Helen Series

An independent episode extracted from the saga of Helen, this story takes place when Helen has been operated on again with a brain tumor, and is a total amnesiac. Helen has two half-siblings: Tomasina Krebs, the tall, eccentric girl who wants to give up her music degree to get into producing porn videos, and Little John, an earnest, awkward young fellow who has just finished his third semester in college. Tommy has made friends with a young Czech model called Sophie, and invited her over to spend Christmas with Tommy, her girlfriend April, and Tommy's mother Grandma Elly, in Ferguson, Minnesota. In College, Little John's band of outcasts includes Spooky, whose real name is Taylor Brown, a goth chick, also from Ferguson. The two half-siblings (actually just Tomasina), dressed up for a prank at the local mall, meet up with Spooky, and Johnny is appalled at the task of keeping them apart. His life is about to get slightly complicated.

This is a highly sexual episode from Helen's saga. One summer, Helen meets a girl who works at a florist's shop. It could happen to anyone, happens to Helen: she gets infatuated with the girl, and they have just one night of passion.

This second installment of the earliest parts of the story of Helen, begins with Helen breaking up with the film actress Marsha Moore and returning to finish her senior year in College, where she meets one of the great loves of her life, a lovely Indian student, Lalitha. Over the academic year their love slowly grows, until it is abruptly interrupted by Lalitha being hauled back to India by her father. Helen follows her love to India, but she is only just in time to see Lalitha married off into a loveless union, and Helen slowly loses her mind, and winds up in a Catholic convent for ten years. After some misadventures, Helen has two seizures, and is shipped back to the US to be treated, and after brain surgery, loses her memory. The rest of the story is about how Lalitha finds Helen, and helps to restore her memory, but the renewed romance is ill-fated. This book partly sets the stage for Helen's later adventures, and introduces Lalitha and the two little girls Gena and Alison, who are a major part of Helen's life.

Helen, while making her third movie under the name Sharon Vuehl, falls in love with her co-star, Sita. Once filming is over, both Helen and Sita yearn for each other, and finally meet again when the movie is nominated for an Oscar. Helen has to turn into Sharon once again for the Oscars, and decides to make an all-out project of it. While still cavorting as Sharon, Helen gets tragic news, and must hurry home to deal with it. Most painfully, Helen meets Sita after she has transformed back to her usual appearance, but doesn't have the courage to reveal that she and Sharon are one and the same. Meanwhile, Sita is also slowly falling in love with Helen, too, though she fights her feelings valiantly. Over several years, Helen's numerous partners come and go, until Helen has unexpected brain surgery, and loses her memory. All her friends stand by her, but they cannot reestablish their relationships with her; her personality has changed too much. Only a few of her friends know that she and Sharon are the same, and it seems reasonable to consider that Sharon is dead. But the ghost of Sharon haunts Helen at the most unexpected moments. This is a major excerpt from the story of Helen. 'Helen,' a long, rambling story that was originally never intended to be published, is being published in segments. Because of the way it was written, Helen lent itself to segmentation, many of the episodes being essentially self-contained. The exception is one suite of adventures which had such a major impact on Helen’s life story that it defies treatment as a mere episode; in fact it takes over the entire saga. This thread spans decades, starting from when she began to teach at Westfield College. Ten years after Helen graduated from college, she had brain surgery which resulted in total amnesia, which was temporary. Ten years further along, Helen is operated on once again for yet another tumor, resulting in amnesia once again. Sita, Helen's costar from her movie, and who was in love with "Sharon Vuehl," the fictitious actress, was initially furious when she discovered that Sharon really did not exist. But Helen's charm is such that she persuaded Sita to forgive her. But now, Sita is in love with Helen instead, though Helen is in a committed relationship with another woman. This story relates the history of Helen up to the point where she begins to relate to her circle immediately after the surgery, and how her friends and family, for whom Helen was an important resource, learn to cope with this new Helen.

Helen N, a violinist, a regular on a TV series, a college music professor, and single mother of four, found herself suddenly without her beautiful lover, and her life seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Unexpectedly, Amy Salvatori, whom Helen had known and loved since Sophomore Year in college, proposed to her, just before being operated on for breast cancer. Amy knows all about Helen's promiscuous ways. With great restraint, Helen has left her students strictly alone. But from the time Helen discovered sex, she's fallen in love with dozens of women. Amy has been a bystander for fifteen years, but now she wants to take charge of Helen; she believes that none of Helen's lovers have understood the needs of the brilliant musician. They want to start off their new life with an extended holiday at the beach, incognito. Amy uses her real name (though she is well known in pediatric surgery circles), while Helen goes as Elaine Gibson. The gang has landed in a little seaside town called Nowhere, in an idyllic little cottage, and the kids quickly make friends with a number of teenagers. "Elaine" takes a job at a local general store, while Amy signs up as a Nurse Practitioner at the seaside Clinic. Things are going swimmingly until a number of beautiful people come into Helen's life. Two of these is a brother and sister pair, the sheltered children of a reclusive photographer who has arranged to do a coffee-table book about Helen. Another is sweet, innocent Hattie, who comes daily to the general store, apparently just to visit Helen. Meanwhile, Gena, Helen's eldest, about to go to college, has her own adventures. Wildly popular with the local teen crowd, Gena, too, falls in love with two young people, and comes to the attention of the local District Attorney, who just happens to have attended the same boarding school as Gena.

