The only way there was enough seating at the Painted Bride for Gil Ott’s memorial service on Sunday was because (a) they put up a couple of rows of seats onto the stage area of the theater space, & (b) all those folks in wheelchairs come with their own seating. As former Painted Bride direct Gerry Givnish noted in welcoming everyone, Gil was instrumental in the creation, growth & success of this community institution. Every aspect of Gil’s complex if too short life was present & accounted for at the service – his best friend from second grade with whom he’d later lived in a tree house near Bolinas, poets & artists & musicians, non-profit administrators whose theater companies relied on Gil for advice, disabled artists who met him teaching writing in homeless shelters, Julia’s coworkers & Willa’s classmates from Germantown Academy.

 

Eli Goldblatt delivered the eulogy, Bob Perelman read from Gil’s poems. Gil’s brother Allen spoke of giving Gil his kidney – one of five transplants Gil endured – calling it the “most difficult & satisfying” thing he had ever done. Julia spoke & sang & Willa read a poem that Gil had written to her. Eli and Wendy Osterwei led a song that Gil had written, “Night and Day Will Pass Away” & toward the end everyone sang a second song, “Moon Don’t Run on Gasoline,” written by Gil’s old San Francisco pal Kush.

 

Afterwards, everyone stood around & marveled at the reception at all that Gil had done & accomplished, virtually every bit of it during the half of his life when he struggled with renal failure. Gil first began Paper Air in 1976, in part to focus his energies on something beyond his medical treatments during his first serious bout with the disease. This coming Friday would have been Gil’s 54^th birthday.