“Don’t send me to River Bend, please—not till I’ve gone completely around the bend,” Nana had said. She was still saying it—even in her sleep, Dottie had confided to me. Even when Nana was napping, and the Realtors were assessing the Front Street house—looking for renovations (at my grandmother’s expense) that would jack up the asking price—my grandmother kept saying, “Don’t send me to River Bend, please.”

As children, both Nora and I remembered my mother telling us that Nana had an unfounded fear of cows—maybe not so unfounded, Nora and I now thought. Even in her sleep, Mildred Brewster was imagining herself doomed to converse with cattle. I’m guessing Nana never knew why the renovations she would pay for were necessary.

It was still the 1970s; the real shit hadn’t started. As Nora was always saying, there was shit in the offing. Nora usually meant this politically. The shit in the offing part of Two Dykes, One Who Talks was called “The News in English.” Onstage, of course, this political satire of the news began with Em’s pantomime; Em wrote all their material. The English translation was all Nora. Naturally, there were differences of opinion between them regarding the fidelity of Nora’s translation.

Em’s spontaneous pantomimes were always ad-libbed. Yet Em got cross when Nora went off-script while they were performing. My empathy was with Em—she was the writer. Em didn’t like it when Nora ad-libbed her monologue.

As written, “The News in English” was prescient about Ronald Reagan’s rise to power. Nora and I missed it. “Why would a former sports announcer, actor, and president of the Screen Actors Guild not seek a third term as governor of California?” Em wrote. It was 1975, and this was a difficult question to put into pantomime. Nora gave the audience at the Gallows a faithful English translation. “I wish Ronald Reagan would be governor of California forever—we’ll all be safer if that cowboy stays in California,” Em had written. Nora faithfully translated this bit, but she went off-script for a moment—Nora always had to add her two cents’ worth.

“For Christ’s sake, Em, you don’t need to worry about Ronald Reagan—he’s a second-rate actor; he isn’t going anywhere,” Nora said. This got a laugh at the Gallows, but I didn’t laugh, and Em was furious. I understood the impromptu pantomime Em was doing; I knew her pantomime was off-script, too.

Nora had been wrong about second-rate actors before. “Paul Goode isn’t going anywhere,” she’d said. Em knew that everyone at the Gallows had surely seen The Kindergarten Man. Em’s pantomime of the anxious kindergartner at the urinal required no translation. We remembered Paul Goode lying under the toilet stalls, holding a handgun against his chest; Em didn’t need to act out that part.