Sam Shepard’s life was as dramatic as his theater
Sam Shepard and I crossed paths several times when we were both living near Charlottesville, Virginia, he with Jessica Lange and their family, and me as a student at the University of Virginia. He towered over passersby on the Downtown Mall, walking as if invisible spurs should be clinking on his bootheels, mane of dark floppy hair pushed back off his forehead and behind his ears, keen eyes above a quick grin. I last saw Shepard 20 years later, having a coffee and reading the Daily Racing Form in a Greenwich Village restaurant; he looked even better then. He was a true Renaissance man. There he was, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, charged with writing a screenplay for a movie somehow set in the concert tour.
