Gil Cortez en LA

 

Siempre estarás sucio en mi corazón, cariño.

Elka Leigh Scott Schumann

 August 1935 - August 2021

A fiend of many years died last Sunday.  I knew her best as the mother of several dear friends and I see her teachings, good and bad as well, reflected in them all. I know that many people knew Elka better than I did, but I knew her for more than thirty five years and sat at her table and ate her food with her and her family and traveled and performed with her on more than one occasion, so I knew her pretty well.  Over the last few days I've read many tributes to her and don't really recognize the icon these tributes describe.  Elka was generous to her friends and benevolent to the thousands who met her through the famous theater she founded with her husband.  This is the public figure I see being memorialized on Facebook and in the press.  The loss I feel at this time is of someone who I enjoyed being around in more mundane circumstances.  I will always think of her because of the support stockings I wear that I first learned of from her daughter when they were prescribed for Elka.  I remember watching Peter struggling to put them on her one morning in the kitchen.  I will always remember Elka's great clutter of uncompleted projects that grew and shrank and grew again at the end of the kitchen table.  I think of her garden, which she maintained every year outside her house near the woodpile.  Several times I was sent to pick in it and I believe I helped weed on occasion.  I stayed for extended periods in the cabin by her house.  I used to watch horror movies in her basement with Tamar and the others in Max's room, the 1987 NBA Basketball Finals too.  I know it will feel very strange for her five offspring being in her house now that she is gone.