Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1986–1994: Wintertide Coffeehouse

Being new on the island and knowing almost no one, I obsessively read posters on telephone poles, devoured the Martha’s Vineyard Times front to back,[i] and studied everything on every bulletin board I came across. Surely there had to be some feminist activity somewhere, and if there was, surely a lesbian or two would be involved?

Well, no. As noted in Adult Child of Theater, my first connection with Vineyard lesbians (and gay men) was through theater. I did, however, find feminism on a bulletin board: several women were organizing a panel discussion on women’s issues for the local League of Women Voters. Contacting them, I learned that not only were they League members, they made up an informal women’s group that had been meeting for several years. I helped organize the panel, and after the project came off successfully I was invited (along with the other drop-in organizer) to join the group. This was my “girl gang” for about 10 years. Would I have stayed on the Vineyard without it? Quite possibly not, but unfortunately I have no T-shirt to show for it.

My early searching also led to the Flip Side, an itinerant performance venue that, as I recall, happened in a tent outside what was then the Ocean Club, an upscale seasonal restaurant, and later became home to the year-round Wintertide. I don’t remember which musicians I first heard there, but it was definitely my introduction to the literary trio known variously as the Poetry Construction Company (because if you weren’t in construction on Martha’s Vineyard, you weren’t taken seriously) or the Savage Poets of Martha’s Vineyard: George Mills, Lee McCormack, and Michelle Gerhard (now Jasny; a veterinarian whose clients have included my three dogs, she’s been writing the Visiting Veterinarian column for the Times for about three decades).

That led me to Wintertide Coffeehouse in the winter of 1986. Back then it was then a weekend thing from January through March, usually one weekend night a week, sometimes two. When I joined the all-volunteer crew, it was held at the Youth Hostel. Donna Bouchard, an experienced concert promoter, was then the coordinator. Not being a techie, I gravitated to the food operation: along with coffee and tea, we offered snack plates with crackers, cheese, salsa, and veggies.

Anyone familiar with Washington Ledesma’s art will recognize this as his work. His Five Corners studio was right around the corner when Wintertide moved into its year-round location.

By this point, Wintertide’s origins were already murky: ask three old hands how it started and you’d get three different origin stories. A few years later, for a 1991 Martha’s Vineyard Times story, I traced a credible line of descent back to 1979. This roughly coincides with a 2021 M.V. Times story (not by me) which located Wintertide’s origin in 1978 as part of Project, a program of M.V. Community Services aimed at giving young people off-season recreational options other than bars. Wintertide’s antecedents were more diverse than the Times article suggests: read the comments for a fuller story. Vineyarders have a long history of entertaining each other after the tourists and summer folk go home, and Wintertide was part of that tradition.

From the Youth Hostel, Wintertide moved to the basement of the Stone Church in Vineyard Haven, where it remained for the rest of the 1980s.

Wintertide performers included local musicians, the occasional touring singer-songwriter, and even musicians with national reputations and recording contracts. I heard jazz musician Stan Strickland at Wintertide when it was at the Youth Hostel, playing with Barbara Dacey, who along with being a musician was also a mainstay for decades at WMVY radio. Among the performers I heard for the first time at the Stone Church were Cheryl Wheeler and Bill Morrissey.

There was no shortage of island-grown talent either: Maynard Silva, Nancy Jephcote, Tristan Israel, Jimmy Burgoff, and many more. It was an ideal place to develop and perfect performance skills.

In a 2010 letter to the Times, I wrote: “The Wintertide I remember was a place where Vineyarders of all ages, old-timers and recent arrivals, came together to entertain ourselves. In the process we learned how to manage the kitchen, run the soundboard, or even perform onstage, whatever needed to be done.”

Inspired by the Savage Poets, I read poems at Wintertide’s regular open mics, and each winter I organized a “Word Wizardry” night featuring Vineyard poets and prose writers. Reading poetry before audiences primed for music taught me the importance of performance. In general I wasn’t a fan of poetry readings, but the likes of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Marge Piercy, and Audre Lorde had shown me that readings can be riveting.

Mary Payne of Island Theatre Workshop coached me in reading my own work: “The first rule,” she told me, “is to forget that you wrote it.” Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you can communicate it effectively to a live audience. In fact, it can make it harder. You know what thoughts and feelings inspired the poem. When performing, you have to get your listeners to feel them too.

Tony Lombardi, the sound tech when Wintertide was at the Stone Church, had a vision of Wintertide as a year-round chem-free multigenerational hangout and performance space. He, with much help from others, made it happen: Wintertide opened year-round at Five Corners in January 1991. This momentous move looked like the dawn of a new age for Wintertide, but it turned out to be not just the end of the beginning — the years of being a peripatetic off-season venue — but also the beginning of the end. It was glorious while it lasted.

My story about Wintertide’s big move appeared in the Martha’s Vineyard Times on Jan. 10, 1991.

In my capacity as Martha’s Vineyard Times proofreader and frequent features stringer, I wrote the story about Wintertide’s big move. Later that year I succeeded Eileen Maley as the Times features editor. As I wrote in a 2018 blog post: “Not only was I a Wintertide board member, regular volunteer, and occasional performer, I was the Times features editor. To put it mildly, the roles got blurred. Wintertide had very little money for advertising; I could put whatever I wanted in the paper’s Calendar (arts & entertainment) section.” Once the Times moved to Five Corners that fall, it was right around the corner from Wintertide. That blurred the roles even further.

Backside of the Wintertide shirt

I’ve come to think of year-round Wintertide as, like Camelot, a “brief, shining moment.” The shining was real. I think especially of the Singer-Songwriter Retreats of 1992 and 1993, masterminded by Christine Lavin and brought to life by a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The resulting recordings — Big Times in a Small Town from ’92 and Follow That Road from ’93 — are still available and still wonderful.

I think also of WIMP, the Wintertide Improv group, a troupe of Vineyard actors whose performances usually included a new installment of Troubled Shores, a serial soap opera about island life. WIMP continued after Wintertide’s demise in various locations. Troupe member Donna Swift started a long-running improv program for young people called, you guessed it, Troubled Shores. (See this 2008 Vineyard Gazette story for some of the details.)

