How Milah Keeler found CZ:
(a How I Found CZ story)
my first semester at berkeley, i met a couple of girls who also lived in unit II cunningham. there names were daphne saliba and amy peckish (sp?), though i didn't know that at the time. we never exchanged anything besides hellos and knowing glances.. being the poorly socialized animal that i am, i never really worked up the courage to introduce myself.
in the spring semester, my old friend finn taught another decal course, this time on performance art. it turns out that daphne and amy also signed up for the course, having, i think, met finn in art 8. that certainly appealed to my teenage sense of synchronicity.
the two of them weren't very consistent at showing up for the classes, which was unfortunate for them, because the classes were the most enjoyable i attended at berkeley (the only course at berkeley i know to give credit to students for turning off the lights and making weird noises).
after one of the first few classes they invited me and probably flornox & rick wood to come over to cz for a party. at that point, the only parties i'd been to at berkeley were in small apartments. my preconceived notion of the co-ops were that they were like apartment buildings populated entirely by hippies who grew their food on the roof. i had at some point in high school acquired a strong anti-hippy bias, though i would now find it difficult to distinguish the person i was then from what i perceived as a hippie. in any event, i hadn't had any desire to even visit the co-ops previously.
of course, i fell in love with the building almost instantly. amy's band, rock n' roll adventure kids, was playing in the space that was to become the red room. she handed me her camcorder so that i could record the show, and afterwards let me loose to wander the building. i was drunk and high at that point, and became entirely lost inside cz's maze-like embrace. i wandered the halls for what could have been hours, filming the walls, and having confusing conversations with the disparate denizens which i could, of course, never afterwards recall. at some point i crashed on the floor in front of the drinky crow mural with a couple of other kids, staring upwards, thinking, "i am that bird". down the hall, meredith was screaming things i couldn't decipher, and taking off her clothes. all i could do was laugh.
over the course of the semester, i came back to cz several more times, and also went to a couple of parties at cloyne. i never liked the energy at cloyne as much as that of cz. the kids there were too plain, too drunk, maybe a bit too uniformly punk. they were also not nearly so friendly as the inhabitants of cz. cz was the first place in my life where i ever felt the sense of a community, of a whole collection of people who could not only tolerate living together, but who actually wanted to live together.. it kind of blew my pampered marin-boy mind.
i decided almost immediately that i wanted to live there, and talked several of my friends into it as well. these were oren, flornoy, and david gusovsky. rick wood, being the whitest boy we knew, moved into the african american theme co-op.. i, on the other hand, decided to move into cz straight from the dorms for the summer semster of 2000. i had to convince my parents that it was worth staying in berkeley for the summer, so i signed up for an introductory ee course. i put cz down as my first choice, but possibly put some of the other co-ops down as well. knowing that it had been trouble filling to occupancy, i wasn't at all worried that i'd get my first choice..
i'm probably leaving out plenty of juicy details, but that's the gist of it.