The 50th reunion of the Patrick Henry High School Class of 1968 is Saturday, and I’ve been made privy to what a colleague at the paper called “the mother of all class reunion stories.”
It’s about playwright and author Sybil Rosen, 67. She left Roanoke shortly after graduation and rarely returned. It’s also about her first husband, Blaze Foley, whom she married in an old-timey country ceremony known as “jumping the broom.” That happened in the mid-1970s when they were young hippies living in a tree house near the Chattahoochee River in rural Georgia.
Blaze and Sybil split up in less than three years. Foley went on to become a country-folk singer and songwriter in Texas. He was usually homeless and frequently drunk. By the time he died in 1989 — shot and killed in Austin by the son of a friend — he’d been banned from most of that city’s music venues.
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Though you’ve probably never heard of him, that could change. Foley’s legend has slowly been growing for years, as better-known musicians such as Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, John Prine and the Avett Brothers recorded the songs he left.
Other artists, such as Lucinda Williams (“Drunken Angel”) and the late Townes Van Zandt (“Blaze’s Blues”), penned songs about him. In 2011, a Texas filmmaker released a documentary, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah.”
“Blaze,” a Hollywood movie directed by Ethan Hawke, came out this year. It’s drawing raves on the film festival circuit and will soon be in theaters. It’s based on Rosen’s 2008 memoir “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley.” She’ll be reading from it and signing copies Saturday afternoon at Barnes & Noble, Tanglewood.
Rosen also co-wrote the screenplay with Hawke. She plays her mother, Jeannette, in a scene opposite Alia Shawkat, who portrays Rosen. How many levels of deja vu does that suggest?
“Living in the Woods in a Tree” is frank, engrossing, touching. At some points, it’s funny and at others, heartbreaking. Rosen writes intricately descriptive prose in a way that could leave lesser writers (like yours truly) envious. Maybe the best way to describe it is, a love story viewed through a gauze of years and reflective wisdom.
Before writing it, Rosen retraced her and Foley’s steps across the country. Because she had little money, she traveled by Greyhound bus. During the research and writing process, she said, she fell “totally” in love with Blaze Foley all over again.
“The way in which those memories came back, and those days in the treehouse, and what it was like to be in love, it was very powerful,” Rosen told me. “There was also a lot of guilt and regret and grief.”
By then, she was involved in a another relationship, with Glyn Thomas, a mutual friend of hers and Foley’s from their days in Whitesburg, Georgia. At one point, she found herself confessing to the man who would become her second husband, “I think I’m in love with a ghost right now.”
Excitement, tumult
I heard all about this a month or so ago in a phone call from Steve McGraw, Roanoke County’s longtime circuit court clerk. He’s also a Patrick Henry Class of ’68 grad and was a friend of Rosen’s, though not a close one, back in the day.
Patrick Henry High was racially segregated back then. That didn’t change until 1970. Rosen was one of a relative handful of Jewish students. In her memoir, she describes herself as “a dark-haired Jewish island in sea of blonde, stacked WASPs. I wasn’t a wallflower; I was the wall.”
“She was quiet, reserved, intelligent,” McGraw told me. “I was a class clown, a smartass.”
They have not kept in close touch during the intervening years. They reconnected recently via email and telephone in the course of reunion-organizing. Until then, McGraw had little idea of Rosen’s playwriting career or that she was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982 (short documentary category), or that she won an Emmy in 1990 while writing for the soap opera “Guiding Light.”
As they caught up, McGraw learned all that stuff and more — and about her relationship with Foley.
“You’re not going to believe this story,” McGraw said the afternoon he called me. Later, he put me in touch with Rosen.
Roanoke, America and planet Earth were different places back then, McGraw said. The Vietnam War raged. For most of the male students, graduation portended registering for the draft. America hadn’t yet put a man on the moon.
McGraw recalled the period in an email he sent to 175 fellow classmates this year.
“In 1968, the average annual income was $7,900, cost of a new house was $15,000, price of a new car was $2,800, and monthly rent was $130,” he wrote. “A gallon of gasoline cost $.34, movie tickets were $1.50, and the hourly minimum wage was $1.60.”
Spring 1968 was a time of drastic social upheaval. That April, James Earl Ray assassinated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., prompting race riots in large cities. Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed presidential contender Bobby Kennedy barely two months later. The nation watched as Chicago shook that summer, when police attacked protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Woodstock was still a year away.
Such was the world in which McGraw and Rosen took tentative steps into adulthood.