But the brevity was also real, and probably inevitable given the place and the personnel. That prime, central, highly visible location was high rent for the time, which meant attention had to be paid to the bottom line, i.e., income. A local restaurateur was willing and able to take charge of the kitchen, which could have put Wintertide on a firmer financial footing without changing its mission or its vibe. This not only clashed with Tony’s vision of an all-volunteer operation, but it would have put a second person, the restaurateur, at the heart of it. Tony couldn’t have that. He wouldn’t compromise with Christine Lavin either, so after those two glorious years the Singer-Songwriter Retreat dwindled into a strictly local affair.

It was not a good sign that, long before that, I and a few other longtime volunteers had taken to calling the coffeehouse “Tonytide,”[ii] which pretty much sums up the problem.

Then Tony decided (for reasons I don’t know, because I and quite a few others had either left or backed off by then) to move on, and Wintertide began its fast slide into history. Tony’s subsequent projects, usually aimed at young people, happened under the aegis of the then new Vineyard YMCA, which meant access to both space and revenue that didn’t have to be raised through operations. He could have his cake and eat it too: run an all-volunteer operation without having to worry about the bottom line.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, on Daggett Ave. . . .

Daggett Ave. Cafe, another grassroots creative effort, started around 1990 — on, you guessed it, Daggett Ave. in Vineyard Haven, where a friend of musician/artist/eventual web designer Heather Goff was living at the time. As a single mom with a very young child, Heather usually couldn’t go out at night, so she invited creative friends over to entertain each other. By the time I learned of it, it had outgrown the friend’s living room. Most of the ones I attended took place downstairs at the Vineyard Playhouse, emceed by Helen Stratford, but before it moved to the Playhouse at least one Daggett Ave., maybe more, happened in the amazing great hall at Fourway on Franklin Street. It included not only poetry and music but dance and video — I distinctly remember Michael Johnson wheeling in a TV on a cart to show video.

Not all is lost (but things have changed)

Despite the devastation wrought by astronomical real estate prices, the consequent exodus of so many younger people from the Vineyard, and the fact that those who remain are often working two or three jobs and have little time to volunteer, there are signs that the grassroots music and arts scene is reviving, thanks in significant measure to nonprofit support and private funding. Circuit Arts, based at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury, is the relatively new umbrella organization drawing together several arts groups, including the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, the M.V. Children’s Theater Camp (a direct descendant of the Children’s Theatre started by Mary Payne), and Circuit Films.

Another new nonprofit, Stillpoint, got the go-ahead earlier this year to convert a West Tisbury barn into a multi-purpose community gathering place.

Wintertide never seriously sought foundation or corporate funding. It might have survived if it had, but for Tony that was out of the question: it would have meant giving up too much control. It’s just about impossible to imagine a seat-of-the-pants operation like Wintertide getting off the ground today, funded entirely by “sweat equity” and with none of the financial kind. But sweat equity magnified by generous donors and professional know-how? It seems to be having an effect.

Notes

[i] The fledgling Martha’s Vineyard Times, about which more later, was free, which the island’s other weekly, the Vineyard Gazette, was not. Everyone agreed that the Gazette had better photographs, but it was also Edgartown-centric and oriented to “the summer people,” neither of which applied to me, and besides, I was looking for island news, not pictures.

[ii] An infuriatingly inaccurate Martha’s Vineyard Patch story from 2012 suggests that we weren’t the only ones who conflated Tony and Wintertide: Tony did too.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1985–1986 (etc.): Adult Child of Theater

Where to begin? The family I grew up in had upper-crusty antecedents on both sides — New England on my father’s side, Virginia/Maryland/New England on my mother’s — but we looked middle/upper-middle class. My father was an architect. My mother didn’t work outside the home while my brothers, sister, and I were growing up. She talked with such evident longing about having done summer stock theater after WWII (during which she was in the SPARs, the women’s unit of the Coast Guard Reserve) that when I first read Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night my senior year of high school, I connected her instantly with Mary Tyrone, who clings to a belief that she could have been a concert pianist if only she hadn’t got married.

I’ve carried this copy with me since my senior year of high school.

That was not the only connection between my mother and Mary Tyrone: the latter was addicted to morphine, while my mother’s drug of choice was alcohol. She didn’t stop drinking till after a family intervention when I was in my mid-40s. As a teenager I was deep down convinced that if I drank, I would become an alcoholic too. So I didn’t drink.

In my mid-teens, however, I started eating compulsively. Between the beginning and end of junior year I gained 40 pounds and was totally oblivious till spring weigh-in in gym class. It took several years before I intuited the connection. Nancy Friday’s book My Mother, My Self came out in 1977, the same year I did, in case I needed any encouragement.

Alcoholism was no secret in lesbian and gay communities. For many years, lesbian and gay life had revolved around bars, but even in the late ’70s, when we were conscientiously creating “chem-free” spaces and events, it was impossible to avoid. By the early ’80s we were arguing about ways to deal with it. In the feminist and lesbian circles I moved in by then, the 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon was suspect from the get-go for its heavily patriarchal Christian God orientation. I didn’t know how to go about finding meetings that welcomed gay men, lesbians, and/or feminists. Coming up with effective alternatives, however, was a challenge.[1]

Among the first things I did when I landed on Martha’s Vineyard was go looking for a 12-Step program. They weren’t hard to find: both weekly papers included lists of meetings for several programs, mainly AA, Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and Overeaters Anonymous (OA). That first fall I attended a couple of Al-Anon meetings. Most of the attendees were women with alcoholic husbands or ex-husbands. I was a lesbian who had grown up with an alcoholic mother but had left home a long time ago. They were dealing with day-in-day-out reality; I was dealing with patterns rooted in the past.

Since food was obviously my drug of choice, I tried a couple of OA meetings. At the time the few OA options on the Vineyard followed the “Grey Sheet” plan, which looked like, and indeed was, a diet. Not what I was looking for. I wanted to deal with the compulsion part, not control the calories I was taking in.

