Yet another story, and a Reminder!!!

Sophie-the-Legs

 There is a minor thread in the Helen story that begins soon after she starts teaching at Westfield.   She is invited to a reception in Pittsburgh, and a young composer challenges her to premiere a still- to- be- written violin concerto.  Helen agrees, and it amounts to a commission, which is not an uncommon occurrence in the music world.

The concerto is written, and Helen plays it, but I always forget the name of the young composer.  Okay, it's Bill Yves!!!  This is so that I will never forget it again!

Back to the early days at Westfield.

Helen On the Run, I feel, marks the point at which Helen actually stops being a kid, and becomes an adult.  Even after this point, Helen still breaks out in some self-indulgent nonsense, and never totally grows up, even once she has met Marissa, at which point she grows up in some ways, but becomes sort of a baby in other ways.

In any case, the story of how she meets Sophie, the tennis player, and Rain (Evelyn Woodford), the language instructor, about her first semester at Westfield College, is very crowded.  Sophie-The-Legs, as Helen's students call her, is a lovely person, but she does not set herself as a potential love interest, which makes her very attractive, is a fun story, especially because she is a fun person, who is entirely outside the music world, and sees everything as new and fascinating.  This part was a lot of fun to write!  Meanwhile, Rain is an intense person, and that part was fun to write because it was so full of emotion.  I think I will have to cut one or the other of them out, and I can't decide which.  I can make Sophie a minor character, who is not a romantic interest, but (Spoiler alert) Rain continues to be an important character, who brings out certain very ugly aspects of Helen's personality.  I love both girls, and with some work I could feature Sophie in a little episode that doesn't interfere with the plot line.

By the way, don't forget: the two new stories, (Helen on the Run, and Helen and Sharon) are uploaded.

Kay

Helen, in Outline

Once again, let me remind you:  Helen was written years ago, just as escapism for it's author: me.  I kept it carefully hidden, to make it more exciting for myself, but also because I was embarrassed.  The literary value of the scribblings were low (and I'm sure many readers still think it is junk that doesn't deserve to have people looking at it, wondering whether to read it!  It takes all sorts, people.)

Anyway, I started publishing cleaned-up episodes from the story, and at present there are eight episodes from the Helen Saga (as well as a major story in which a Helen Nordstrom character is present, but where the character histories of the two Helens have major discrepancies.)  This is a overview of the entire business, so that you can select which segments will be interesting to you.

Helen, ages 12 - 18
In this period, Helen's mother has died, Helen wins a choir scholarship to "the college", a nameless college in Ohio, but her father is too depressed to take her in for freshman year.  Helen hitch-hikes her way to the school, with Janet and Jason Kolb, and meets Janet's mother, Elly.  Helen is early; the other students have not arrived.  There is an instrument-maker who is setting up an instrument-factory at Helen's college, and Helen is hired to help him.  Meanwhile, Helen helps Janet with a tennis program set up by the parks and recreation people.
The semester begins, Helen joins the choir, the tennis team, and hears recitals by a local chamber music ensemble that plays renaissance instruments: viols, lutes, etc, and is soon absorbed into the local Early Music scene, which is just beginning to blossom.  Helen is also interested in mathematics and computer science, and takes courses in those.
During the Winter Break, Helen is offered a job with a rich woman in Florida, to be a companion, and a tennis partner.  Janet and Jason also love tennis, and the lady invites them over, and pays for Janet to attend a program to train tennis coaches, and Janet qualifies to coach tennis.
Helen gets gradually more involved with Early Instruments through the workshop, and persuades the college to organize an Early Music Festival over the summer break.  The local PBS station gets Helen to give periodic updates about the progress of preparations for the festival, and her face becomes familiar to the regional public TV audience.  That winter, Jason is called up for the Balkan war, and dies on the way to the front.  Janet is pregnant, and the baby is born soon after Janet is widowed, and Helen and Janet decide to bring up the baby--Baby Elly--together.  Coincidentally, Janet's mother Elly (now called Old Elly, or Grandma Elly) also delivers a baby, Tomasina, who was accidentally conceived with Helen's father (it's a long story) and the two girls grow up together.
Helen makes friends with a girl called Cindy over the Internet, and it turns out Cindy has lost her memory, and is actually being kept captive by a prostitution ring.  Helen encourages Cindy to escape, and Cindy comes to live with Helen.  (Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.)  Helen is also there when the daughter of the president of her college has a terrible accident, and helps her until the Ambulance turns up.  The girl is Lisa, and her mother Pat plays violin for the local chamber group.  Pat is grateful to Helen, and lends her a valuable unconverted Baroque violin.  The violin suits Helen so well, that she quickly becomes an excellent violinist.  Cindy's memory returns, and she realizes that she is a violin instructor.  Cindy helps Helen to realize her full potential as a Baroque violinist, and then as a player on the modern (steel-strung) violin.
Helen gets a minor part in Mozart's The Magic Flute, meets a sweet guy, Kurt, a fellow-cast-member, and they decide to become a couple.  Helen begins to get invitations to play the violin repertoire with major orchestras, but over the summer, Helen and Kurt drift apart.
Every chance Helen gets, she is invited down to Florida, and she gets to visit a very special nightclub, where they present nude ballet.  Not all the performances are nude, but every evening, they present a few dances by girls dressed very scantily, or not at all, or only wearing body paint.  Helen falls in love with the daughter of the owner of the establishment, Leila, and Helen is Leila's first love, and they begin a passionate relationship.  Leila has been taught martial arts in her childhood, and one night, (long before Helen and Leila had met) Leila and her mother are threatened knife-point.  Leila fights back, and kills the attacker.  The incident leaves a deep scar on Leila.
The Nightclub features Helen and Leila dancing nude together, and their popularity spreads like wildfire.  The club begins to make a lot of money, and Helen gives her earnings to the rich lady who brought her down to Florida in the first place, Juliana.
Helen's affair with Leila makes Janet very unhappy.  Meanwhile, Helen begins to work for a men's magazine as a photographer, which is how she meets the Baker sisters.  Presently, Leila is also unhappy, and Helen also has a few admirers at school, and by the end of the school year, Helen has numerous lovers, but is deeply unhappy herself.

