Book honors stewards of Hispano traditions in one of the state’s true cultural enclaves
Resident of Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast of New Zealand, Suzanne MacAulay is an art historian, folklorist and ethnographer. She is Professor Emerita and former chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her research interests are arts revitalizations, ethnographic textiles, particularly Spanish Colonial colcha embroidery and Maori weaving. Her book, Stitching Rites, is the first comprehensive academic treatment of Spanish colonial colcha embroidery and Hispanic art revitalization movements. In 2019 she successfully nominated Josephine Lobato, folk artist from the San Luis Valley, Colorado, for a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Award.
Film actor and author Griffin Dunne’s Colorado connection, briefly noted in his charming, disarming and satisfying family memoir, is that he honed his acting skills as a teenager at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs where he “knocked it out of the park” as Jerry in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and was changed by the experience. Dunne was forced to leave the next semester after getting caught smoking hashish in the dorm the night before he was due to perform in Othello. This brief misadventure mirrors many others in young Dunne’s developing years as he relocates from coast to coast, rubs elbows with his parents’ Hollywood coterie, is best friends with Carrie Fisher and constantly adores his eclectic and glamorous parents, brother Alex and sister Dominique. Dominique’s 1982 murder at the hands of an abusive ex-boyfriend and the subsequent, highly publicized trial of her killer become the focus of much of the book’s second half. Dunne’s book rises well above the category of celebrity memoir to a true family memoir, unwaveringly honest and filled with moments of despair as well as laughter as the Dunnes pull together and fall apart, like most families, in the face of tragedy.
