Ingrid and I met in September 1979, our sophomore year at Rutgers College. We lived down the hall from one another. She had come to New Jersey on a national student exchange program. She was eager to escape Boise to get to New York, and Rutgers was a way to do it. At the time she was experimenting with being out of the closet, and was the first person whom I knew who was open about being gay. I was a pretty awkward straight guy, obsessed with women, but not doing a whole lot about it. Our shared obsession though was just one of the things we had in common. We viewed ourselves as cosmopolitans. I thought that I belonged in New York and not Jersey; Ingrid was convinced that it was her destiny to be in a big city rather than Boise.
Soon after she got to Rutgers, we took the train into New York. We did lots of touristy things --the Statue of Liberty, the top of the World Trade Center (She reminded me of the World Trade Center trip when we talked on the phone after 9/11), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I still repeat something she said at the Met. We were walking through this room filled with a couple hundred Greek Vases. There were so many of them, that it became boring to study each one. She was outraged that there were so many. She said, "If there was just one of these in Boise, humanities teachers from all over the state would take their students to see it."
Ingrid was kind, trusting, and trustworthy. She had friends of all genders and orientations and could talk to anyone. For all of her fascination with big city life, Ingrid had grown up on a farm and was deeply suspicious of people who put on airs. She often spoke of how people she met might appear to her family back in Boise. I'll always remember how she could flip back and forth between lesbian feminist and Boise farm girl.
In our senior year we shared an apartment. I did my school work, applied to graduate schools (in psychology), and almost nothing else, but Ingrid was always doing an art project or working on a film. I remember her working for days at a time on her films. Years later when I tracked her down through the internet, I saw that the films she made in college were now for sale on a videotape. Every now and then we’d get involved in some big cooking project together. Once, Ingrid found a recipe for homemade Kalua and insisted that we make it. In those pre-Starbucks days, it involved large amounts of vodka and instant coffee (Yuck!). We shared a stereo. I remember none of the records I owned at the time, but Ingrid introduced me to Patsy Cline and I still sing along when I hear her songs.
After college, Ingrid and I didn’t do a good job of staying in touch. I always figured though that at some point I’d make it out to California with my wife and daughters. Ingrid always struck me as someone who did what she set out to do and I’m sad that my daughters never got the chance to meet her, see the example she set, and laugh with her.
Jonathan Steinberg
Cincinnati, Ohio
February 2008
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I met Ingrid in 1984 at a Sunday brunch (that may be overstating it - it was probably too relaxed and informal and eclectic to qualify for "brunch") at, as I recalled last night (correctly? not sure . . .) Ingrid's or someone's flat on Ord Street. I remember a rainy autumn day and the thrilling, still-new-to-San-Francisco sense of how many incredible women inhabited this city.
A friend took me along that morning mainly so that I could meet Ingrid, repeating enroute that Ingrid was funny . . . really funny and that I would immediately like her. And Ingrid,as I quickly discovered to my delight, was funny (and I liked her instantly). She was this kind of funny: as a designation or a kind of exalted certification that in my 17 years in San Francisco I rarely found equalled in anyone else and never quite in the way that Ingrid was uniquely memorably unbelievably at times funny.
I knew her through the L'ingenue days (I still regret oversleeping for the shoot at Maud's, which I had been promised a role in:
standing against the wall with assorted other dyke friends of that era and grinning and laughing) and marvelled at her dab hand with the camera and script. Who can forget . . . was it Todd . . . sitting at the table with Ingrid as Ingrid fondled a sandwich (I've got to see this again). Fun with a Sausage (announced to me as winner of the Hamburg Film festival -- is that correct?) made me so happy -- all those uptight dykes encountering a man (with a rather large penis) who finally (sitting on the steps outside the lesbo meeting house) gets the girl as a dog runs away with the sausage. And watching the lesbian roomies movie (I cannot remember the title) at Amelias (sometime in the late 80's, I think), where the chore wheel meets its (deserved) fate as substitute toilet paper. Ingrid brought it all to life -- the irony and absurdity and vast stores of wit in our lives.
I lost track of her in the 90's but one evening, after my partner and I had moved to San Rafael, I enountered Ingrid and Nicole in the local Borders, where I circled around the pair until I had convinced myself that these 2 attractive women were indeed Ingrid and Nicole. As always with Ingrid, I started laughing and grinning the moment we began speaking. She was one of those persons who had the effect on me -- something sparked inside me whenever I talked to her, something connected to laughter and silliness and an all-purpose, free-floating happiness that did not deny reality but rather accepted it as something cosmically ironic. Her gift of irony was remarkable, I always thought -- sharp and incisive but never did I find it mean; never snarky. It was irony as pleasure. After that, we mainly saw Ingrid and Nicole at parties at their home, always notable for the variety of guests and some stellar performance art (Cow Cow Boogie stands out this afternoon, as I write this).
My partner and I left the Bay Area in 2000, returning to our "home" in the South (elderly family + cheap real estate beckoned, sort of). Since then, I always think of my Bay Area home as still peopled with everyone I knew there. I was reading the Advocate last night, flipping through the pages with a mild interest, when I saw, with a huge shock, Ingrid's name and the notice of her passing.
The people I knew and know in the Bay Area sometime shine in my (exile's) thoughts like bright twinkling lights. With the loss of Ingrid, the firmament that is my memory is truly diminished. Good bye, Ingrid. (Judy Wilson, Feb 20, 2008)
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