Helen, ages 19-21
At the beginning of the summer, Janet has decided to travel to North Carolina, where she has met a wonderful guy, a clergyman, with whom she has fallen in love.  She needs to bring baby Elly up with two parents, and Helen does not seem mature enough for the job.  Helen decides to visit Leila in Florida, and repair that relationship.  Two people whom Helen loved dearly, a boy and a girl, both had developed AIDS, and had died, and Helen was barely keeping sane.
A woman called Sandy meets Helen at the bus station, and asks whether Helen would like to help out at an all-girls nude tennis camp in Canada.  Helen is not interested at first, sensing trouble.  But she finally gives in, and joins the camp as a counselor called Pink Orchid.  The camp does really well, the girls really learn a lot of tennis, and Helen is a hero.  Helen has a brief visit with Kurt, but that doesn't work out.  Helen is now far happier than she has been in a long time, and decides to stay in Canada with the camp Nurse.  She drops out of school, and Helen and Nurse lead a life close to nature, growing their own food, hunting in the large tract of forest that Nurse owns, visiting the Native American tribe that lives close to Nurse's property.
Helen finds out that she is pregnant, but Nurse is confident that she can help Helen through the pregnancy.  Women have had babies without hospitals for years, she reminds Helen.  But it is soon clear that Helen is having twins.  Sandy is called in, and Helen discovers that Sandy is really Marsha Moore in disguise.  Marsha Moore is a Hollywood actress.  Marsha flies Helen out to her home in Bel Air, and despite everything, Helen miscarries, and Helen sinks into depression.  Helen and Marsha get involved in an intense and desperate sexual relationship, to try and kick Helen out of her depression, and this works to a limited extent.
Marsha and Nurse confer together, and decide that it doesn't make sense for Helen to live in the wilderness, occasionally assisting at a tennis camp; her destiny is to be a violinist, or an opera singer, or a teacher.  She has to finish college; after that, Helen can decide to drop out of society, if that's what she really wants.  As a first step, they suggest that Helen sign up as a camp leader for a girl's ballet camp in Europe.  Helen likes this idea, and the camp is a resounding success.  (Helen at Ballet Camp)
After Ballet Camp, Helen returns briefly to California, and she and Marsha try to settle down to couple-hood.  But Helen is bored, and Marsha sadly realizes that Helen needs her last year of college to grow up.

