Have you ever had one of those sensory memories that transport you through time and space? It’s like being outside on a dark night, out in the country, away from any town lights, and having a flash of lightening illuminate a landscape known and remembered, but unseen, where every sense—except the one that transported you—is heightened, intensified. It happened to me in the grocery store the other day.

Darleen had a cold and I was doing the shopping. I was heading for the meat counter, pushing my cart up an aisle between tinned soups and tinned fish, neither happy nor sad, thinking—to the extent I was thinking at all—about not forgetting anything on my list, just absorbed in the unfamiliar routine of the mundane. And suddenly, as suddenly as a flash of lightening, I was three thousand miles away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over thirty years ago, sitting in a makeup trailer, on a tall, canvas-covered folding director’s chair, the wooden arms hard and smooth under my fingers. I could smell the pancake makeup, hairspray, even the deodorant of the makeup man. I could feel the welcome warmth of the lights on my face, the colder raw early spring weather on my back every time the door opened. I could see all the round pancake containers, eyeliners, little brushes, glue, mascara, tubes with unknown contents, spray cans, sponges, all laid out on a white towel on the Formica counter, the large square of the mirror surrounded by lights, the face of the makeup man—he had a graying moustache—a man I haven’t even thought of since that time and that place. I could see my own face looking back at me, improbably young, in a blond wig and with a blond moustache glued on. And, most important of all in this split-second flash, I could see in the mirror the incomparable Karen Allen, getting her makeup done in the chair next to me, Karen Allen, intelligent, beautiful, sweet, charming, cheerful, remarkably free of both ego and neurosis in spite of her staggering beauty and talent, singing softly along to—

And I was back in the grocery store, standing between the soup and the sardines, shopping cart in my hands, listening to Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers singing What A Fool Believes:

He came from somewhere back in her long ago

A sentimental fool trying hard to recreate

What had yet to be created…

And it was that sense, a song unheard, or at least only unconsciously heard, piped in for the customers, that had for one brief, startling and magnificent moment transported me back to Cambridge, back to a beginning I thought would last forever.

There were other songs that long ago spring, but in my memory it is always What A Fool Believes playing on the radio in that little makeup trailer, What A Fool Believes that Karen always sang softly along with, smiling happily if she caught you watching her going for the high notes.

It was spring in Massachusetts, spring in my life, spring in hers, spring in poor Brad Davis’ life, who wouldn’t live even to see his own summer, but who died with rare courage and dignity. The movie we were filming, A Small Circle of Friends, turned out to be a disaster. Not the movie itself—that was fine—but its anti-war themes offended somebody high up at United Artists and they buried it. I went on to do Simon & Simon, Brad died only a few years later, and Karen, God bless her, went from triumph to triumph: all the Indiana Jones movies, Starman, Shoot the Moon, with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, a boatload of other movies and plays.

Being a sentimental fool myself, I went on-line to see how she was doing and what she was doing, and found—to my delight—that she is apparently thriving. She has a son, writes plays, has a yoga institute, designs clothes, and has a web site where she sells handmade cashmere clothing of her own design. I have added it to my favorites; if you buy something from her, give her my love and tell her I wish her well. Tell her I saw her in a small-town grocery store on the other side of the continent.