When I first met and spoke with Dori last August at the St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood, the most enduring impression was her cheerfulness in the face of great hardship. As her story printed below testifies, Dori’s life was shattered by a tragic fate, a brain aneurism which derailed her dreams, put her at death’s door, and still affects her physically and otherwise…
Revisiting Dori’s story today, after finally locating her cluttered but homey RV (a camper shell) parked for now on a residential North Hollywood street, I’m struck by how little she talked about her early career in music. She had told me about a song she had once written that was included in a high-profile movie soundtrack, but not much more. Today she shared an old CD which contained that song and five other well-written and produced tracks, recorded by the band she sang and played keyboards in. The music is lovely, her voice sweet and strong. As she sang along with the CD, it was still her song, still her voice. Dori also took out an old 11x14 portfolio that held several high-quality black and white portraits of her in those salad days, portraits of a beautiful and sensitive artist. There were also pictures taken with Rick James, Gary Wright and other luminaries of that era. Most surprising, among the memorabilia stuffed in the side pockets of the portfolio, was a card (a love letter really) written to her by Prince. It’s envelope also held a color Polaroid of Dori and the legend, taken sometime in the late-70s before he hit superstardom. She mused about selling it to some collector, but seems to have decided that in spite of her dire straits, it’s not worth it.
“Because of my aneurism I might
forget some of the things you ask me, My name is Dori, my age is 58. Before I
had a brain aneurism, I owned a spa called the Oasis Day Spa in Studio City and
we did facials, massage, nails. I had about ten employees and I was working
about eight days a week. And I think the stress of it all just got to my head. One
night I was working in my studio at home and writing music and then I suddenly
started to feel lightheaded so I went down to the bathroom and looked at myself
in the mirror and I saw this black blood that was under my skin and I had white
circles through my eyes, then I just fainted and then went in a coma from that
point.
I was in the hospital when I
woke up … I came out of that stroke and was like ‘okay I have to get back
to work.’ You know, I was telling everybody I’ve got to get to my spa because I
just started it four years prior and I really wanted it to do well. And it was,
and I was very busy that day, so my receptionist kept calling me and she said
you always answer the phone so what’s the matter with you Dori? So she came to my house and found me in bed
with the two dogs next to the bed lying there and I couldn’t move so she called
the ambulance and they took me into the hospital and said that I was
experiencing a brain aneurism.
Actually I could talk or think
about what people were saying but I couldn’t respond. So that was what the
scene was all about for three weeks. They were going to take me off life
support and then Greg, my ex-husband, came up to me and said Dori, I want you
to know that it’s okay if you go but if you want you can stay. But they are
going to take you off life support so you need come to and give me a sign that
you are going to come to so I squeezed his hand and he said ‘I think she’s
awake come on in,’ and they all came running in saying ‘yep she’s out of the
coma,’ so get it out so we can get her going.
Now I didn’t have my business
because it had died probably a couple months before I was out of the coma
because they just didn’t know how to keep it running you know, which I
understand. So that died and then I had a house that was going to have to be
put up for sale, which I went bankrupt on. So I went into bankruptcy from that,
and then I got an apartment, which I could afford because I was babysitting
dogs on the side too as well as getting money from the government.
And then the rents went up and
from there I lived in a house on Irvine. For six years I rented a room and he
let my dogs in and let me do music and everything so it was fine but then he
decided he wanted to sell the house. And when he sold the house, looking at
rents and stuff and how much they are, it was so expensive I couldn’t afford
it. So I got an RV. And that’s where I live now, in the RV. Since probably, six
months now. The police say that neighbors are complaining occasionally because
I was living with a guy that we’d fight a lot. And so he’s gone now thank God. I
got a ticket the other day for being there for more than three days because the
police had come.
I love the homeless people that
I meet. To me it’s like another family you know, it’s a good family and the
food is good that we get too because we can go to different places everyday and
get fed. So that’s helpful. I’ve never been homeless, I never ever thought I
would even be in this position. I get money from the government. Every month I
get like $889 for disability. And then I’ll house-sit on the side and (watch) animals
you know, which brings in a little cash. And that’s really what I live on. Six
hundred of it is already spent with the storage that I have and that kind of
thing.