Then I found an Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) 12-Step meeting in the doctors’ wing of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. There I found my tribe. I kept coming back. I was asked to lead the fourth meeting I ever attended. I didn’t realize at the time that this was highly unusual. Leading the meeting was Mary Payne, who was sure not only that the newcomer was, like her, a lesbian but that she would come out if she had to introduce herself. She had my number: I was and I did. On the Vineyard in the mid to late ’80s, gay men and lesbians lived mostly under the public radar. We knew each other, but no one was, as they say, “flaunting it.” This was my invitation. A door opened up. I walked through it, not knowing what the reaction would be. The reaction in that ACA meeting was pretty much “No big deal” and “Keep coming back.”

Along with being the chair of that particular meeting, Mary (1932–1996), the founding director of Island Theatre Workshop (ITW), was frequently described as “a dynamo.” This is 100% accurate. She was under five feet tall but had the presence and impact of a six-footer. AA’s 11th Tradition says that “our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion.” Mary’s PR policy was the exact opposite: she was a tireless promoter, and in her worldview the overlap between theater and recovery was significant. Come by the theater — Katharine Cornell Theatre, “KC” as I soon learned to call it — during a rehearsal, said Mary. ITW was rehearsing Molière’s The Miser. I could help with PR. (This was probably my introduction to the Tisbury Printer, which printed all of ITW’s posters and programs.)

This T isn’t a T at all — it’s got a collar — and it predates my involvement with ITW, but it’s the only ITW shirt I’ve got.

I hadn’t done theater since high school, but over the years I’d often been at least on the peripheries of the performing arts, especially music. Hallowmas, my D.C. writers’ group, had given public readings. I was tempted, but I was also terrified. I envisioned the theater as a cavernous space with tiny figures at the far end, none of whom I recognized and none of whom noticed me.

When I finally mustered the nerve to walk up the outside stairs and open the door for real, what I saw was a cozy, even intimate space, flooded with light from tall multi-paned windows on both sides. Between the windows were four giant murals, two on each wall, depicting scenes from island history and island life.[2] In the mid-1980s the seats were covered in a green vinyl that could emit a sound like flatulence if you changed position. They’ve long since been replaced by a textured blue fabric that remains blessedly silent.

The front of the house, just in front of the proscenium stage, was bustling with activity. Rehearsals usually had two or three dogs in attendance: Mary’s Schipperke, Jenny; Nancy Luedeman’s Lhasa Apso, Featherbell; and Lee Fierro’s Meggie, who was larger than the other two but not by much. Dogs were of course verboten in KC, and equally of course Mary and company ignored the prohibition.

You’ve seen this shirt before, but some shirts keep coming back.

I was quickly hooked. Mary was impossible to say no to, but the reasons for “yes” were compelling. I was still getting my bearings on the Vineyard, still half thinking that I was just here for a year, and here, abracadabra, was a ready-made multigenerational circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, quite a few of whom were lesbian or gay. I got included in potlucks, holiday gatherings, and birthday parties. I got part-time jobs and house-sitting gigs through theater connections. On solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days — the sacred days between the solstices and equinoxes: Samhain (Hallowmas), Brigid (Candlemas), Beltane (May Eve), and Lammas — Mary often hosted witchy celebrations in her living room.

Not surprisingly, all this theatrical ferment affected my writing. I set aside the novel I thought I’d come to the Vineyard to write. What came out of my pen and my brand-new computer was poetry, along with reviews and occasional essays for the lesbian and feminist publications I hadn’t quite left behind. My two first stage-managing gigs, first of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play and then of Medea, inspired work that I’m still proud of, including “The Assistant Stage Manager Addresses Her Broom After a Performance of Macbeth” (see below). I was giving readings and sometimes hosting an open-mic poetry night at Wintertide Coffeehouse (you’ll hear more about Wintertide in a future post). “MacPoem,” as I came to call it, was my favorite performance piece.

Step 2 of the 12-Step Program: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Theater was part of that power for me. While growing up, I had associated theater with addiction, so it was wildly appropriate that it become part of my recovery. Mary’s approach was, to say the least, unorthodox, but it worked.

Notes

[1] This was what prompted me in the early 1990s to write a series of columns for the feminist wiccan journal Of a Like Mind, on working the steps from a pagan/feminist perspective. In keeping with the 11th and 12th Traditions, these were bylined “A Pagan Twelve-Stepper.” They were popular enough to be collected into a pamphlet, which I’ve still got a copy of.

[2] Before long I learned they’d been painted by Stan Murphy (1922–2003), the eminent Vineyard artist.

* * * * *

the assistant stage manager addresses her broom after a performance of “macbeth”

Who am I? Let me tell you what I do.
Within these walls I manage time and space,
make sure the pitcher’s on its hook before
its bearer wants it, warn the messenger
he’s on soon, check to see his torch is lit
and that the backstage lights are out. Right now
I’m cleaning up debris from this night’s show.
Is this a dagger I see before me?
It is, but split in pieces. I’m the one
who tapes it back together after hours.
Tomorrow night this plastic dagger turns
to steel, honed sharp enough to pierce a haunch
of gristly meat — or Duncan’s royal breast.
Before each show I sweep the stage. I see
green needles strewn where Birnam Wood has come
to rest the night before. I shiver, chilled,
as if I’d slept and woken centuries hence
with all my friends and family dead. And then
I sweep them all away. “Out, out, damn trees!”
I cry, “You haven’t come here yet! Begone!”

Here, separate ages stream like shimmering strands
in one great waterfall, and time dissolves.
Mere mortals we, what havoc do we wreak?
Elizabethan Shakespeare conjured up
Macbeth, medieval Scottish thane, and we
invoke them both, in nineteen eighty-six.
I watch the people enter, choose their seats,
and rustle through their programs. Normal folk,
it seems, and yet this gentle summer night
they’ve purchased tickets to a barren heath,
a draughty castle primed for treachery.
Right now the lights are up, the theatre walls
are strong, the windows fixed within their frames.
At eight o’clock the howling winds begin,
the wolves close in, the sturdy walls are gone.
These common folk, I wonder, have they bought
enough insurance? Have they changed their bills
for gold and silver coin? If challenged by
a kilted swordsman, how would they explain
their strangely tailored clothes?

