KATHY ALTMAN
Whatever the question, love is the answer
EDUCATION My parents who taught me that art (in all forms) is not optional My beloved partner of 40+ years My son who always ends calls with, ’Love you both’ Family and friends – they make me laugh til I cry and let me cry til I laugh Gabrielle Roth who saw the seedling I was and watered who I was to become My dog  – love incarnate Greta Thurnberg – embodied courage Nature in all its glory ​ AUTHORS I LIVE FOR Louise Erdrich Octavia Butler adrienne marie brown Pema Chodrun Valerie Kaur Tosha Silver Annie Lamott Notice they are all women ​ BELIEVE IN Freedom of Choice The Right to Vote Clean water and food for all Reparations for indigenous peoples and the enslaved Climate reform NOW ABOLITIONIST FOR The electoral college, the supreme court life time terms The prison system Corporations being taxed as people Gender and racial profiling and inequality Fracking
LORI SALTZMAN
Dance as if this were your last dance. Dance as if surrounded by people who may be dancing their last dance. Write as if these could be your parting words. Write as if they might be the last words someone will hear. This is, after all, the case.
I didn’t always make my living teaching people to speak stories with their bodies and dance with their pen. Before that I spent 30 years riding shotgun on Gabrielle Roth’s magic carpet ride, traveling the world to dance people up, open their hearts and minds, shake them and wake them to the beauty, love, wildness & silence that lives in them and around them. Before that I was a corporate consultant, teaching relational skills to high tech executives. I got fired for asking a group of vice presidents to share how they were feeling. This was apparently unheard of back in the 1980s. Just recently I heard about executive teams going to Peru for team-building ayuhuasca ceremonies. Timing is everything. Before that I launched the first women’s medical center in San Francisco. Before that I led classes in natural birth control, teaching women to track their own body’s fertility cycle. One woman dropped out because she got pregnant. She honored me by naming her baby Lori. Before that I worked as a Planned Parenthood community sex educator in the San Francisco school district. Here I learned everything I needed to know about teaching. I made my living rolling condoms on cucumbers and sticking a diaphragm on my chin in front of horrified teenagers. Before that I volunteered for the Berkeley Free Clinic suicide hotline. They didn’t offer much training before you got thrown onto the phone. I was 20 years old, fresh out of college, terrified I would say the wrong thing and someone would decide to kill themself after talking to me. Before that I was a whitewater rafting guide on the Stanislaus and American Rivers. Before that I was a waitress in an Italian restaurant. I was incredibly bad at it and only lasted 3 weeks. Before that I worked in a pool hall to pay my way through college. I made extra money hustling guys at 8-ball. Before that I was a cashier in a supermarket. We took our coffee breaks smoking pot in the walk-in freezer. I loved that job.
