in technology that meant I had to keep learning new programs to do the same job, I decided to leave my 15-year career as a movie title designer and go back to school to get my masters degree to become a librarian. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me, given my all-consuming history with books, to become one before, but after deciding that’s what career my cousin should pursue and having her turn it down, I thought, Hm, why not? and applied to UCLA. I was accepted, and started the two-year process in the fall of 2005.

Among the people I met while there (we had around 140 in our class, and 100 entered the year after), two were Madaleine Laird and Anarda Williams. Madaleine and I were in the same year, and did at least one class project together (a magazine about author Beverly Cleary for our children’s lit class), hung out quite a bit, and mostly stayed in touch after we graduated and she moved away to the east coast. Anarda, who attended from 2006-2008, got a part-time job in her second year of library school with Burbank Public Library. After graduation in 2007, I became the youth services librarian at Moorpark’s city library from Fall 2007 to 2008, and then applied and was hired for the position of supervising teen librarian at Burbank PL, and Anarda moved from her part-time position to full-time as the teen librarian at our Buena Vista branch; we worked together after that for more than 10 years.

So, where does Susan come into this and how does it relate to the rest of us? Well, in 1995 I shopped regularly at that Sherman Oaks branch of Crown Books. Madaleine worked there, and was so admiring of the REALGirls ‘zine that she communicated with Susan about it via email and, with her permission, had a .pdf file made of it at the local Staples store. And in the ’90s Anarda was a traveling sales rep for a publishing company (I think it was Macmillan?), and Crown was one of her monthly client calls.

Anarda and her husband had bought a house one block up from Victory Blvd. at Coldwater Canyon, and Susan lived about a mile south and a long block east of them in an apartment on Riverside Drive at Fulton. Madaleine lived on Woodman, south of Roscoe Blvd. in east Van Nuys, while I was at Balboa and Vanowen, on the far west side of Van Nuys. There were only a couple miles, max, between the four of us, although only Susan and I were known to one another at the time. In a city population of 3.5 million, what are the odds that we all end up in the same story?

And what are the odds, 37 years later, that Madaleine would see my post about Susan, realize she knew who I was talking about, discover that she still had the .pdf of the premiere issue of REAL Girls, and send it to me so that I would be able to share it with you?

I asked permission of Susan’s daughter, Jenna (I think she’s the middle Barbie, in the plaid skirt) to put this issue of REALGirls back out there; Susan was so proud of this publication, and people who knew her in later life have expressed curiosity about her early writing, so when Madaleine said she had it, I got excited to show it to them. It is, I think, quintessentially Susan.

(NOTE: Staples scanned the ‘zine backwards, so read from bottom to top.)