                   No loyal lord
or rebel threatens me. Between the worlds,
or through this velvet curtain, I can move
at will. I warn the sound technician, “Ten
more minutes,” then I pass backstage to say,
“The house is filling up.” The Scottish king
is drinking ginger ale; a prince-to-be
in chino slacks is looking for his plaid.
The Thane of Glamis is pacing back and forth,
preoccupied with schemes to win the crown,
or trouble with his car. I prowl backstage,
alert for things and people out of place.
Last night I found a missing messenger
outside the theatre, smoking cigarettes.
I called him back in time: Macbeth’s bold wife
demanded news — What is your tidings?; he
was there to gasp, The king comes here tonight!

No phone lines run to Inverness, no news
at six o’clock. (Walter MacCronkite’s face
appears and says that base Macdonwald’s head
was nailed upon the wall, that Cawdor’s fled
and Glamis has been promoted; polls predict
he might go higher still.) The kingdom’s nerves
are messengers who run from king to thane
to lady. Take the Thane of Ross, who comes
to tell his cousin that her husband’s flown
to England, leaving her unguarded; then
he takes himself abroad, to where Macduff
and other rebel lords are planning war.
Macduff’s unguarded lady fares less well.
A breathless runner pleads, “Be not found here;
hence, with your little ones!” but on his heels
come murderers, death-arrows from the king.
Two sons, a daughter, and their mother die
with piercing shrieks that vibrate in my spine.

With piercing shrieks vibrating in my spine,
I contemplate a different line of work;
this sending harmless people to their deaths
is bad for my digestion, and what’s more,
it’s happening much too often. First I let
King Duncan in, and he gets killed in bed.
Could I have known so soon that Cawdor’s heart
was rotten? No. But shortly after, I
send scoundrels to the banquet hall; Macbeth
himself has called them. Not the kind of guest
that Duncan entertained! And then I tell
Macbeth’s friend Banquo and his son it’s time
to join the party. What about the thieves
I know are lurking on the gate road, dressed
to kill? But Banquo is a fighting man,
well-armed, and Fleance does escape. Not so
Macduff’s fair lady, and her kids. Could I
prevent their deaths? What if I plied the brutes
with Scotch? They might get drunk enough to lose
their maps, or drop their knives, or fall asleep.
What if I whispered in the lady’s ear,
“Don’t go outside today — and bar the doors.”

I doubt she’d pay attention. Each one goes
to meet the dagger destined for his breast.
Perhaps I’d get my point across if I
could speak in rhyme and paradox, the way
the witches do, with fair is foul, and foul
is fair. The witches manage time and space
like me; you could call me the unseen witch.
I wonder, are they working from a script?
You’ll see: the second sister sweeps the stage
as I do, clearing them the space they need
to cast their circles. We both summon kings
and apparitions out of time, although
our methods differ some. “You enter soon,”
I warn, “stage right.” Mundane, compared to how
my sisters work, with Double, double, toil
and trouble, cauldron, fire, and lengthy list
of weird ingredients — the eye of newt
and toe of frog, the blood of sow that ate
her piglets — but we get the same results.
Our audience is moved to awe, and then
proceeds along its merry way to rendez-vous
with fate, or Birnam Wood, or man not born
of woman. They get blamed for it. I don’t.

The witches disappear, and one last time
prince Malcolm calls his kin to see him crowned
at Scone. The set is struck, costumes returned
to cardboard boxes, wooden banquet bowls
and Scottish flag to rightful owners; kings
go home to mow the lawn or fix the car.
Where did the blasted heath go off to? I
am leaning on my broom again. What stays
when all the parts spin off? Just memories
of daggers, prophecies, and anguished screams?
The air still tingles here. The gates remain
but smaller, well concealed. I might reach in
and conjure back that knife, that messenger.
“There’s knocking at the gate,” the lady says,
“Give me your hand! What’s done cannot be undone.”  
To bed, she says. To bed, to bed, to bed.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 2 Comments

1985–1986: Morgana Comes on Board

The several seeds planted my first off-season on Martha’s Vineyard sent out tendrils that kept growing for years, often tangling with each other. Where to start, where to start?

It probably doesn’t really matter where I start because I’ll get to where I’m going no matter what, but let’s start with computers.

I acquired this T several years later, almost certainly in my science-fiction-con-going years (roughly the ’90s), but it’s the only computer-related shirt I’ve got so here it is.

My first serious computer relationship was with the TRS-80 that Lammas Bookstore acquired while I was working there, around 1983. The TRS-80 (the T in TRS is for Tandy, the main inventor, and the RS stands for Radio Shack, which produced and marketed it) was a wildly popular workhorse that introduced hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people to what IIRC were then called microcomputers, to distinguish them from the hulking machines that occupied whole rooms at universities and big businesses.

For the first few weeks I was terrified that I’d hit the wrong key and blow something up. It was a little like learning to drive. In both cases, the terror passed. I didn’t have my first real computer disaster till several years later, when I accidentally erased a client’s current accounts receivable file. Fortunately it was only March so it wasn’t hard to reconstruct it from bank statements and paper invoices. And by then my relationship with computers was so solid that one screw-up didn’t do it any damage.

This TRS-80 Model II looks like my memory of Sylvia, except Sylvia’s case was white.

Once that TRS-80 and I got through our shakedown cruise, we became good buddies. I named her Sylvia after my editorial mentor, Sylvia Abrams; my brilliant high school history teacher, Sylvia Sherman; and Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia character. Sylvia had two 8-inch floppy drives in the same unit as the monitor, a separate keyboard, and a word processor called Scripsit. She was connected to a dot-matrix printer.

When I left Lammas and D.C., I was accompanied by the venerable red IBM Selectric I’d bought from a friend some years earlier, but I was ready for a computer of my own. Most participants at the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops that summer of 1985 were still using typewriters, but at mealtimes we talked as much about computers as we did about food.

That fall, I found my way to EduComp, which was then located in a little house set back from the sidewalk on Main Street. Proprietor Pat Gregory introduced me to hard drives. I was an instant convert: with a 10MB (!!) hard drive and one floppy drive, instead of two floppy drives like Sylvia, you didn’t have to keep swapping program disks in and out. This option would add $500 to the cost of a basic system, but even to this chronically frugal New Englander it was hands-down worth it.