“It was a challenging, exciting, intriguing, joyous, perplexing, promising, threatening, tumultuous time to be young and alive,” McGraw wrote.
‘Legends never die’
Following graduation, McGraw attended Virginia Western Community College and then Virginia Tech. Rosen went off to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. There, she studied theater arts; she obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1972.
Then she spent a few years bouncing around the country, acting at dinner theaters in places like Little Rock, Arkansas; Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Memphis, Tennessee. She performed in a long children’s theater tour across North Carolina.
In 1975, a college classmate and friend invited Rosen to rural Georgia, where a developer was trying to turn a huge closed textiles factory on the northern outskirts of Whitesburg into a kind of artist commune. Rosen joined the acting troupe there. Today, the place is an adventure retreat center.
That’s where she met Michael David Fuller. He later became known as Blaze Foley. He was born in Arkansas and raised in Texas, one of a passel of kids in the Singing Fuller Family, which traveled a Southern gospel circuit performing in churches.
At the time, he went by the moniker Depty Dawg, after the cartoon character. Like her, he was shy. He was kind, caring and respectful, too. Growing up, he was a fat kid — in the year before he met Rosen, Foley had dropped 150 pounds and become a 6-foot, 4-inch string bean. They had an almost instant connection. And he grabbed her heart.
Her acting gig at the mills fell apart and not long after they met, they moved into a treehouse just south of Whitesburg, near a creek that fed into the Chattahoochee. That’s where the book’s title came from. It’s derived from a song he wrote while they lived there, “Livin’ in the Woods in a Tree.”
The treehouse was on the property of a guy they knew. They paid no rent and lived with neither electricity nor heat. Many mornings they woke up freezing. To earn money, she caned chairs and he did odd jobs. And he composed songs. The way Rosen writes, it was the most romantic and idyllic existence imaginable.
His goal was to be a legend of country music. He used to tell her, “Stars burn out, but legends never die.”
Two Blazes
Romance fades, however, and disillusionment grows. That’s what eventually claimed the Foley-Rosen union. To understand the whole story, you have to read her book.
After eight months in the tree house, they moved to Austin so Foley could launch his career. It didn’t take off. She worked as a waitress and supported them while he wrote and tried to secure gigs. He also returned to Georgia for long spells.
“We told ourselves that he was doing this for his art,” Rosen said. “And I supported him with that. But he was absent a lot.”
In December 1976, they moved to Chicago. Almost immediately — in January 1977 — Foley took off again. Rosen called it their first breakup. She got a job as a nanny for a well-off family.
Foley returned that March and brought the finished version of a song that’s become his best-known tune, “If I Could Only Fly.” Among others, it’s been recorded by Nelson and Haggard. Haggard’s solo version was the title track of his 50th album. Many critics say it rescued Haggard’s career.
The couple lasted three more months. By then, Rosen was beginning her own writing and earning a regular paycheck with the nanny gig. Foley was drinking heavily.
“I was making money — I mean, it wasn’t a lot of money. It was harder for me to be supporting him,” she told me. “A lot of that meant buying him alcohol.”
Chicago was also the first place Rosen ever saw him perform on stage. “He was drunk,” she said. “In Chicago, I saw him drunker than I had seen him previously. I couldn’t live the life that he was choosing to live. I couldn’t hitchhike around the country and bail him out of jail. That wasn’t going to happen.”
When the family for whom she worked moved to the suburbs of New York City, Rosen went with them. Foley moved back to Austin. She saw him one more time, when he visited New York City, and opened at the Lone Star Cafe for Kinky Friedman. That was in 1980. She still recalls the huge plastic iguana on the club’s roof. That’s where he gave her a 45-rpm record he’d recorded of “If I Could Only Fly.”
“I came in, and he was pretty drunk,” she said. “He was very drunk. And so I left. That was the last time I saw him.”
Rosen moved to the Catskill mountains north of New York City. There, she wrote plays and a novel for middle-school age students. She spent a season writing soap operas — as part of a team for “Guiding Light” in 1990. It was the best-paying job she ever held. But she was glad when the producers fired her. It wasn’t a job she enjoyed.
Foley, meanwhile, kicked around Austin. He was usually homeless and either slept in his car or on friends’ couches. He used to joke that labels on dumpsters owned by Browning Ferris Industries — BFI — stood for “Blaze Foley Inside.” His first three album-length studio recordings were lost in separate bizarre incidents.
One disappeared when the station wagon he lived in was stolen. Federal agents seized the tapes for another — somehow, the record producers got entangled in a drug trafficking investigation. The third set was lost in a flood.
