Berkeley’s beloved ‘Bubble Lady’ poet dies of cancer at 75
BERKELEY >> Julia Vinograd, who brought bubbles and poetry to all she met during the more than 50 years she ambled along Telegraph Avenue, has died.
“The Bubble Lady,” as generations knew her, was 75.
Vinograd’s death Tuesday came less than a month after her friends and fellow poets held a benefit for her at the Art House Gallery & Cultural
Center on Shattuck Avenue; she had been diagnosed with cancer.
With her green and gold beret and wobbly walk — childhood polio left one leg in a brace — Vinograd was a fixture at the nowshuttered Caffe Mediterraneum, where between coffee and chats with UC Berkeley students she would shuffle from table to table, peddling her poetry books.
A button adorned her hat. “Weird and Proud,” it read.
Out on the street amid the bewildered and downtrodden, or among the teenagers record shopping at Amoeba and eating pizza at Blondie’s, Vinograd blew bubbles.
The poet started spreading the sudsy orbs in
May 1969, when activists seized land slated to become housing for UC Berkeley students and declared it a “People’s Park,” sparking a showdown with police.
“There was going to be a riot the next day, and everybody knew that,” Vinograd recalled in 2000. “I was a pacifist and I still am. But I was angry enough that I wanted to throw something. So I went out and got 15 bottles of soap bubbles.
“I went out feeling very noble on a pleasant summer night. There were two
rookie cops in the park. I don’t know why, maybe someone was going to steal it. One finally said, ‘Hey, can I try (blowing bubbles)?’ I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Pretty soon they were having a contest.”
The park remained despite its rocky beginnings, and so did Vinograd, who in her tassled beret, anklelength dress and bubble wand looked like a fortune teller as she made her way along Telegraph Avenue.
The bubbles floating around her — as if the muses for her poetry had sprung to life — was how many who frequented the south-of-campus neighborhood recognized Vinograd,
even if they didn’t know her name.
“I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Julia Vinograd, a renowned poet and Berkeley institution,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín said in a statement. “Julia Vinograd captured the soul of Berkeley, especially in the heyday of the counterculture movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Her wit, keen observations and use of language have left an indelible mark on our city.”
In approximately 50 poetry books — one titled “Eye Contact Is a Confession” — Vinograd channeled her thoughts and observations into verse. Or as she put it in a July 2017 profile on
the Quirky Berkeley website: “Poems walked by and I wrote them.”
“Despised and irresistible/in carefully torn jeans/a poem leans against the doorway/not quite looking at you/and saying nothing just yet,” Vinograd wrote in “A Poem is a Street Hustler.” “Only the tip of its tongue curls/as if forgotten in the side of its mouth/It’s young, it’s got a fake I.D. and it ran away from home and it doesn’t care what happens as long as everything does.”
The Berkeley native was born in 1943. She earned a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, where she attended
the Iowa Writers Workshop. She returned to Berkeley in 1967 just as the city was the front lines for political and cultural upheaval.
“She was a leading character of the era,” said Harold Adler, director of the Art House Gallery & Cultural Center. “She was trying to lighten the intensity with her bubbles.”
The death of Vinograd follows the recent deaths of Richard Krech and John Oliver Simon, also legendary Berkeley poets of the 1960s, Adler noted.
Tom Clark, another prominent poet, was killed in August after a vehicle struck him as he was crossing a street in Berkeley.
“It’s just a very, very sad time,” he said.
Vinograd’s survivors include her sister, the painter Debbie Vinograd. Details about a memorial were not available.
“It is true that I might not have had any identity if there hadn’t been a Berkeley to write about,” Vinograd said in June 2004, when the city honored her with a lifetime achievement award. “We have to keep writing because voices are needed. Not just for great causes, just to go on ‘peopling.’ I don’t know if that’s a word, but it is now, particularly in bad times. Remembering the people is necessary.”