I bought my first computer on an off-island foray to Framingham: a Leading Edge Model D (an IBM clone). A Wikipedia article supports my memory of the cost: in addition to the $500 for the optional hard drive, I paid $1,500 for the computer itself (it also had a 5 1/4” floppy drive), $500 for WordPerfect 4.1, and $500 for an Epson LX-80 dot matrix printer. $3,000 was the most money I’d ever spent on anything.

Setting it up I was on my own, but in those days software came with manuals, hardware instructions weren’t hard to follow, and you could actually reach a real person by calling tech support. Once the tech guys (all the ones I spoke with were guys) ascertained that you had plugged the computer in, connected the cables, and turned the thing on, they treated you like someone who was capable of understanding and following directions.

Morgana was named for the Celtic goddess the Morrigan, for Fata Morgana (Morgan le Fay); and for the hero of C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine novels. Her equine namesake was the Morgan horse. The Morgan horse stamp was released that September. I stuck one on Morgana’s case. As the first Morgana was succeeded by Morganas II, III, IV, and V, the stamp migrated to each one as a sign of continuity.

Since in September 1985 first-class postage was 22¢, it was also a reminder that while the price of computers kept coming down, the cost of mailing a letter kept going up. Believe it or not, I’ve still got that stamp, much the worse for wear (see right). After Morgana V, around 2010, I switched from desktops to laptops and started a new naming convention, so since then the stamp has been stuck to a cupboard door above what used to be my computer desk.

Me in my vintage Tisbury Printer T-shirt

As my savings dwindled, I entered the Vineyard workforce as a freelance typist, running an occasional “situation wanted” ad in the Martha’s Vineyard Times classifieds. The Tisbury Printer — with whom I’d established a connection doing PR and other print-related tasks for Island Theatre Workshop (more about that to come), and which I’m pleased to note still exists — referred me to people who wanted cut-rate typesetting for lengthy documents, booklets and even books. I’d type the manuscript on Morgana, then take the floppy disk down to EduComp (which unfortunately no longer exists, and which I miss a lot), which by then was located in the big building at the head of Main Street.

At first EduComp rented out time on its laser printers to the public, but it turned out that most customers needed so much hands-on support and supervision that it was taking up too much staff time. They made an exception for me and a couple of others who were capable of sitting down with a disk unsupervised and getting the job done. My girlfriend in the late ’80s was a graphic artist: she did the layout using my typescript. We produced a couple of books and at least two Nathan Mayhew Seminars course catalogues that way.

Come to think of it, seat-of-the-pants on-the-cheap publishing has been a theme through my adult life, from my antiwar movement days to my evening job proofreading that law weekly, to off our backs and Lammas Bookstore, on to the Vineyard, and right up to the present day. 1980s publishing technology was strictly horse-and-buggy compared to what we’ve got now, but hey, it got us where we wanted to go.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 2 Comments

1985–86: Transition to M.V.

I don’t remember how I found my first winter rental — Linda, my father’s former girlfriend, probably had something to do with it — but it couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a walk-up a stone’s throw from Five Corners, the heart of Vineyard Haven, and the main room’s picture window looked out on Vineyard Haven harbor. I could tell time by the arrival and departure of the ferries.

My apartment had no lock on the outside door so there were no keys. It didn’t lock from the inside either. This was so unimaginably different from my D.C. life that I wrote a sestina about it. You’ll find it at the end of this post.

My end of the little parking area was dominated by the busy Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway next door. It was hard to park anywhere without blocking someone in. Since everyone’s keys were invariably in the ignition, getting unblocked usually didn’t take long.

The Beach Road end of the parking area belonged to the health food store next door (where the Martha’s Vineyard Times has been located since the fall of 1991 — much more about that later). The owner would place a flyer on the windshield of any vehicle that blocked one of his customers: offenders were threatened with being beaten with a carrot.

My apartment came with one parking space, at the foot of the semi-enclosed outside stairs. Parking space, you ask? What use had carless I for a parking space? Linda had a hand in that too. She lived in England during the off-season, so she gave me the use of her 1980 Subaru. All I had to do was take care of basic maintenance and let her grown kids, who all lived Stateside, use it when they were on the island. For someone who for years had gotten around by bike, bus, or subway or on foot, this was a windfall.

It was also a learning experience. The very first morning in my new digs, I came out to discover that one of my gift car’s tires was flat. I’d never changed a tire in my life. OK, I thought, the car can just sit there till Linda comes back in the spring.

Fortunately Courtesy Motors was then located right across the street. Owner Larry Conroy did not treat me like an idiot female, which is what I was feeling like. He lent me an air can, showed me how to use it, and, when I’d inflated the flat and driven round to the back of the shop, put the spare on. He’s been my mechanic ever since. Well, OK, his son Jesse is now running the shop, which relocated quite a few years ago to the outskirts of town.

I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to start from scratch in a new place. I’d saved enough to live on for a year if I was frugal, so I didn’t even have a job to organize my new life around. The only year-round Vineyarder I knew lived up-island and wasn’t especially social.

By the early 1990s, this very, very old Black Dog T had been supplanted by the ubiquitous, iconic Black Dog shirt (and sweatshirt and mug, etc.). I don’t have one of those, but I do have two parodies. They’ll be along later. This shirt claims to be a large. That’s a crock. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to fit into it.

Being an early riser, I took to walking around the corner to the Black Dog Bakery each morning for coffee and a raisin bran muffin. After a few days or maybe weeks of this, a bakery worker would recognize me in line, bring me my usual, and take my money. Maybe I belonged here after all?

But what to do after I’d finished my coffee? Before I left D.C., I had started writing what I thought would be a novel about a woman, roughly my age but a graphic designer, who on impulse had moved from D.C. to Martha’s Vineyard to manage a small horse farm that belonged to a family friend. I planned to work on that, but writing 24/7 was not in the cards, and though I do pretty well with solitude, I am not a hermit.

Once I was actually living on the Vineyard, I realized I didn’t know half enough about the place to write a novel about it. What I wrote those first few years was mostly poetry, and book reviews and other nonfiction for feminist publications I already had a connection with: Sojourner, off our backs, Hot Wire, Feminist Bookstore News . . .

