Sally Sheklow got her first stage experience as a candy cane in a ballet recital at the age of 5. She appeared frequently in spontaneous productions on her family's fireplace hearth throughout her early years, and sang "Moon River" in a trio at her 6th grade graduation. After her political stint as president of the Nelly N. Coffman Junior High student body, she resumed her stage exploits in high school, playing a one-line part in The Sound of Music and moving on to a one-line part in Dark of the Moon at Foothill Junior College. She hit the big time in 1974 at the University of Oregon, winning the coveted role of "spider" in the touring children's play The Tortoise and the Hare, where she met the leading frog, Debby Martin, some 17 years before they joined forces again in WYMPROV! In 1975 she came out, shaved her head and changed her name to "hayfield," a name she kept for eleven years, succumbing to societal pressure to have a first and last name only after she'd earned her master's degree and had to start looking for a job.
In 1978 she co-founded and performed with the Footlight Faggots and Lesbian Thespians, a political theater group doing gay rights education and working to defeat Oregon's first anti-gay ballot measure. She later performed with Steal This Show, whose memorable "Vacuum Cleaner Rodeo" remains a career highpoint.
For seven years she worked as a member of Starflower, a worker-owned and controlled feminist collective which warehoused and distributed natural foods in the days before you could get a rice cake at Albertson's. In addition to learning to drive a forklift and load semi's, she became Staflower's ad-hoc in-house entertainment coordinator, writing and singing songs about organic sunflower seeds and rennetless cheese. This was the beginning of her "spiritual" period when she wrote such hymns as "I Got a Friend in Cheeses" and "Cheeses Love Me (this I know, for our profits tell me so.)" She is the composer of the matriotic "Starflowered Banner", Starflower's natural anthem.
She also took up Kung Fu which inspired her first Motown parody to the tune of Walk on By: Black My Eye. After grad school she served as the Executive Director of Willamette AIDS Council and then the Development Director of All Women's Health Services. No funny songs yet out of those two jobs. Sheklow's true opus came after two well-meaning friends took her to Portland for a JoAnne Lulann lesbian sexuality workshop. On the drive home they wrote a perfect parody to "My Favorite Things" and it was only a matter of time before the entire score of the Sound of Music had been parodied into "The Sound of Lesbians." She managed to pull off 25 paid one-woman performances of the completed work before she was contacted by a friendly attorney from the estate of Rogers and Hammerstein and ordered to cease and desist. The threat of a $10,000 lawsuit persuaded her to move on in her career as an entertainer and eventually she ended up with the other 3 women who founded WYMPROV! She loves to garden and to plant funny things like old sinks and broken rakes in her garden. For three years she wrote a humorous gardening column for a gay and lesbian magazine. Her garden was selected for the 1999 KLCC Garden Tour and featured in Garden Showcase Magazine. Sally writes Living Out, a column about life as she sees it, currently running in Eugene Weekly and an alternative newsweekly near you.