My family, both my parents died
and my sisters, one lives in Nashville and the other one I’m not sure where she
lives. They don’t even know. Because I don’t know if they know how expensive
rents are …
Yeah it would be nice if I could
write a hit song, that would be good. That’s about what I want to do now. And I
have a whole studio setup. I’m trying to get the electricity so I can plug it
in and work on my keyboards. But I’ve got 15 songs that I wrote on my own that
are pretty good.”
AFTER TWO YEARS OF BEING HOMELESS, LOS ANGELES FAMILY HOUSING FINALLY MOVED DORI INTO A ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN VAN NUYS. Activist Laura Rathbone, most instrumental in moving the process along, recounted the saga in a Facebook post January 19, 2018.
I picked this sign up outside a 7-11 along my regular bike route today. Folded and tucked under my arm, it was a symbol of abject poverty and marginalization, so I anticipated or channeled a measure of resentment and pity. I detected a mini-gamut of reactions, from the grim smile to the grim encouraging smile (more eyes), or being ignored outright. (So many people frown these days out in public so I couldn’t gauge a difference from my usual rides).
In spite of and because of the ratty condition and the felt marker mix of upper and lower case italicized san serif lettering, it will become a piece of documentary evidence, an indictment or an artifact, either way a receipt littered on the ground elevated to the status of Art in the service of social justice.
Pedaling into the late afternoon sun with Bob Dylan philosophizing in my ears, it was just a reminder, a pinprick, more than it was a meaningful experience…. Reports abound that it costs $2000 to some guy named Mike to experience professional or recreational slumming. Such naked voyeurism evokes Binyavanga Wainaina’s poverty porn sentiments on patronage and exploitation.
Well you know there’s that lingering guilt about turning a person’s disadvantage into an artwork, with the whole notion of context thrown up for grabs. Displaying their words, as they shared them, hopefully helps to recontextualize the portraits … This project used to be called One of Us
I used to bump into Lydia and her partners on Broadway Street during the years 2007-2009. Big Gulp cups of liquor took the edge off life on Skid Row, and they’d move up to Broadway Street when they preferred to pass the day somewhere less violent.
Consoling one another while talking about a fire that had destroyed most of their possessions.
Evelyn demonstrates a stabbing they witnessed on Skid Row earlier that day.
“’Humanitarian imagery,’ the historian Heide Fehrenbach
suggested, ‘is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence.” (63)
Amie and Terry are caught in an unforgiving phalanx of substance abuse and poverty. January 6, 2018
“In fifty years much of Western society has inched toward a
public-service-lite ‘hollow state,’ a term used to describe a society, most
pronounced in the United States and Britain, where the state withdraws from
primary responsibility for public-service provision. The move in this direction
is based up ‘trickle-down’ economic theory and the belief that self-regulating
markets will solve social problems with minimal care in the community.” (66)
“In 1975, more than a quarter of the British population were
living in or on the margins of poverty. However, discovering this as a
process—explaining why many people remained in poverty—proved more challenging,
as the photographers discovered: ‘To document a condition is not to explain it.
The condition is a symptom, not a cause; more precisely, it is the outcome of a
process.’ The Survival Programmes
photographs in themselves were, ultimately, unable to develop a narrative that
entirely succeeded in explaining inner-city poverty, although the interviews
helped. They hinted at a sort of self-perpetuating ‘culture of poverty’
exacerbated by families unprepared for the form of social change that the
political class deemed to be good for them.” (68)
“Documentary photographers committed to exploring the
condition of those living in poverty have struggled to understand its nature.”
(68)
“Many of the issues that photographers have sought to
address in the medium’s first 150 years have been driven by outrage at various
forms of what the economist Amartya Sen calls entitlement failure. Sen used the
term to imply that problems faced by the poor were not necessarily of their own
making. His context was famine, but the same thinking might easily be applied
to landlessness, drug addiction, domestic violence, poverty, foreclosure and
inner-city housing.” (69)