Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

She performed in many college plays, but also stepped outside the theater department to become awakened to women’s politics. Rebecca graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, where she studied theater, English, and psychology. It was an introduction to the natural glories of the park-mountains, waterfalls, hot springs, and geysers-as well as to the art of hitchhiking. The day after she graduated from high school, Rebecca left for Yellowstone National Park, where she worked as a waitress. Acting in school and summer youth theater productions freed Rebecca to step out of the social hierarchies of high school and into the joys of walking inside another character and living in another world. In high school, she read Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” which opened her up to the idea that everything in life is a poem, and that, as she says, “We are not born separately from one another.” She also read “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s indictment of the strangling consumer-driven American culture he saw around him. She counts black music and culture from Louisiana as something that will stay in her body’s memory forever. She recalls her early influences as being the land around her, harvest times, craw-fishing in the bayou, practicing piano after school, dancing with her mother and brothers and sister, and the close relationship to her black “mother” who cleaned for the Wells household. Early on, she fell in love with thinking up and acting in plays for her siblings-the beginnings of her career as an actress and writer for the stage. “I grew up,” she says, “in the fertile world of story-telling, filled with flamboyance, flirting, futility, and fear.” Surrounded by Louisiana raconteurs, a large extended family, and Our Lady of Prompt Succor’s Parish, Rebecca’s imagination was stimulated at every turn. She recalls her early influences as being the land around her, harvest times, craw-fishing in the bayou, practicing piano after school, dancing with her mother and brothers and sister, and the close relationship to her black “mother” who cleaned for the Wells househol Rebecca Wells was born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Rebecca Wells was born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells