"I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!"

"I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!" The sound of Don hard-rocking out those lyrics from the musical Oklahoma as we tread the same Ann Arbor street day in and day out the summer we wrote our dissertations has always been a favorite memory-stone for me. It sums up for me his inimitable embodiment of irony and wit. By which I mean Don was just so fucking funny. He made me laugh like no one else. He saw the world as no one else quite exactly did and he pulled me in to that world view hook line and the rest of it. There's an image in a story I wrote that came exactly from a conversation he and I once had about how to read photographs. In the days before he died I'd been remembering the time he told me he didn't understand how anyone could stay down for long when there was so much yet to be discovered and understood and, since it was Don, obsessed about. His insatiable curiosity and his intellectual passions were contagious. How else to explain the appearance in my dissertation on Barbara Stanwyck quotations from Andre Breton?? It struck even me as absurd until I remembered, "oh yeah, that came from Don." His complete immersion in surrealism and da-da and French culture bled into our conversations and eventually into my own attempts to understand modernism and film and Stanwyck's configuration within those force fields. Don is a force. Even now, even still, always: loyalty, humor, irony, passion, friendship, unpretentious, true. Love to Don from Beth.