I went looking for connections to my D.C. life: singing, bookselling, and, of course, women. If I wanted to keep singing, it seemed I had to join a church choir. No way was I going to attend a church service every Sunday: I put singing on hold.

I struck out with bookselling too: Bunch of Grapes was interested, but only if I would sign on full-time — and they only paid $4/hour, which would go up to $4.25 after a trial period. At Lammas, a comparatively shoestring operation, I’d been making $5/hour, my health insurance was paid for, and the owner paid herself the same amount she paid me. This was clearly not the case at Bunch of Grapes. Eventually I was going to have to buy a car, and I couldn’t see that happening on $4.25 an hour.

I like this shirt a lot even though I had no connection with the original shop. I am a longtime fantasy & science fiction nut, however, and this is one of only two brown T-shirts in my 200+ collection. Why is brown so rare?

Unicorn Tales, which had recently changed hands and would soon be renamed Bickerton & Ripley, never responded to my application, even though my résumé made it clear that I had serious bookselling experience. The new owners were a lesbian couple who may have thought they were in the closet (no one else did). Did they pass over my résumé because “feminist” and “lesbian” were all over it? Maybe they just mislaid it, or weren’t looking for help.

In my D.C. world, “feminist” and “lesbian” overlapped so often I thought they were practically synonymous. Martha’s Vineyard showed me that they weren’t. Women of all ages dressed casual, often in jeans and flannel shirts. To my urban eye, they looked like dykes — until I noticed the wedding rings. I made the connection: many of the lesbians I knew in D.C. and elsewhere, including me, had emigrated from small towns and rural areas because coming out in our hometowns was difficult if not dangerous. Maybe all the Vineyard dykes had left town.

In my wanderings I paid particular attention to bulletin boards, which is how almost everything from special events to Help Wanted got advertised. Here’s my recollection of how I made the connection that played a huge role in my decision to stay on the Vineyard, or at least my decision not to leave just yet. It rings true enough, but is it?

What I spotted was a small announcement that some women were organizing a program on women’s rights for a meeting of the M.V. League of Women Voters. The League was barely on my radar, voting wasn’t a priority, but women? That was a serious draw. I called the number and got roped into the planning of what turned out to be a panel discussion at Katharine Cornell Theatre (remember that name — it will come up again).

Of what we said or how it was received I have zero recollection, but it turned out that the core organizers were not only League members; they were also part of an informal women’s group that had been meeting regularly for some time. As far as they were concerned, the two of us “outsiders” who’d helped with the planning were now part of the group. They asked us to join them. Both of us did.

This is from 1995, but it includes several members of the women’s group that I became part of in (I think) 1986.1995 was the League of Women Voters’ 75th birthday year. We marched as part of the League contingent in the Fourth of July parade. From left: Carol Koury, me, Patty Blakesley, and Ann Hollister.

This, I came to realize, was what feminist organizing looked like on Martha’s Vineyard. All of the other women were straight, several were divorced, and the husbands of those who had them were generally in the background. For about ten years they were my Vineyard lifeline. Two of the group were full-time teachers, another was a therapist, yet another worked for one of the island towns. Year-round island life was far more complex than I’d realized as an occasional summer visitor.

The Key Sestina

My city apartment needed four keys,
the mailbox a fifth. Two for each of two
jobs, and a tenth for my bicycle chain.
A fine rattle they made, a heavy weight
in my pocket. There was one key whose lock
I’d forgotten. I would not throw it out.

My island friend spends the whole day out,
leaves her door open, needs only the keys
to her car. My new apartment won’t lock
from the inside; I still sleep well. Here too
my ten-speed bike leans against the wall, wait-
ing for me, sheltered from rain, but not chained.

It’s strange at first, leaving padlock and chain
behind, stopping by my friend’s when she’s out
to use her phone. I miss the clanking weight
in my pack, the rattling of all those keys.
Each of them meant commitment, access to
home, store, office, women’s center, all locked

against the untrusted. I knew that locks
won’t stop everybody. The severed chain
remains; the bike is gone. In less than two
months my house was robbed three times. We were out
at work, we’d locked the doors, we had our keys;
the burglar had none but he didn’t wait

for us. Perhaps it’s only custom’s weight
that makes a barrier of a door that’s locked.
When my mother drank, I’d hide her car keys,
not knowing she had a duplicate chain.
Once in a muted rage I put them out
in plain sight. Did I want her dead? or to

end my responsibility? These two
options nag twenty years later, their weight
unsettled. I visit, after years out
of New England, her house, whose door is locked
always. My mother from her extra chain
detaches and gives me a front door key.

Says the keeper’s jangling chain, “Just wait,
I can split the world in two: danger
locked out, comfort kept in — or vice versa.”

November(?) 1985

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1984–85: D.C. Area Feminist Chorus

The story behind this one starts way, way back, long before I moved to D.C. the first time.

My family wasn’t especially musical. My maternal grandmother played the piano by ear, which I thought was cool, but unless Granmummie was visiting,[1] what music there was in our household came via records and the radio.

Not to discount the importance of records, however: When I left for college, I absconded with my father’s Joan Baez album, her first. I didn’t need to take his Tom Lehrer LPs — Lehrer’s first, the one whose cover featured a caricature of the pianist as the devil surrounded by the red flames of hell (see below), and That Was the Year That Was — because most of the songs were embedded in my memory.

I’ve still got that Joan album, and the 10 or so of its successors that I acquired legitimately in the following years, and I still know a ridiculous number of Tom Lehrer songs by heart.[2]

See what I mean? Originally released in 1953, when I was 2.

Like many middle-class-and-up suburban kids my siblings and I took piano lessons with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The teacher wasn’t especially inspired or inspiring. I did learn to read music, but I didn’t learn to pick songs out of the air the way my grandmother did. That was disappointing, but what I didn’t really understand was what all that tedious practice could lead to. If I had, maybe I would have persisted.

Or maybe not.

I did, however, like to sing. Singing was the best part of church, where we went almost every Sunday morning as a family: St. Peter’s Episcopal in Weston, Mass. From fifth grade through eighth I sang alto in the junior choir. After eighth grade, when we aged out of both the junior choir and Sunday school, we could join the adult choir, but the adult choir sang at the 11 a.m. service and my family went to the 9:15. That’s when I left the church.

