Julia Vinograd, Berkeley poet known as the Bubble Lady, dies
from her final book, “Between the Cracks,” at an event in San Francisco. She never made the reading and never made it out of the hospital. The cause of death was colon cancer, said Bruce Isaacson, her publisher and a longtime friend. She was 74.
“Julia’s work was always accessible, always immediate, personal and deeply human,” Isaacson said. “Her work portrayed the lives of average people. She was not one to mystify her readers.”
Among the cast of Berkeley characters who made Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley their main stage in the late 20th century, Vinograd was far and away the most pleasant. Unlike the Hate Man and the Polka Dot Man and the Naked Guy, Vinograd never offended anybody as she made her daily walk, simply drawing liquid out of a plastic bottle and blowing it gently into the air to drift away as bubbles.
You could set your watch to the arrival of the Bubble Lady in her standard costume of black-and-orange patchwork beret, flowing black robe-like garment, and striped socks that looked like the ones worn by the wicked witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”
But her main sartorial feature was a corrective boot. Vinograd had polio as a child and limped her way along uncomplainingly with her bubbles. People always asked her “Why the Bubbles?,” so she finally explained it in her poem, “Beside Myself: How I Became the Bubblelady.”
She had been active in the uprising of 1969, but was not quite up to physical resistance. So she planned to blow bubbles in the park all night long in hopes that she would be arrested peacefully. It didn’t work. The cops loved her for it, and it was bubbles from that night forward.
Julia Shalett Vinograd was born Dec. 11, 1943, in Berkeley, where her father, Jerome Vinograd, was a biochemist, and her mother, Sherna, taught English. They lived way up in the Berkeley hills until Julia was diagnosed with polio at age 5 or 6. Then the family moved to Pasadena, which was flat and easier on her. Her father became a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
You could set your watch to the arrival of the Bubble Lady in her standard costume of black-and-orange patchwork beret, flowing black robe-like garment, and striped socks that looked like the ones worn by the wicked witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”
But her main sartorial feature was a corrective boot. Vinograd had polio as a child and limped her way along uncomplainingly with her bubbles. People always asked her “Why the Bubbles?,” so she finally explained it in her poem, “Beside Myself: How I Became the Bubblelady.”
She had been active in the uprising of 1969, but was not quite up to physical resistance. So she planned to blow bubbles in the park all night long in hopes that she would be arrested peacefully. It didn’t work. The cops loved her for it, and it was bubbles from that night forward.
Julia Shalett Vinograd was born Dec. 11, 1943, in Berkeley, where her father, Jerome Vinograd, was a biochemist, and her mother, Sherna, taught English. They lived way up in the Berkeley hills until Julia was diagnosed with polio at age 5 or 6. Then the family moved to Pasadena, which was flat and easier on her. Her father became a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Vinograd came to UC Berkeley as a freshman in 1962. After graduation, she earned her master of fine arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and came back to Berkeley to make her name as a poet.
Though she was qualified to teach, she refused. “She hated the idea of teaching,” said her sister, Debbie Vinograd of Berkeley. “All she wanted to do was write poetry.”
Vinograd always lived in the cheap residential hotels along Telegraph and University avenues. Her longest stay was at the Berkeley Inn, until it burned into a shell in the 1980s. The day it was demolished, Vinograd was there with her bubbles, watching. It became a poem and the title of her book “Blues for the Berkeley Inn,” published in 1991. After the Berkeley Inn was gone, Caffe Mediterraneum became her sanctuary, where she wrote daily and was also allowed to sell her books to other customers and passersby, until Caffe Med folded a few years ago.
At one point, her publisher Isaacson calculated that Vinograd had sold 150,000 books, hand to hand. Her collection “The Book of Jerusalem” won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1985.
“A lot of her poems were about street people,” said Isaacson, citing a favorite, “The Spare Changers Came From Outer Space.”
Vinograd was always there when Telegraph Avenue needed her most. When Moe Moskowitz, the founder of Moe’s Books, died in 1997, Vinograd was on the scene to recite a poem:
“I remember the continual cheerful grumble / That came out of Moe like cigar smoke / and of course the cigars / Freud said ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ / but not now.”
The city of Berkeley did not then have a poet laureate, but on June 5, 2004, it issued Vinograd a lifetime achievement award as Berkeley’s unofficial poet laureate.
About 10 years ago, Vinograd stopped with the bubbles when her hands developed a tremor and she could not form a proper bubble. But she could not stop writing poetry, even after writing a poem titled “I Hate Poetry”: “the more poetry I hear / the more I hate it / and the more I write it. Here I am.”
She is survived by her sister, Debbie Vinograd of Berkeley. Services are pending.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer
