Fried & True

by Fay Jacobs

  The first time I went to a community center was over 25 years ago. Peeking out of my very musty closet, I’d traveled to downtown Washington, D.C. from the ‘burbs, heading for a place called the Women’s Center. I correctly suspected that the name of the place was code for Lesbian Center.

  What happened there is why I am here—in Rehoboth, in my long-term relationship, and possibly here at all.

  I’d been in the D.C. area for over 15 years but had never driven downtown solo. D.C. intimidated me then and does now. There are four of every damn street. Northeast this and Southwest that. And those diagonal streets, names brimming with patriotism like Constitution and Independence Avenues, form trapezoidal mazes from which the only exit is a plunge into the reflecting pool by the Capitol.

  Lore has it that D.C.’s ubiquitous traffic circles were designed by inebriated City Architect Pierre L’Enfant, who kept putting his sweaty beer mug on his map plans and oops, made a ring. “We’ll call this one Dupont Circle….”

  So there I was, in alien territory, seeking a place to feel comfortable. That first visit to a welcoming space set me on my way.

  You have to kiss lots of Toadettes before you find your princess and go to lots of inappropriate venues before you find your niche. My Women’s Center visit led me first to a lesbian square dance. Hee-Haw!

  I sat pasted along a wall, watching 30 or 40 women dosey-do in Dale Evans get-ups. While it wasn’t my kind of thing, I got to see women enjoying being together as couples. Actually, I noticed many women in sleeveless shirts, who had obviously shunned underarm shaving (it was, after all, the late 1970s). Then and there I determined if I was coming out of the closet I was taking my razor with me.

  The next event was a lecture on Women and the Outdoors—which to me, was that distance between the car and Macy’s. These gals meant spelunking and backpacking.

  I didn’t know what was worse—hating myself for thinking I might be a lesbian, or hating myself because I hated square dances and mountain climbing and figured those were the only lesbian options. Geez, the gay community was just one more place I wouldn’t fit in. So evolved was my internal homophobia, I thought it odd, or queer if you will, that a gay group held meetings at a place called The Ethical Society. Snicker, snicker.

  But after a few more weird forays—a meeting on lesbians and depression (which, based on me, was redundant), a potluck where all the women but me dressed like Johnny Cash, and an unfortunate evening spent learning to play pool, things turned around nicely.

  My Women’s Center connections led me to a party in D.C. hosted by a friendly woman (remember this, there will be a quiz), where I met someone who invited me to an event, where I was introduced to another woman, whose friend lived near my home in the suburbs and…suddenly there were parties and dates and friendships.

  To this day, some of the women I met that fledgling year are still dear friends. Incredibly, many of them now live in Rehoboth.

  And the funny thing is, as I became more comfortable with myself and my new life, I became more adventurous and outdoorsy. After meeting Bonnie and getting to love both her and her passion for boating, I became one of those formerly daunting women and the outdoors. Although, I drew the line at camping.

  My second community center experience happened here.

  In 1995 Bonnie and I, knowing only a handful of people in Rehoboth, came to town by boat, docked just outside Rehoboth in Dewey Beach, and planned to spend summer weekends here. In our first week, Bonnie and I were subject to the rants of a homophobic chef at a Dewey burger joint. He spewed hatred with a side of fries. I was so upset I didn’t know if I wanted to remain here for the summer.

  I had seen the magazine Letters from CAMP Rehoboth and made my way to the tiny courtyard office with a letter to the editor I’d written. Though I didn’t know a soul there, I received a warm welcome and immediate help. Not only did the editor run my letter, but he contacted Dewey officials who promised to look into the situation. I don’t know whether it was the bad burgers or the community action, but the offending restaurant and its owner were soon gone.

  Hearing we lived on our boat and had cruised here from Chesapeake Bay, editor Steve suggested I write about the trip for Letters. Before we knew it, I was a columnist, Bonnie was donating volunteer time for something called Sundance, and we were up to our armpits (shaved, of course) in both CAMP Rehoboth and Rehoboth Beach.

  Within a year we were so deep in local activities, friends and the brother and sisterhood, we bought a condo here. From there, the ties CAMP helped us make, and the torture of crawling over the Bay Bridge every weekend, caused what would have been unthinkable a short time before: we ditched our corporate, dressed-for-success lives in Maryland and ran away to the beach. My father thought we were mental cases until he visited and began to see the liberating effect of our being able to live openly and proudly in our own hometown.

  Fast forward. Hundreds of people gathered for CAMP’s Community Center Founders’ Circle fundraiser recently, producing palpable energy, genuine excitement and spectacular generosity.

  Still, there are gay people in town who wonder why we need to build a full-service community center. Based on some image conjured by the words “community center,” they may feel disinterested; not needing a place to play checkers; having no use for meeting rooms, a library, art gallery, or Letters office.

  To them I say, please reconsider. Whatever physical shape the building takes, it really will be “the heart of the community.” More than a place to buy tickets, run a magazine, publicize events, hold meetings and welcome people who need help or companionship, it will be the future of gay Rehoboth.

  To me, it will insure that Rehoboth Beach stays a gay friendly resort and hometown for all of us, even if we never attend a single event, meeting, or envelope stuffing party there. For everyone who loves Rehoboth, gay or straight, this community center will anchor the activities and atmosphere everyone enjoys in Rehoboth.

  After all, years from now, when some homophobic goof ball makes insulting comments to some young gay man or lesbian just arriving in town, we want them to be able to head to the community center and discover what a safe and heartwarming hometown this can be.

  And by the way, just last month I ran into the woman whose DC home had been the site of that lesbian potluck dinner so many, many years ago on my coming out journey. She and her partner have a place here now and I watched them joyously purchase one of the paintings auctioned at the Founder’s Circle Ball. I guess that’s why they call it a Founder’s CIRCLE. What comes around goes around, and we want to make sure the tradition continues.

  August 2005

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  YELLOW SUBMARINE

  They say that if you remember the 1960s you weren’t there.

  I was there. My memories are appropriately fuzzy.

  The recollections that do still exist came trickling back last week as Bonnie and I prepared to attend a 60th birthday party with a psychedelic 60s theme.

  First let me say that the downtown shop featuring 60s gear (is it still called a Head Shop?) must have had a great week. Throngs of old people (how old am I? I want a caller ID on my side of the phone to remind me who I’m calling) kept asking for tie-dyed clothes and other 60s accouterments. The clerks took to asking if we were going to “that party.” Duh, yes. Why else would I buy a purple tie-dyed shirt festooned with peace symbols?

  Actually, when I think about it, I could amortize the outfit by marching, once again, in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue protesting a prolonged, bloody, senseless war. You’d think that the first time would have been enough.

  My freshman year at American U. in Washington, D.C. was 1966. I arrived on campus with a suitcase full of preppy pink Villager clothes, Bass Weejuns penny loafers, a record player bellowing “I Want to Hold Your Ha-a-a-a-and” and a penchant for showing up in class dressed to the nines, including prepantyhose hosiery, false eyelashes (I swear!!!) and more lipstick on my puckers than you’ll
find in barrel of lipstick lesbians.

  Within weeks, thanks to an intervention by my roommates, I wore holey denims with shredded bell bottoms, scraggy tie-dyed shirts, day-glo buttons, macramé headbands, and a face scrubbed clean of Maybelline. Those special Brownies were heavenly.

  On Thanksgiving my parents wrung their hands over the stranger who came to dinner.

  As the 60s turned increasingly psychedelic, our mop-topped Beatles morphed into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and we pulled all-nighters in the dorm—panicked cramming fueled by No-Doze, Mateus wine and smoke from a bong.

  While I studied (and I use that term loosely), I got to experience the apex of the protest era.

  During the huge 1967 march against the Vietnam War I rode up and down Constitution Avenue, my head poking out of the moon roof (although that term had yet to be coined) of my boyfriend’s VW bus. I photographed the protesters with my Kodak camera (with Flash Cubes). We traipsed up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gazed back at a sea of people, protest signs and civil disobedience. We were rebels with a cause.

