Bridget O'Brien, 1981-2007

So Bridget died the other day. I hadn’t been in touch with her for several years, partly because she was a globe-trotter and I am a boring, sedentary type; and partly because we were friends for a time but not super close. Regardless, her death hits me hard. Her obit is here.I am listening to Radiohead while writing this, which I hadn’t even thought about when I plugged in my head phones. Turns out this was a terrible idea; Radiohead is just about all the Daily Bruin peeps were listening to back in 2000-2003, which is when I got to know Bridget. There’s nostalgia and then there’s oh shit, remember that time we all camped out at Joshua Tree and ate those brownies, and that’s when you realize those days are gone in more ways than one. So I’m turning Radiohead off now.

As Mari told me on Thursday, Bridget wouldn’t want her moping around, and even if Bridget wouldn’t give a shit if I moped around, I won’t. Instead I offer this anecdote as a small and inadequate tribute. In early 2004, back when I was still a reporter, I came up with the idea of writing a story about California college graduates who get the governor’s signature on their diploma. No big deal, except one of the world’s biggest movie stars was just elected governor, and it would be a fun story to see what students thought about having The Terminator’s signature on their diploma.

The rub was that most students would be graduating in May or June, and would not receive their actual diplomas for another three months, or longer. When there are more than 100,000 students graduating at once, the process takes a while. But I knew a small number of students had finished their studies in the middle of the year, and would have been among the first batch to get Schwarzenegger’s John Hancock on their certificates. After asking around a few friends, I discovered Bridget fit the bill.

So I did a cursory interview with her, as well as a few other friends and acquaintances who were still in school. Bridget provided the best quote and agreed to be photographed with her diploma; in fact, she basically made the story. Without her, I not only would have had to work a lot harder to find someone with the diploma, but the story wouldn’t have been as good.



But what we’re talking about is not Bridget making my story better. What we’re talking about is Bridget being Bridget. The interview I had with her was cursory; she said she wasn’t really excited about having Arnold sign her diploma. It makes the diploma seem like a bit of a joke, she said. Then she got more into it, finally delivering the money quote: “I got a B.A. in geography, but I think my diploma is B.S.”

This, of course, is awesome. I committed a minor ethical breach right after she said this, asking her if she really wanted that quote to be on the record, because I knew she had concocted it as a funny comment, as an exaggerated version of what she really felt. “Are you sure you want to say that?” I asked her. “This story is going to be all over the place. You might get hate mail or something.” (This was a distinct possibility; the story would go on the Associated Press national wire, and someone like Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh could get a hold of it and declare the public universities in California to be a hotbed of smartassed communists.)

But Bridget would have none of that. She would not back down from her quote, and in fact insisted that I use it in the story, which I did. This to me is textbook Bridget. Looking at her, you wouldn’t expect she was a person who went against the grain. But she lived her life the way she saw fit, and didn’t care if you didn’t like it. She finagled a press pass to an XFL game in Los Angeles in 2001, having her picture taken on the sideline with Vince McMahon. In 2002, she engineered a Daily Bruin end-of-year banquet slideshow that included just about every photo it was not supposed to include: Patrick making the Zoolander male model face; Linh dressed like a gangsta chick; at least a dozen pictures of people flipping the bird at the camera; and me standing on my toes to grab a bottle of booze. Her professional career as a photographer took her to places like Nicaragua to hang out with dirt-poor farmers for a series on fair trade coffee—Nicaragua, land of junta horror stories and Reagan-era dictatorships, not some cushy resort nation like Costa Rica where there is no army and the beaches are whiter than government letterhead. More recently, she had been taking pictures for a pornography business in Australia.

What I feel is the greatest loss here is that Bridget was one of those people who did the things that most people just kind of thought about but never actually did. She traveled the world, sometimes to scary places; she launched a career in a field that is extremely difficult not only to break into, but to remain successful at over the long run; she married a rock musician—who, tragically, was also killed in the accident—and went on tour across Australia and the U.S.

Even though I hadn’t kept in touch with her while most of this was going on, I heard snatches of things, and I always knew that she was out there, doing her thing, living the life. It’s people like her that keep the rest of us going, especially desk jockeys like me who have nothing but computer screens and carpal tunnel syndrome in our futures. She was a touchstone for me; she was proof that there is something out there, an adventurous life, a world in which people with spirit and heart and a little bit of craziness can not just survive, but thrive.

A part of that spirit has died, as death diminishes all of us. But Bridget wouldn’t want us moping about it.