Haight Street is an adventure. It is a story that centers around the life of Stella Durand-Ruell, owner of a women's bar just a block away from the famed Haight-Ashbury district in 1967. Like most people who were part of the hippie subculture at that time, Stella's life centers around where she is going to get her next drink or whether she has enough dope to last the day. Stella finds joy and meaning through her relationship with her lover Joanne, an Italian teacher at the University of San Francisco. She is also enamored of Joanne's little girl Sofie, who in the end is the catalyst for Stella's startling reflection of her own life as spiraling downward, *enmired in self-destruction and denial of the very life that she wants. But Stella is a strong and powerful figure, filled with vitality and wit and humor. She looks out for her friend since childhood Gary, rescuing him from a bar fight with Elko, a drag queen holding a grudge. She looks forward to her morning conversations with Claire, a groundskeeper who works in the Golden Gate Park who, stoned as she is most days, runs over a dead body with her riding lawn mower. Stella finds excitement too in her friend T.C., an eccentric lawyer working for the San Francisco D.A.'s office. The Vietnam War is raging and Stella and Joanne and Sofie makes signs and go to the demonstration at People's Park in Berkeley at which hundreds of people are rushed and clubbed by the National Guard, and Joanne and Sofie end up in the hospital. Stella is know all over town, on Haight Street, in the Mission District, and Castro Street, not only the owner of her famed bar, but as a survivor, someone who seems to be impervious to the ravages of the times. But it is not so, and in the end she must either change or accept her fate as yet another casualty.
About the Author: RACHEL CORDAY Biography 2012 Rachel Corday is an author, a playwright, an actress, and a teacher. She has an MFA in Theatre Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a PhD in Expressive Arts Therapy from Summit University of Louisiana at New Orleans. Rachel is a Certified Expressive Arts Therapist and a Lifetime Diplomate with the National Institute of Expressive Therapy. She has been an activist with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) for twenty-one years, has served on the NAMI board of directors for the state of Colorado, and is past president of NAMI Boulder County. She is a member of the Colorado Author's League and is author of the non-fiction books The Common Loon, Expressive Therapy and The Art in Spirit, The Common Loon Essays on Serious Mental Illness, and Just One Sparrow: The Dance Between Nothingness and Somethingness, Understanding Life as Art. She is author of the novels Haight Street, The Summertime of Baily Lowell, and The Benningdon-Crank Nervous Hospital. She has won writing prizes and publication for several short stories, and for her essay Psychosis, The Inner Experience. Her sixty minute video Losing The Thread, The Inner Experience of Psychosis, which she wrote and produced, has been awarded a four-star review by the National Video Rating Guide for Libraries. The video is distributed nationally by Insight Media, Inc. She is an accomplished playwright and has been produced in Honolulu and the San Francisco Bay Area, and in Boulder, Denver, and the nationally acclaimed Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado. Rachel is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and is most well known for her feature role in the CBS movie-of-the-week Manhunt, The Search for Claude Dallas. She is a professional stage actor and among many leading roles, has played Jessie in the Pulitzer Prize winning play 'Night Mother at Harbor Repertory Theatre in New York. She has studied intensively with the acclaimed theatre artist and Emmy award-winning actress Viveca Lindfors. She has been recipient of a Best Supporting Actress of the Season nomination from the Denver Critic's Circle. As Artistic Director of the Corday Actors Studio, she teaches acting at the beginning and advanced levels in the Boulder and Denver area. She also teaches metaphysics through her class The Art in Spirit, which explores the meaning of art and the artistic process.