  My first political campaign had me licking the proverbial envelopes for Robert Kennedy’s presidential bid. I was sure he could change the world and I wept as Walter Cronkite announced that my hero had been assassinated in that California hotel kitchen. It was my very first in a long line of political disillusionments and disappointments.

  I was at the District Building in D.C., when the city went up in flames following the Martin Luther King assassination. Some of his disciples burned their own neighborhoods, and my friends and I manned the phones trying to find milk and diapers for families without resources.

  As amazing as the political memories are, so too are my recollections of pop culture: Peter, Paul & Mary concerts (girls in peasant skirts, guys in Nehru jackets), Peter Max paintings, hootenannys in the dorm (how many deaths will it take till too many people have died? Sorry.), a win for the hapless NY Mets, and illegal substances everywhere you looked. We lived in an earthquake of cultural upheaval.

  Gloria Steinem renamed us Ms., we watched men take a step for mankind on the moon, wondered if Teddy knew Mary Jo was asleep in his car on the Chappaquiddick Bridge, said goodbye to Marilyn, watched Funny Girl and hummed Dylan’s Lay, Lady, Lay.

  Abortion wasn’t legal but you knew where to go. One of my friends almost died from a botched backroom job.

  And we protested everything from the bombs in Cambodia (for which we got tear gassed by DC civil defense troops) to the school cafeteria menu (resulting in the first Roy Rogers Roast Beef restaurant opening on campus).

  We took our Flower Power seriously.

  “No more falsehoods or derisions

  Golden living dreams of visions

  Mystic crystal revelations

  And the mind’s true liberation, Aquarius!”

  It was indeed the Age of Aquarius.

  Now, it’s 40 years later (40 years!) and the aged of Aquarius are partying in a Rehoboth Beach backyard.

  Some things don’t change. I never went back to eyeliner. I did lose the guitar, though. And shame on me, I had to Google the words to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But most of us Boomers are still protesting in one way or another. Now we write letters to the editor instead of taking over campus buildings.

  In fact, feeling uncommonly frisky in our tie-dye, my spouse and I partied hearty, followed the birthday bash by dancing at Cloud 9, then on to Louie’s Pizza for food to sober us up for the ride home. It was almost an all-nighter.

  The only difference is that back in the old days we didn’t need to gobble an aspirin and Nexium nightcap, sleep with three pillows to stave off reflux, and have to get up to pee several times a night—no matter how much 3.2 beer we drank.

  Peace and love, sisters and brothers.

  August 2005

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  TEA DANCE AND SYMPATHY

  I love this town.

  Although, for the past two weeks I’ve been kicking myself for saying “yes” to participating in a fundraiser at Café Zeus.

  When a brave Sussex County AIDS Council volunteer asked me to volunteer, he made it sound innocuous.

  All I’d have to do is climb up to the big white lifeguard chair in the Zeus courtyard, and spend five minutes at the Sunday tea dance asking for SCAC donations. How difficult could it be?

  Well, that was before I found out what usually goes on in that courtyard for Happy Hour. Then I was plain scared.

  Part of the Zeus bar culture is a fabulously well-attended Sunday tea dance where the lifeguard chair is filled by muscled, six-pack-ab-sporting lifeguard types, with and without body jewelry, with and without shirts on, promoting the sale of beverages to guys who appreciate the abs, body jewelry and shirtlessness. Sometimes the shots are delivered using flat abdomens as serving trays. Sometimes there’s CPR practice involved.

  What could they possibly want with me? My panic was only slightly assuaged knowing that other Rehoboth fools, favorite middle-aged bartenders, local coffee baristas and a certain Letters editor were similarly hoodwinked into participating.

  After all, SCAC desperately needs money for its transportation fund—the only way many clients have of getting to their doctors. How difficult could it be to raise the cash?

