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

When I Am an Old Woman

I acquired this shirt when I was around 30. Both the shirt and the poem whose first line graces it were popular with women my age, give or take a decade. This may sound odd but it isn’t: the poet, Jenny Joseph (1932–2018), was 29 when she wrote it, in 1961.

The possibly odd thing is that Jenny Joseph hated purple. It didn’t suit her, she said. I can’t help wondering if that was always the case. She was an accomplished poet, the author of several children’s books, and an all-round interesting person, but the poem became far more famous than she. Once the internet came along, it circulated widely with no name attached, and it has been often “adapted” over the decades — Google “when I am an old cowgirl” if you don’t believe me.

That’s enough to turn anyone against purple even if they loved it to start with. We poem quoters and T-shirt wearers loved purple. Lavender was for lesbians, and what was purple but a deeper shade of lavender? (If a T-shirt came in multiple colors, you could count on the lavender ones selling out first.)

So fast-forward about four decades. My friend Dan Waters — poet, master printer, artist, photographer, and my town’s moderator, among other things — has been photographing Vineyard characters for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, and he asked if he could photograph me. Hell yes, said I.

Photo by Daniel A. Waters

As the appointed date for the shoot approached, however, I was having second thoughts. It wasn’t that I was nervous about being photographed, it was that I couldn’t decide what T-shirt to wear. As you well know by now, I have a lot of options. Should I pick a Vineyard shirt? one from my horsegirl years? an overtly feminist or blatantly dykey shirt?

I spread the likeliest candidates, at least a dozen of them, out on my bed. When my eye fell on “When I Am an Old Woman,” I knew: That’s the one.

The shirt is purple, of course, though you can’t tell that from the photo. I don’t generally think of myself as an old woman, though, since I was going on 70 when Dan took the picture and am closing in on 71 now, I surely am.

This particular T-shirt seemed right because I was wearing purple then and I’m wearing purple now.

The last three lines of Jenny Joseph’s poem go like this:

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

No one, but no one, who knows me at all could be shocked or surprised that I wear purple. It’s probably one of my lesser idiosyncrasies.

Wave image by Hokusai, button design by Alison Scott

From a visual point of view, I rather wished I hadn’t decided to wear those two buttons, but they do represent important parts of my life. The one on the left is “Blue Wave 2018,” about the midterm elections during what blessedly turned out to be the Trump administration’s only term.

The one on the right — well, that goes back a while. It’s from the October 15, 1969, march to end the war in Vietnam. The D.C. march was my first big demonstration. I was a first-semester freshman at Georgetown University, majoring in Arabic and already minoring in antiwar organizing. The same logo was used on the two-day moratorium that preceded the huge November 15, 1969, national march on Washington. The two-day Moratorium, November 13 and 14, included a long, solemn, single-file march from Arlington National Cemetery to the White House. Each marcher carried a sign bearing the name of a service member or civilian who had died in Southeast Asia. At the White House they deposited their name signs into coffins that had been set up for the purpose.

Dan’s photo of me, blown up to four by five feet, will eventually appear in rotation in the lobby of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. He’s been at work on this project for a few years now: in 2019, before Covid-19 shut everything down, a selection of the huge photos was displayed at the museum. Who knows, maybe mine will eventually appear in a group show too!

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