Gretchen Worden, Rest in Peace

YOU OFTEN DON'T know what kind of impact someone's had on your life until it's too late. When you take the time to look back over the things you've encountered, the people you've known and the shaggy, ambling, detour-strewn path that links them all together, you'll usually find a few people along the way who, unbeknownst to you at the time, had a much more profound effect on where you ended up than you could have imagined. It's surprising sometimes.

That wasn't the case with Gretchen. I think I recognized her impact pretty early on.

I first met Gretchen Worden in 1988, on my second visit to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. The medical museum was right around the corner from my apartment, hidden away in the back of the shadowy ground floor of the College of Physicians, but I never knew it was there until a psychotic gay Satanist suggested that I check it out.

I strolled in not expecting too much one hot, bright summer afternoon, and was immediately awestruck. The Mütter tends to have that effect on people. I was a cynical, snot-nosed punk kid who was sure he'd seen everything already, but this stopped me. A display cabinet full of skulls lined the far wall. Downstairs, the skeleton of a giant was posed next to the skeleton of a dwarf. There was a plaster cast of Chang and Eng made after their deaths. Wax models illustrated various dread diseases and eye injuries. Old medical instruments designed to do some godawful things were presented under glass. And of course there was the Soap Lady. Given my mindset at the time, I thought it was like a fabulous freak show-but a dead-serious one. One designed, originally, to educate doctors. Even if I wasn't educated too much on that first visit (that would come later), I sure was entertained.

I left the museum addled, but exhilarated, fully aware, if momentarily, of my own mortality.

I'd recently started writing for a newspaper down there, and thought this would make a great story-not knowing then that the museum was "rediscovered" by the local media every year around Halloween.

I picked up the phone the next day, called the museum and asked if they had any photographs the paper could use. I was told they did, so I grabbed my hat and ran around the corner to pick them up. That's when I met Gretchen, the museum's director.

She was a tall, stately woman in what I guessed to be her early 40s, with a strong jaw and dark red hair. She wore a lab coat and spoke in a voice reminiscent of Julia Child-but a much throatier, smarter Julia Child.

She gave me a quick tour of the museum-something she clearly loved doing-then led me to her office in the back. A skull sat on the desk, and several moo-cow creamers were collected on a shelf. Before she even opened up the file with the photos, however, she sized me up. I was wearing a punk-rock t-shirt, a ratty hat, and my jeans were ripped from above the knee to just above the ankle.

She stared at me hard, smirked slightly, then informed me in no uncertain terms, "You will not make the museum out to be a freak show. If you plan on doing that, I can't cooperate with you. That's not the image we're after."

The freak-show angle was, of course, exactly the angle I was planning to take at the time. There was a sternness in her voice, though, that made me quickly rethink the whole thing.

"Oh, no no no," I assured her. "I would never do that."

And in the end, I didn't. Gretchen was pleased with the way the story turned out, and we immediately became friends. The museum, in fact, became a second home to me. I spent long afternoons trolling the displays, always finding something I'd never seen before. A new brain in a jar, a new malformed fetal skeleton.

Despite her earliest stern warning to me to take the museum seriously, it was clear before long that she had a sense of humor about it herself-even pulling together a lighthearted exhibit about conjoined twins.

I'd occasionally hang out in Gretchen's office if she wasn't too busy. At first we talked about medical anomalies and the museum's long history. After a few impromptu visits, we'd talk about most anything that came to mind. She had an almost shocking breadth of knowledge-and not just about things medical. She knew art, music, film, sideshow history, religion, philosophy. Nothing was too extreme or bizarre for her. She could not be shocked. Quite the opposite: The more extreme or bizarre, the more delighted she seemed to become. Plus she smoked and enjoyed the occasional drink. Gretchen was simply a joy to be around, and had a knack for attracting interesting people. I introduced her to some of the folks I knew, and they became friends as well. She showed up at their gallery openings and went to see their bands play.

A week or two before I was set to move to Brooklyn, she called and told me that some friends of hers from New York were coming to town, and that I should meet them. Their names were Ken and Laura, and they ran a small publishing house (I already owned a number of the books they put out). Although I was as intimidated by them as I had been by Gretchen at first, we soon became close friends as well. They were the first people I knew up here, and they went out of their way to drag me to strange places and introduce me to folks (many of whom also remain good friends to this day). And it seemed that all those people I was meeting knew Gretchen, too. In fact, Gretchen and the museum, somehow, seemed to be at the epicenter of an ever-growing circle of interesting people, most of whom in turn had met each other. Painters, photographers, writers. Former New York Press editor John Strausbaugh was a dear friend of Gretchen's, and we both found ourselves making regular references to her and the museum in the paper.

Over the years, I helped Laura and Gretchen put together the Mütter Museum calendar, and still made trips down to the museum when I could. Word had begun to spread, and soon the Mütter-which had been a very quiet, tiny secret when I first started visiting-grew in popularity. Gretchen appeared on the Letterman show several times. Joel-Peter Witkin took pictures there. Errol Morris shot a short documentary about the museum. It seemed tv crews from somewhere or another were in there almost weekly.

Gretchen was synonymous with the museum, and was becoming as well known. She was a great interview subject. Yet for all the attention and all the celebrity, Gretchen remained Gretchen-level headed, sometimes stubborn, always straightforward, funny as hell-and she'd always stop and talk to me if I called.

I remember taking a trip to Atlantic City with Ken and Laura in '94. Gretchen was meeting us there, and we agreed to hook up at a bar. I hadn't seen her in over a year, but still, true to form, we hadn't been there for five minutes before we'd fallen into a conversation about the medical value of drinking one's own urine (there wasn't any, by the way).

The last time I saw her was here in New York. Morgan and I met up with her and a couple other friends at Ken and Laura's apartment before heading out to one of those Korean barbecue places. I remember we laughed an awful lot that night.

In early May, Laura told me that Gretchen needed a bone marrow transplant. Although I knew she'd had some medical problems when she was much younger, the news came as quite a shock. Still, she had a donor, and I figured everything would be okay. About a week before the transplant was scheduled, however, she ended up in the hospital with heart problems and breathing difficulties. While preparing to treat those, doctors discovered that she was much sicker than anyone realized.

Laura sent out regular updates about her condition. Word spread around pretty quickly. Most of us, it seems, were figuring that she was going to be fine. It would be rough, but she'd be fine. She'd spent her time at the museum surrounded by images of death and evidence of all the things that could go horribly wrong with the human body, but it was almost as if we thought those things would become protective totems. She simply wasn't the kind who died. So when I heard that she had on the night of April 2, it took a day before it fully began to sink in.

Sad as I am, though-and sad as I know many, many other people are-I have to keep remembering Gretchen as I knew her: vibrant, smiling that famous smile, telling bawdy jokes, tossing off some unexpected tidbit, keeping one step ahead of everyone.

That seemingly mundane meeting, that quick trip around the corner to pick up some pictures, had an indelible effect on the future course of my life, and for that, I will be eternally grateful. I hope she knew that. o