Helen Nordstrom was a gifted all-round musician. She was also an athlete, an actress, and a wonderful teacher. Unfortunately, she was also bisexual, and utterly passionate and romantic, and found it difficult to resist any pretty girl. After numerous amorous adventures, Helen was struck by a sequence of tragedies: her reputation was destroyed by homophobic elements, her adopted girls were taken away, she was shunned by the religious right, she had a terrible accident that killed the baby she was carrying, and she retired from the stage in acute depression. And as she was beginning to recover, a large brain tumor was removed, and Helen lost her memory. Much of the Helen saga is concerned with her episodic love affairs with a sequence of women. But on one occasion, Helen decided to masquerade as an actress called Sharon Vuehl, and acted in a movie, just as a prank; then she returned to her life as a college professor. But the movie was a hit, and Helen slipped out to make a second movie, which was also a hit. Then she decided to make an epic movie in which the theme was a lesbian romance set in the bronze age, where Helen played the heroine, Merit, who was a fighting, love machine of a woman, who falls in love with the princess, and runs off with her. The problem was, the actress who plays the role of the princess actually falls in love with Sharon. Of course, Sharon disappears into thin air between movies, but the actress, Sita, who plays the princess can't forget her. Then, Sharon and Sita are both nominated for Oscars, and Helen can't resist attending the ceremony. The actresses meet at the home of a friend, and have an intense encounter, and both women are left feeling hopeless and guilt-ridden, respectively. Meanwhile, as described above, Helen has her reversals, but a core of staunch friends keep Helen on an even keel, not least of whom are Lalitha, and Sita, her sister, two wonderful Indian women. Sita does not initially know that Helen is in fact Sharon. But after Sharon's accident and the miscarriage, inevitably, Sita finds out. Then, to top everything, Helen is diagnosed with yet another massive tumor, and loses her memory. This story is the record of whether, and to what extent, Helen regains her memory, and how Helen relates to her various friends as they anxiously watch the process.

This is, so far, the earliest episode in the Helen story, and shows Helen Nordstrom as a Junior in College. The background to this story is as follows. (The following events take place before the present story; just to avoid confusion!) Helen witnesses her mother and her dog die in a tragic accident, as a result of which her father goes into depression. She applies for a scholarship at a school in Ohio, with the help of her teachers, and wins it. Her father cannot find the energy to take her in to her freshman year, and Helen sets out to hitchhike to College. She is picked up by a young couple, Jason and Janet, who are in fact on their way to the same town. We learn that, more importantly, the mother of Janet was the lesbian lover of Helen's dead mother, and that the two women have continued their relationship in secret even after Helen's mother got married, and Helen was born. Helen is attracted to Janet, and the two women begin a relationship unknown to Jason. Helen's freshman year at college is a great success, and she meets up with a famous instrument-maker who has been invited to begin a new program at the college, and Helen is selected to help set up this workshop. She discovers early music (music of the seventeenth century and earlier), whose revival was at its height at that time, and her success in learning to play reproductions of old instruments, and her beautiful voice, set the trajectory of her fame. Over the first Christmas break, Helen is suggested for a job in Florida, as a companion to a lady millionaire, Juliana Hoffmann. By this time Jason had learned of the ongoing relationship between the two girls, and has reluctantly allowed Helen to move in with them. Juliana learns about the couple from Helen, and invites them down to Florida, and showers them with gifts, including training as a tennis instructor for Janet, and computer equipment for Helen and Jason. Back in school, Helen is an excellent student, and takes courses in mathematics, physics and computer science, as well as music and art. She makes several instruments at the workshop, and is a student assistant in physics, and an assistant in various tennis programs, as well as being a manager in the new instrument workshop. Sophomore year proceeds pretty much like freshman year, except that Helen takes up ballet, and Jason is called up for military duty, and has to attend training camp. He is deployed in the Balkans, and dies before he sees action, in a plane accident while landing. Janet is pregnant, and gives birth in December, while still devastated by Jason's death, and Helen promises to help bring up the baby with Janet. Things proceed fairly smoothly, until Helen goes to Florida to Juliana Hoffman during Spring Break. Charismatic Helen is irresistible to some of the young people she meets in Florida, and Janet is deeply unhappy with Helen's little affairs. This story begins shortly after the beginning of Junior Year. Helen has become well known over the summer because of a music program that is spotlighted on TV. Helen in picked for a minor role in a Mozart opera, and then another minor role in The Marriage of Figaro. Quite by accident, she is on the spot when a car crashes into a tree during a freak early blizzard, and helps to rescue a victim. The grateful parents of the girl happen to be music lovers, and Helen is loaned a priceless unaltered 17th century violin, and Helen's fame as a violinist takes off. Helen also befriends an amnesia victim, Cindy, who becomes a major influence on Helen in later episodes. Helen meets a number of long-lost cousins, especially the two youngest, Marika and Heikki, who become very close friends. Please note that the characters and the institutions in this story are entirely fictional! I love them all, but they only exist in our imaginations. (I should add this disclaimer to all my stories . . .)

Helen, a musician, is the single adopted mother of two little girls, Gena, 14, and Allie, 2. There are those who objected to a lesbian woman being allowed to have female foster children, and to Helen's horror, the girls are taken away from her. The girls escape, and find their way home on foot, and Helen goes into hiding with them, in far away Southern California. Along the way, Helen meets Penny O'Brien, and her daughter Erin, whom Penny believes is musically gifted, and they throw in their lot with Helen. The story is about how Helen and Penny struggle to keep the older girls comfortable, and keep up with their schooling at home, always under the threat of being found out by the FBI. To make things more interesting, Helen gives birth to her only biological child, James. Gena, 13, Erin, 9, Alison, 2, and baby James give a lot of three-dimensionality to the story, and though this is not by any means a children's book, there are kids in every page of it.