In my eighth-grade year, Becky B., also an eighth-grader, a soprano who’d been in the choir as long as I had, told me that I always sang off-key. To avoid ruining the anthem, she said, I should just pretend to sing.

No one else — not the choir director/organist, not any other member of the choir, not any of my music teachers in school — had ever told me any such thing. Becky B. didn’t like me and I didn’t like her; she was a goody-two-shoes who was always playing up to the adults. But I feared she was right, that I had been found out.

Somehow I made it through the year. Then I stopped singing. Period. When I entered high school in the fall, the music teacher encouraged me more than once to try out for Glee Club. Since she directed the Glee Club, this should have given me confidence, but it didn’t. I was sure I’d fail and confirm beyond any doubt that Becky B. was right: I couldn’t sing.

It was years before I recognized the pattern: I’d pursue a skill, an instrument, a foreign language — then abandon it when I was on the verge of being able to actually use it. At that point you’re bound to make mistakes. In my family making mistakes got you creamed. My very intelligent and well-read father regularly ridiculed my mother for getting the wrong answer or saying anything he considered stupid. I learned to get my facts straight before I opened my mouth. From an early age I’d been good at words, anything to do with words. I stuck to words, spoken and written, but never sung.

I never stopped listening to music, though, or hanging around people who made music or were somehow in the music biz. Gradually, and usually in fits and starts, I got braver, venturing into territories where I didn’t have all the answers and was bound to make mistakes: taking that first editorial job at the American Red Cross, for instance, or becoming the book buyer at Lammas Bookstore. I did well at both, but note that they both had to do with words: in some ways I was pushing the boundaries of what I was already good at.

The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus was founded in 1978, prompted by a singing workshop led by Holly Near during that year’s Gay Pride celebration. In its early months it was leaderless, with members leading warm-ups and teaching each other songs.

At some point, they decided to engage a director/conductor, and after interviewing several candidates, they hired Deb Weiner. Deb either was already or was soon to become one of my housemates, but this did not prompt me to join the chorus. If anything, it was a deterrent: What if it was your housemate who had to tell you that you couldn’t sing on key and were dragging the group down?

I have an indelible memory of Deb conducting the combined D.C. Area Feminist Chorus and Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington at a holiday concert, in either 1981 or 1982. To be the conductor channeling all that massive sound! I was awed.

How did I come to finally join the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus? Well, I have it on good authority — my own words from 36 years ago — that I set out to write a story about the chorus for Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture “and almost immediately found [my]self singing in the second soprano section.” By then Deb had moved on after several very successful years, Caroline Foty was the chorus director, and I was living on the far northeast fringe of Capitol Hill, subletting a large room from and sharing a kitchen with photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB).

By then, probably in 1984, I had joined the brand-new Gay and Lesbian Chorus of Washington (GLCW). How did I hear about it? I don’t remember. This was a small group, conducted by Tess Garcia, and my most vivid memory was of a performance we gave where Congressman Barney Frank, dressed in a leisure suit, reclined across several chairs in the front row. Most of the homemade cassette tape I have from a June 1985 performance is unplayable, but on the one audible cut, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” we sound pretty good. According to the label, the program also included some P.D.Q. Bach, the spiritual “Soon Ah Will Be Done,” and selections from Annie.

I noted the most striking contrast between my two choruses in that Hot Wire story: “Because the GLCW did not choose to specialize in works by gay or lesbian composers, a chorus member could walk into any music store and be overwhelmed by the available selection.” Not so any Feminist Chorus member: all our music consisted of handwritten scores photocopied or similarly duplicated, because none of it had been published. Director Foty did some of the arranging, and fortunately feminist choruses were thriving at the time, and lots of sharing went on among them through the Sistersingers network. We were breaking ground, pioneers, in the forefront, and very aware of it.

We sang at least two songs from the Balkan women’s singing tradition. I can still fake the second soprano part of “Shto Mi e Milo,” which has been widely recorded.

One of my favorites from the chorus repertoire was a four-part setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Conscientious Objector.” I didn’t realize till about an hour ago not only that Mary Travers had performed it spectacularly, but that she wrote the solo setting and recorded it on her 1972 album Morning Glory.[3] I have a copy of the poem on my fridge: “I shall die / but that is all I shall do for Death . . .” It reminds me of the song.

The chorus made decisions collectively, including decisions about repertoire. “Conscientious Objector” almost didn’t make the cut; that was before I joined, so I don’t know what the objections were. As I recall, a couple of chorus members thought Malvina Reynolds’s “We Don’t Need the Men” was too anti-male. For others among us, this was a plus, not least because it was so tongue-in-cheekily Malvina. It was fun to remind people that Malvina wrote it in 1959.

The most controversial song I remember from my time in the chorus was “Sisters, Spring of Vietnam”; it clearly favored the Vietnamese liberation struggle against the French and the Americans, and that did not sit well with some members. Singing along with Lucha’s version I remember the tune, the harmony, and many of the words, so I’m pretty sure we sang it anyway, but some choristers chose to sit it out.

The back of the 1985 Sisterfire T. The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus is about halfway down.

My last gig with the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus was at Sisterfire, June 22 & 23, 1985. By the end of that summer I was semi-settled on Martha’s Vineyard. Music was much easier to find than feminism, and find it I did, volunteering at Wintertide Coffeehouse starting in 1986.

It took a while to find a way to start singing again. My way in turned out to be the annual Christmas performance of Messiah, sung by a large (and ever growing) pickup chorus of Vineyarders, many of whom sang regularly in various church choirs.

I’d never sung Messiah before, and most of the chorus seemed to know it by heart. More, although I could read music, I couldn’t “sight-sing,” sing from a score on first acquaintance. I still regret not having the nerve to audition for Glee Club in high school, where everybody learned to do stuff like that. I worked hard, I learned, and when, in my third year, I made it through the glorious “Amen” without losing my place, I thought I’d arrived.

The annual Messiah sings eventually grew into the Island Community Chorus, which did several concerts a year and with which I stayed until around 2005. I’ve managed to keep singing since then. In the age of Covid-19, I’ve participated almost weekly in Zoom sings (Zings?) with Susan Robbins of Libana, a women’s ensemble whose music I’ve loved since at least 1980, and a bunch of whose recordings I’ve got.

