In the summer of 1982, Suzanne Lacy was in San Francisco producing Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room, one of her huge visionary pieces. It involved more than ioo women: groups of old, black churchwomen, old Jewish women, prostitutes, young professional women, bridge players, nuns, pregnant women, Chicana artists, teenagers, disabled women, and many others. Commissioned by the San Francisco International Theater Festival, Freeze Frame was staged in an expensive, elegant furniture showroom. It attracted a large audience (as diverse as the performers) who gathered around to listen to the women as they sat at tables and on sofas, chairs, and beds, talking amongst themselves about survival-emotional, financial, and political. In the fall of that year, Lacy, who had returned to her home in Los Angeles, wrote to me in La Jolla about the painful stresses of her private life, ending her letter with: need some vision, some exciting image to go for. [. ..] or is that possible in flat, burnt-out Los Angeles? I constantly think about a hundred or two old women in white, standing on the cliffs and by the side of the mountain, sitting on the beach around white tablecloths, telling each other secrets: 'Whisper, the Waves, the Wind.' Right down the street from your house! Secrets about dying? (Lacy 1982b). Two years later, after a year of intense organizing in the local community, Lacy created the brilliant, sunlit image of her Whisper, the Waves, the Wind in which over s15o white-clad women from a wide variety of cultural, racial, and class backgrounds and ranging in age from 60 to 98, sat on a La Jolla beach at small, white-covered tables.' On the cliffs above, I,ooo people watched and listened to the women's prerecorded voices as
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Jan 1, 1993
David Johnston 
