I guess I must have been 19 or 20 when I met Helen Caswell. Helen was a friend’s, best friend’s girlfriend. She was a film student at SF State and looking for an “actor” for her project. My friend didn’t want to do it because he thought she was a bit too strange so I volunteered. Here I was, a want-to-be actor … soon moving to Hollywood!

In any event, she told me to dress casually and come out to her parent’s house out in the peach and almonds orchards of Modesto, in the Central Valley. I remember the heat of summer and an older forties style farmhouse way out in the middle of this orchard. I arrived and was met with about six or seven different cakes…all kinds, chocolate, white, cupcakes, double-decker’s, you name it. I think she baked all but one.

We quickly dispensed with our “how do you do’s” and got to business. She had a pretty old 8mm camera, as I remember. (This was way before computers and automation so I know it was old.

She filmed me doing a number of things. Eating the cake, smashing the cake, prodding and sticking my finger in the cake. It was fun. Then she asked be to get this really devious look on my face. She filmed that. And finally, she asked me to look off distantly and sink to the floor and she opened a freezer filled with dry ice. Interesting.

On my way home I thought about the evening’s events and agreed with my friend, Helen was a bit odd!

Cut to 1998 some 18 years later. The Telephone rings. My friend answered the phone. Helen is on the line and asking for a Bill, who did a movie back in the ‘70’s. Luckily I was just coming in the door from work. I had all but forgotten that strange summer evening in the orchards of Modesto…with all those cakes! It was interesting explaining that to my friend. Well, low and hold, Helen had become mildly famous in a very small circle of San Francisco filmmakers with her two-minute film, “Cake” A short film about a young man’s fancy for sweets. She wanted to see me and further invite me to a screening of the film at the San Francisco Film Festival in the newly opened San Francisco Center.

As my friend and I walked into the theater, I heard from a small group of people in the front section things like: “Cake Boy!” “It’s him!” “He’s here!” “Of course it’s him, don’t you recognize those lips.” “Those ears!” Well honey… I had arrived! Now mind you all these people had seen the film and I hadn’t so I had no idea what I was in store for.

Helen and I said our hellos as the lights dimmed and the film began. Woody Herman’s seductively erotic striptease “The Flame” began playing and there I was…on the big screen in an erotic tantalization of teases, with the cake. I sank deep into my seat! I didn’t realize her concept was sexual when she filmed it. Anything but! After the screening, she asked me what I thought. I truly was speechless. Never the less, in a small group of San Franciscan’s I shall be forever known as Cake boy!