Photo copyright 2014 by Larry Neilson
The day before Dee Dee Rainbow‘s memorial service, I was calmly medicating with a friend in his Capitol Hill penthouse. His place has lofty ceilings and big view windows all down two sides of a large condo apartment building. We were talking about Dee Dee and what an outsize personality she had, and noticing the back-lit raindrops of a furious rain squall falling on the west side, while on the north side the ground was still dry. Shortly afterwards, we noticed an enormous rainbow forming to the north, arching through half the sky, immense and intense. It thrilled us by persisting, without fading appreciably, for more than 15 minutes, sometimes supplemented by a parallel second rainbow more faintly trying to appear. When the natural prism eventually dissolved, we knew we had had a Visitation and a last Blessing from the Rainbow Lady.
Dee Dee Rainbow (1933-2014) – Photo copyright 1993, 2013 by Larry Neilson
She was an embodiment of fun, down community values, DIY sense, and intuitive wisdom. Seattle native Dee Dee Rainbow took that name in the 1970s. Already a teacher, mother of four, and wife to one of Seattle’s most distinguished clergymen (Rev. Peter Raible of University Unitarian Church), Dee Dee felt moved to project her vibrant personality and sense of fun even further in the go-for-broke Seventies. Her hand-made sparkly wand was a font from which unlimited blessings flowed. Speaking of sparkles — the pins, the rings, the pendants, the earrings, the glitter-glued eyelids and hair!
Dee Dee was a founder of such huge mainstream events as Seattle’s Bumbershoot Arts Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival. A raving jazz fan, she was never absent from major jazz gigs and arts festivals around the region, nor from the Fremont Solstice Parade, a wack-a-doodle community-based event that celebrates life through home-made art. Indeed, that was the fulfilling thread binding Dee Dee’s many interests together: art as fun, art as learning, art as a bridge to the Beyond. A means to access — to liberate — the divine in each of us. Dee Dee’s own playful ceramics of dragons and creatures with crystals and stones laced into their anatomy, were — and still are — collected the world over.
But beyond any pretensions of philosophy or religion, Dee Dee would insist that the fun come first. An enormous button, that was an inevitable component of her get-up, read “Enjoy Life: This is not a dress rehearsal.”
For a small album of photos on Dee Dee’s memorial service (which included a New Orleans second line leading a strut around the block by mourners in Rainbow-colored rags), go to https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10203103865181154.1073741841.1342143533&type=1&l=cbfa21edbc