Auntie Rachel

by Jim Lee

I was asked to write a brief piece about a memorable person.  When I did bit parts in movies back in the 1970s, I got to know some famous people, but a person very few people have ever heard of stands out from those days.  And I don’t think she did any movies.

             She got occasional gigs in Los Angeles doing stand-up under the name “Auntie Rachel.”  Her driver’s license indentified her as Rachel Wolf.  Rachel readily admitted to the title of “local character.”  That she certainly was—and I mean that in an affectionate way.  In her late 40s back then, Rachel managed to get herself thrown out of a Hollywood church for raucous behavior.  I don’t know why she joined a congregation of gay Christians anyway.  I never asked her about her sexual orientation, but I knew she was Jewish.  I guess she just liked the fellowship.

             Rachel had black hair with a couple of streaks of gray.  She stood about five-foot-five or so and probably weighed close to 300 pounds.  She had a voice that could drown out a choir of fog horns and the laugh of a bipolar anarchist.  When Rachel showed up, people would roll their eyes but everybody loved her.  How could anybody not love her?  My toddler son adored her. 

             She never said anything about family.  Aside from her friends in our theater crowd, she apparently had nobody.  She seemed to enjoy informal gatherings and attending plays when she could get free admission.  Once in a while I would see her strolling along a street in Hollywood deep in thought or sadly sitting at a bus stop.  I wrote a play for her called Will Someone Please Tell Me What’s Going On Here?  When I handed her the script, she hugged me.  A tear sparkled as it dripped onto her cheek.  Rachel had to play the lead in the play’s first production as a condition of releasing the rights.  She was a hit.  She was an even bigger hit at the cast party.

             Wherever she is these days, someone is laughing.  May God bless Rachel Wolf.