College of Marin

You know, I worked, started working at Sunshine Bike Works, and there was Craig Mitchell.

Craig Mitchell was an instructor at the College of Marin, uh, for a metal shop and everything, and also a bike freak, and he did a ton of bikes.

He made the first 26-inch, uh, purpose-built frame that was unsuccessful, says Charlie Kelly, 'cause Chali- Kelly built it up [laughs] in a bizarre way.

What can I say? You know, it was a beautiful piece.

And so I gained that going to college, not knowing what I was eating.

Where did you go to college? I went to school in Marin County, College of Marin, and I went to school in San Diego.

And you became a model.

I had an opportunity to start modeling.

No, I do have shy moments, absolutely.

So anyway, in high school it was the musicals, and then I went to College of Marin and auditioned and got to be Maria in my first, not Maria, but the Rosalia, the gal who wanted to go home to Puerto Rico, you lovely island.

and then i came back from abroad back maybe 10 years after i graduated from college of marin and i decided i got to do something with my life and then i studied opera and it was really nice singing really loud

yeah i'll bet now so you're a marine county girl is that where you grew up we're

in county girl absolutely

Before we move on to our second segment about the increasingly imperiled state of America's libraries, I thought it would be worth taking a couple minutes to dive into our archives for a little bit of tape to pay tribute to women's movement icon, Gloria Steinem.

KPFA made this recording of her speaking in 1973 at the College of Marin.

we suddenly see, understanding for the first time that we ourselves are not inferior, that the system is not natural.

We understand the nature of politics for the first time, that it's not just some utopian system that is imposed from an intellectual point of view, that it's not just the operation of certain isolated machinery in Washington or in the state capital, that it is any power relationship in our daily lives It is looking at the fields not far from where we are and seeing that one kind of person is working in them and another kind of person owns them.

No more research papers.

Thank you.

Gloria Steinem in 1973 at the College of Marin, recorded by KPFA's Katie Butler and produced by KPFA's Laurie Sims.

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at the age of 92.

Your body fills with light, you dissolve your body, you-- all those sort of mystical things start to happen.

She would call me, and actually what happened was that there was a kind of eruption of Kundalini energy that happened in Sylvia's body, and she would say, "I'm teaching an aerobics class at the College of Marin, and I looked into the mirror, all these people are moving that I'm ta-- and they all turned into skeletons," or, "They all dissolved." Or, "This week I was driving down, you know, one oh one in Marin and- And it all turned into light, and I, I guess I had to pull over 'cause it was hard to drive.

[laughs] I said, "That's okay.

It's just Sylvia, it's just Kundalini things.

She's a country girl.

She went all the way to the College of Marin.

That's a community college in Northern California, an affluent Marin County.

Marin County is right across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco.

There's all kinds of intel there in Marin County.

You check it out.

And Robin Williams himself, I think, went to College of Marin before he went back east and went to go study theater there.

Was it at Yale or was it at Juilliard? It was one of these high-level theater schools.