RIP, Georgelle Hirliman

Courtesy of Gabe, a NYT obituary for one of the people that make New Mexico an interesting place to live:

Georgelle Hirliman, whose innovative solution to writer’s block a quarter-century ago gave her a national career as a performance artist — and a book to boot — died on Jan. 29 in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 73 and a Santa Fe resident.

...In 1984, hopelessly blocked on a novel, Ms. Hirliman hit on the idea of setting up shop with her typewriter in a Santa Fe storefront. Beside her, she placed a sign:

Help Me Cure My Writer’s Block — Give Me a Topic.

People stopped and stared. Before long they began scribbling questions on slips of paper and taping them to the window. (Q. Where do the ducks go when ponds freeze over?) Ms. Hirliman fired off brief, aphoristic replies and taped them back up for all to see. (A. Warm, chlorinated pools in Miami and Beverly Hills.)

She never wrote her novel, but it no longer mattered: Ms. Hirliman was soon appearing in windows across the United States and Canada, her work widely reported in the news media.

In Manhattan she wrote in the windows of The Village Voice, Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side and B. Dalton on Fifth Avenue, among other places, sitting daily for eight hours at a stretch. Store owners paid her $50 to $100 a day, New York magazine reported in 1985.

Ms. Hirliman’s project resulted in a volume of questions and answers, “Dear Writer in the Window: The Wit and Wisdom of a Sidewalk Sage,” published by Penguin Books in 1992. She later reworked her window act as a one-woman stage show, which she performed around the country.

Before Ms. Hirliman began writing in windows she was variously, by her own account in interviews over the years, a model, journalist, secretary, tarot card reader, astrologer, cigarette girl and call girl.

“Being a call girl is a very giving profession, just like writing,” she told The Washington Post in 1992.

Georgelle Cynthia Hirliman was born in Los Angeles on June 11, 1936. She was adopted as a baby by Eleanor Hunt, a Hollywood actress, and her husband, George A. Hirliman, who produced “Reefer Madness” and other films. Georgelle, who moved with her family to New York as a girl, was unhappy at home and left as a teenager.

Ms. Hirliman settled in Santa Fe in the early 1970s. In 1982 she published a nonfiction book, “The Hate Factory” (Dell). Written with W. G. Stone, it chronicled the notorious 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, in which 33 inmates were killed and scores injured.

...In later years, she answered still more questions through her Web site, writerinthewindow.com.