One of his closer friends in the music world was Van Zandt, the legendary country-folk singer and songwriter. After Foley’s death in 1989 at age 39, Van Zandt told the Austin-Statesman American: “There’s kind of two Blazes. A lot of people saw one or the other. There was the wild one ... and then there was the gentle, loving, caring one. I came to know both.”
A love story
In 2002, Kevin Triplett, a Texas filmmaker, set out to make a documentary about Foley. Someone told him he had to talk to Rosen. Triplett contacted her in the Catskills and invited her to Whitesburg, where he had planned interviews with people Foley knew there in the 70s.
She went and reconnected with folks she hadn’t seen in years. She ended up moving there permanently — she still lives there today. In 2006, she married Glyn Thomas, who was about 20 years older and had been a friend of hers and a close friend of Foley’s back in the 1970s. They “jumped the broom,” just like she had with Foley.
Thomas, who died at 80 in 2014, was a retired college professor — among his friends and colleagues back in the 1970s was Newt Gingrich, who had yet to get his start in politics.
From Whitesburg, she traveled around the country, retracing the places she and Foley visited together in their 20s. The University of North Texas Press published her book in 2008. Triplett’s documentary, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah,” debuted in 2011.
In 2016, Hawke, actor-writer-director, contacted Rosen through Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle and executive producer of the documentary. Hawke wanted to produce a movie about Blaze.
Hawke “loved Blaze’s music,” Rosen said. “The story he wanted to tell had something he wanted to say about fame and success.”
Hawke read her book and wrote to her. “Now he had a love story,” Rosen said. “It brought many more dimensions to the movie.”
They met in August 2016 in New York City and over the next four months put together a script based on the book. The filming happened over five weeks. Most of the shooting was in Louisiana, Rosen said.
“This was an ultra-low-budget movie,” Rosen told me. “There was a lot of duct tape.”
Musician-actor Ben Dickey stars as Blaze. Charlie Sexton plays Van Zandt. Richard Linklater and Kris Kristofferson make cameos. Shawkat, who’s had recurring roles in the TV series “State of Grace” and “Arrested Development,” plays Sybil.
“I couldn’t be happier that’s who was representing me,” Rosen told me. “She’s so wonderful. She’s such a good actress.”
Rosen, meanwhile, plays her mother, Jeannette, in a scene that evokes the time Rosen brought Blaze Foley to Roanoke to meet her parents (her dad’s name was Sam). In real life, the introduction didn’t start off smoothly. Jeannette left the room and started crying, Rosen told me. (It ended better though.)
What was it like for Rosen, playing her mother in a scene opposite an actress who was playing her young-self?
“Sometimes, it was extremely disconcerting,” she said. “Am I reliving my life here? It was just a given that this was going to be surreal.” The scene, she added, was “almost entirely improvised.”
Variety’s review said the movie is “about a sweetly passive and self-destructive anti-star, with a buried bad temper, who is mostly a monosyllabic layabout. He’s the hero as lug — but the thing is, this lug has heart.” The movie is made in “a redneck-verité style that’s as delicate as it is daring.”
It debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. In March, it was screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin and, in April, at the Louisiana International Film Festival. IFC Films has picked it up in a distribution deal. Rosen said she expects it to be in theaters near the end of the summer.
Taking Roanoke
In researching her book about Foley, Rosen estimates she rode about 30,000 miles on buses across America. She turned those experiences into a book of short stories, “Riding the Dog,” published in 2015.
They’re fiction, based on the characters she met on the bus, the places it went and small-life dramas she witnessed. She’ll be signing that one at Barnes & Noble, too.
One story is titled “Lizzie Takes Roanoke.” The narrator, Lizzie, is returning to the Star City by bus for her 40th high school reunion. It’s an anxiety-filled solo trip — that’s the thread that runs all the way through the story. Lizzie the high-school wallflower worries nobody will remember her.
Somewhere between Maryland and Roanoke, a pregnant woman on the bus goes into labor, and Lizzie delivers the baby right there in the Greyhound aisle. It makes national news and winds up on the front page of The Roanoke Times. Kind of like this story.
Dozens of her classmates — the ones Lizzie fretted would never recall her — meet her at the bus station on Campbell Avenue with a chorus of cheers.
“They were smiling at Lizzie and clapping,” Rosen writes. “A few of them held up her front-page photo. Others carried signs that read, ‘Welcome home, Lizzie’ and ‘Lizzie Delivers!’ It was better than she pictured it. Royalty could not have waved more grandly than Lizzie at that moment.”
Life imitates art. Is that weird or what?