But it was the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus that got me singing again, and though I didn’t sing with it for much more than a year, this shirt is about how I found my (singing) voice again.

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notes

[1] Which was fairly often, because she lived only eight miles away.

[2] This is so common among the political circles I’ve moved in over the decades that if I sing or even hum a line, often someone in the vicinity will sing the next one back to me. A favorite memory from my freshman year at Georgetown U.: As a marshal for the huge Mobe (Mobilization Against the War) march on Washington on November 15, 1969, I was stationed on Pennsylvania Ave. between 6th and 7th. We were close enough together that we could reach out and touch our neighbors on either side. It was sunny but bloody cold, and my winter gear was still back in Massachusetts: I had this idea that since D.C. was a southern city I wouldn’t need it till after Thanksgiving. Wrong. Anyway, while waiting for the sun to get fully up and the march to start, we did a lot of jogging in place and making coffee runs to the nearest drugstore. Eventually one of us — maybe me, maybe not — started in on a Tom Lehrer song. No idea which one, so many of them would have been appropriate — maybe “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” with its lines “I’ll watch the guided missiles / while the old FBI watches me”? We were sure the FBI and who knew what other intelligence agencies were around.

[3] My source for this is a detailed bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay on, of all things, the website for the ABC Oriental Rug & Cleaning Company in Ithaca, N.Y. There has to be an interesting story here, but I’ll have to save that rabbit hole for another time. The page seems to be updated regularly: it includes a reference to the ongoing pandemic and other events.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

My Only Bread Shirt

During my sojourn in England in 1974–75, I discovered unsliced bread. When I returned to the States in late November 1975, I discovered that sliced bread — at least what was available in the western suburbs of Boston at the time — didn’t measure up. After my Grandma died in February 1976, I moved into her (large) house to take care of it and her Lab, Max. In her big country kitchen I taught myself to make bread. I taught myself out of a paperback book because there were no bakers in my family. As I recall, I caught on quickly. One attempt did turn into the proverbial brick, but that was it.

Apart from almost five years when I was living in an apartment with no oven,1 I have been baking my own bread ever since. Bread is pretty much my only culinary accomplishment. If I don’t bring some form of bread to potlucks, people wonder if I’m OK. For about 25 years in a row I won ribbons for my yeast breads at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society fair. (Full disclosure: The yeast bread categories were nowhere near as competitive as the quick breads, and forget about brownies and cookies.)

Considering how central bread has been to my daily life for so long, it’s surprising that this is my only bread-related T-shirt. Even more surprising, to me anyway, is that I don’t remember how I came by it. I’ve never been to Gladewater, Texas, so someone must have given it to me, but I don’t recall who. A Google search tells me that Glory Bee Baking Co. closed its doors in 2010. Even though I’d never been there, that made me sad.

Independent bakeries have something in common with independent bookstores, and to paraphrase John Donne, the death of any one of them diminishes me and the communities I’m part of. Just up the street from Lammas Bookstore was the Women’s Community Bakery, which (as I just learned from Googling) closed in 1992.

“Just up the street” I say, but Pennsylvania Avenue SE was like a moat and for all the time I spent in the neighborhood I rarely crossed it.2 I had plenty of opportunities to sample their wares, however, with an emphasis on the cookies, muffins, and other non-bread offerings. If the Women’s Community Bakery ever had its own T-shirt, it must have passed me by.

I do still have my copy of Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book, published in 1983, which includes recipes from more than 30 independent bakeries, including the Women’s Community Bakery. It’s a handsome, spiral-bound volume, with each bakery’s section hand-lettered in its own distinctive style, and the introductory pages cover just about everything you need to know about bread baking if you’ve never done it before.

I rarely baked anything from it because so many of the ingredients could not be found in the supermarkets or ethnic groceries near me. Malt syrup? Millet flour? Soy margarine? Turned-down page corners and check marks do indicate that I tried some of them, though. These days exotic ingredients are easier to find, at least on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’m more confident about improvising and substituting than I was four decades ago, so maybe I’ll try again.

What I lack in bread-related T-shirts, I make up for in items related to bread-baking. Not surprisingly, many of these have been given to me by housemates and others with a vested interest in my continuing to make bread. These include my big bread bowl, my green-marble rolling pin, and my copy of Beard on Bread, which is held together with strapping tape. (See photo. My other most used book, Floss and Stan Dworkin’s Bake Your Own Bread, is in three pieces.)

The largest gift is the table I knead bread on. This was rescued from a Mount Pleasant (D.C.) alley by onetime housemate Beverly, she who also made my Feminism Is a Lesbian Plot shirt. Being handy with tools, she installed dowels to stabilize it, and voilà, the perfect kneading table. It’s accompanied me on all my many moves over more than four decades because most kitchen counters are the wrong height for kneading, at least if you’re very slightly over five-foot-four. In between bakings, it masquerades as an ordinary worktable, barely visible under the stacks of files, notebooks, and loose papers piled upon it.

Bread baker’s corner, with kneaded dough ready to be cut into loaves

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notes

1. This jumps ahead to Martha’s Vineyard, where affordable year-round housing was in crisis before I arrived in 1985 but denial was epidemic among the comfortably housed and it’s only been in the last few years that most people started to acknowledge that the situation was desperate. Landlords and tenants collude in evading local bylaws on what constitutes an apartment by omitting stoves from the dwelling. I cooked my meals with a hotplate and microwave, which worked fine — but I couldn’t bake bread. This was in the mid-2000s, from 2002 to 2007.

2. Phase 1, aka “the Phase,” one of the few lesbian-friendly bars in D.C. at the time, was also “just up the street,” across Pennsylvania Ave. on Eighth Street, but if I went there more than half a dozen times in my D.C. years I’d be surprised. I’ve never been a bar person. The Phase closed in 2016 (or maybe 2015, according to one website). The area around Lammas was its own self-contained neighborhood, anchored by Eastern Market, which is still there, seems to be thriving in an upscale sort of way, and even has its own website. I was in Eastern Market several times a week, usually looking for either a pulled-pork sandwich or Doris’s hamantaschen.