Pat Branch

Ralph Cook writes: Pat Branch, my ex-wife, just died in San Francisco. There would have been no Theatre Genesis and no Monday night workshops without her. Her job was to keep me sane AND sexually satisfied and fed and to feed (and sometimes sleep with) my writers and actors in our apartment over the church. She also wrote two fine plays which were the next production after "Cowboys" [Sam Shepard's first play], starring Anne Waldman. She was never produced again because she wanted to marry me and I told her I couldn't marry her because she was a playwright and an actress. So she O.D.'d on Valium and ended up at Paine Whitney. The workshop fell apart. The theatre was falling apart. I was falling apart! So I went to see her at the hospital and she said she would give up writing and acting if I would marry her and I did. I don't know who was sicker, she or I. She touched the lives of so many people of the Off-Off-Broadway sixties. Did you know that she was Bob Corrigan's administrative assistant when he designed and set up the NYU School of the Arts? I know that I was one of the worst chauvinist pigs of the time but what the hell, thank god for the women that made us!!!!!!!