  How difficult? When I got to the Zeus courtyard on Sunday I found out. First off, the damn lifeguard chair looked three stories high. Yeah, there were steps, but they were further apart than these thighs have been in a decade. Short of hiring a crane, I’d need a sand bag and pulley system to hike me up.

  As the event began and the first life-guard victim took his seat, I sidled up to the bar for a cocktail. I know that worrying doesn’t solve anything, but it gives you something to do until the trouble starts. And there was going to be trouble.

  The “lifeguard” before me was a buff, bejeweled Baywatch clone. Twenty dollar bills for SCAC flew at the young man as he poured drinks into willing jaws—not an act to follow.

  They called my name and I walked to the side of the chair, hauled my ass up the first two steps, and from what has been reported to me (I have post traumatic stress amnesia), climbed Everest only with the assistance of three dykes and a boost from a body builder in leather swim trunks.

  Ah, the cheers! No, not for me. People cheered that I made it into the stupid chair so they wouldn’t have to put down their drinks to make room for the ambulance gurney.

  Once at cruising altitude, I loved the view: throngs of people braving the oppressive heat to drink for a good cause. A bunch of my buddies had shown up to support SCAC and their stupid friend, who was now waving a microphone and trying to figure out how to please this crowd to get donations. Singing “Let me Entertain You” and taking off a glove wasn’t it.

  Perhaps reverse psychology might work. I gazed across the ocean of mostly young male faces and found myself hollering “give me the money…or the clothes come off!”

  You should have seen the rush. Tens, twenties, all for SCAC.

  “Show me the money!”

  People plunked bills into the silver wine cooler collection pail and others stood below me, mouths agape like baby birds, with mama here pouring pink liquor into them.

  For the Miss Manners crowd we had tiny shot glasses so they wouldn’t have to rely on my aim. Good thing, because I missed a lot of mouths, dousing donors and causing shrieks, applause, laughter and sticky tee-shirts. I think I gave somebody a nasal enema.

  By minute three my loyal and long-suffering friends had all coughed up their cash, my previous victims were rinsing off and I was desperate.

  “Calling all Schnauzer lovers!” I yelled, and amazingly a Schnauzer owner appeared with some currency.

  It was a hundred degrees in that courtyard, and I was schvitzing like no other Jewish girl had ever schvitzed. “Okay, kids,” I screamed above the din, “deadline for Letters is tomorrow and if you don’t come across with the cash I’ll tell embarrassing fables about each and every one of you.” />
  That brought forth another flurry of fives, brave shot drinkers, and more and more money.

  Finally, the longest five minutes in the history of beverage service was over. Yay!!!!

  Oh god, I had to get down. By this time I’d stopped asking myself how difficult it could be. Would they let me just stay up there along with the next “lifeguards?” Then I could wait for happy hour to end and summon the volunteer fire department to retrieve me with the bucket truck. I looked down. It was a really long way to Tipperary. Thelma and Louise flashed through my mind; should I take a swan dive out into the crowd?

  I stood up, inched my way toward the ladder and dangled one foot, searching for base camp. The lesbian posse below gripped my swollen ankles, guiding me to the next step. Arguuuhhhh! There were so many people participating in the dismount I felt like a balloon in the Macy’s Parade. Finally, I hit terra firma to another round of cheers, mostly because people were relieved to have this particular circus act over.

  How difficult could it be, indeed. I understand that there were many thousands of dollars raised thanks to the incredible generosity of Café Zeus and the many, many greenback-tossing participants. And I got a column topic where none existed mere hours before.

  So for those who witnessed this whole discomforting affair, as they say in the play Tea and Sympathy, “When you think of this, and you will, be kind.”

  I love this town.

  August 2005

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  PR DISASTER 101

  Well, it’s the end of August and exactly one year since I wrote my last its-the-end-of-August and nothing is happening column.

  These dog days of summer (although, in my house it’s always dog days) are infamous for no real news to speak of, no juicy scandals and nothing much happening anywhere. August is when we get newspaper headlines like last week’s, “Woman downs 35 Bratwursts in 10 Minutes to win speed-eating title.”