Helen, ages 21-32
Helen is readmitted to college, and meets a lovely Indian girl, Lalitha, who is a freshman.  Over the year, the two girls fall in love, but Lalitha's father wants her back home, having heard that his daughter has been behaving inappropriately with a certain American girl.  Helen follows Lalitha to India, where she is unable to prevent Lalitha from marrying a man she has no interest in.  Helen wanders around India for months, and gradually loses her memory, forgets her identity, and spends ten years in a Catholic retreat and farm, and Ashram.  She falls seriously ill, and the sisters take her in to the American consulate, which decides to repatriate the nameless American woman.  Helen has surgery, and a tumor is removed.  She has total amnesia, and Cindy offers to take Helen under her wing, and gets her settled at a farm in California run by an order of Catholic nuns.
Helen does well at the farm, discovers she can play tennis, and works in housing construction, and meets two little girls, Gena and Allie.  But the parents of the little girls are ill, and the mother dies, leaving the kids with Helen, and their father is later found dead.
Meanwhile, Lalitha and her little boy have been living in the US for many years.  Lalitha had called around soon after she had arrived in Maryland, and left messages asking to be informed if anyone heard from Helen.  Eventually she got word, and decides to take a cross-country bus trip, to meet Helen, and see whether she can help Helen recover her memory.
With great difficulty, Lalitha manages to help Helen recall her senior year, and Helen returns to Ohio, and her former professors help her to get accepted to graduate school in Philadelphia.
For a while, Helen and Lalitha are happy.  But the pressure of graduate school, and Helen's libido, are too much, and Lalitha asks to be allowed to leave.  She moves back to Baltimore to join her son and the widow of the missionary who had helped her come to the US.  But things go bad, and Lalitha moves in with a young woman who has been a glamour model, Trish.  Together with Lalitha's young son, they set up a home in a low-rent apartment, and barely make a living working in a store.  Lalitha's girlfriend gets herself pregnant with Lalitha's son's child, the young fellow barely old enough to be the father of the baby.  Lalitha has her work cut out for her, keeping Trish and her son apart.  Helen rescues them, and brings them back to Philadelphia, to work for her in a new instrument workshop she has set up.  Meanwhile, Helen is trying to resist the romantic overtures of Lorna, a high-school senior, who studies at a ballet school.  Lorna is infatuated with Helen, and makes highly inappropriate gestures of affection to Helen, much to the disapproval of Gena.  (Helen and Lalitha: the Lost Years)

Helen, ages 33-36
As it becomes better known that the talented violinist, soprano and conductor Helen Nordstrom is a lesbian, and the mother of two little girls, certain conservative elements start a campaign to have the children removed from Helen's care.  At this time, Helen is living with a well-known model, Michelle Smith.  The case is brought to court, and Helen loses custody.  But the two girls make a daring escape to return to Helen's apartment by foot (with the baby in a stroller), and Michelle advises Helen to take the children and run.  Helen buys an old junk car, and they head west.  On the way, Helen meets Penny O'Brien and her little daughter Erin, and they make their way to southern California, and Helen works odd jobs, and they live hand-to-mouth for a while.  Helen's cousin Marika Johnson learns how to get in touch with Helen, and presently Michelle joins them, and Helen gets construction work, and they are now fairly well off.
Helen has carelessly got herself pregnant again.  She had spent the night with a grad student from Rhode Island, Jeffrey Gibson, and paid the price.  They plan a deception, and tell their neighbors and friends that "Steve" (what Helen was calling herself) has to go help out with looking after the kids of his sister, "Paula".  Helen catches a bus as Steve, goes to Marsha, who helps her transform into "Paula", and a few days later, returns on another bus.  After Helen spends a few weeks as Paula, Michelle is identified by the FBI, and taken into custody.  Helen, Penny and the three children head north in a minivan than a friend helps them to buy, and Marika's younger sister, Heikki, lends them a cottage she owns in a little village outside St Paul.  Both Helen and Penny are given work at Ferguson School, a private boarding school in the village of Ferguson.
The baby is delivered, but Helen is once again spotted by the FBI, and brought before a Federal judge, who sentences Helen to six months in prison.  But the sentence is suspended, because of the many mitigating circumstances.  Penny has cancer, and dies in Ferguson, and now Helen has Gena, 14, Erin, 10, Alison, 2, and Baby James, who was born in Ferguson.  (The plan is to put this material in Helen on the Run:  The Lost Years.)

More in the next installment!

Kay