For Frying Out Loud (22 page)

November 2009

EXPEDIA DOT BOMB

Leaving 9-5 behind to be a full-time writer, it didn't take me long to utter the phrase I was told would eventually come out of my mouth: “I don't know how I had time to work.”

Sadly though, I've spent most of my days answering the door and arguing on the phone. Very little writing is getting done.

Actually, part of my time has been spent working out in-house territory rights with Bonnie and the dogs, who are not used to having me underfoot all day.

I admit, I'd be a little ticked too if my spouse, who used to be absent all day, was suddenly home running her mouth. Bonnie frequently sends me to my room to write.

So I'm in the den trying to compose language and Moxie is pissed off that he is no longer allowed to bark indiscriminately at joggers. And apparently, Paddy used to spend his days curled up in front of the file cabinet I keep opening and he's ready to go for my throat. Now Bonnie is standing at the den door complaining that she's been on her hands and knees for two days installing laminate wood flooring and her hips and butt hurt. Frankly, the way this has been going, I'm pleased she has a pain in the ass that's not me.

Finally, we agreed to sign the Schnauzerhaven accords. They stay out of my way, I stay out of their way and we all come back together for dinner like usual.

That would be great if I could just write, but most of my work time has been spent on the phone, arguing with nincompoops like
Expedia.com
. All I wanted was a flight-hotel-car package for a weekend wedding in, of all places, Austin, Texas.

I got a flight for two, a cheap car (a Yugo?) and a room. Fine. I wouldn't even be in Austin long enough to see the million bats fly out from under that famous bridge at dusk. Given that Molly Ivins is dead, the bat thing was really the only reason, besides the wedding, ever to spend a dime to go to Texas.

Imagine my surprise when Expedia charged my Visa card for two vacation packages – a total of four people flying to Texas, two Yugo rentals and a pair of hotel rooms. Short of inviting two other people to Austin not to see the bats, this was redundant. I lodged a complaint with Visa.

Then I went to call Expedia Customer Service. Ever try to find a phone number for a dotcom? Expedia doesn't want to talk to its customers so badly they hide the phone number like Where's Waldo. Oh, here it is in 2-point type.

For new reservations push one, for existing reservations push two, for vacation packages push three, for anxiety medication push four….

“All vacation specialists are helping other customers right now and….”

Vacation specialists?
I'm
a vacation specialist. These people are aggravation specialists. On hold, I put down the land line.

Then I made a cell phone call. Medicare had approved a new power wheelchair for my dad months ago and the government had already paid the supply company. Despite six months of calls to a woman named Christine, the chair has not been delivered. Dad is 91. You'd think they'd see some reason for expedia. Dot com.

So I called Medicare. A phone robot said “For Medicare selections say ‘one,' for Part B say ‘two,' for all other questions say ‘other.'

“Other.”

“I'm sorry,” said the robo-answerer, “I didn't get that, can you repeat?”

Of course I can repeat but how can I say “other” any clearer? I wasn't gargling the first time.

“O-T-H-E-R.”

“You have reached the Medicare Customer Service line. All operators are busy assisting other customers…”

Now there are two phones on hold in speaker mode with dueling elevator music.

Trapped at my desk, I played video games. Finally, the Expedia operator picked up. I described my dilemma.

“Yes,” she said, “on reservation 288 we have Fay and Bonnie leaving from Philadelphia in seats 17A & B, changing in Atlanta to seats 21A & B and arriving in Austin. We also have reservation 291 for Fay and Bonnie leaving from Philadelphia in seats 11A & B, changing in Atlanta to seats 14 A & B and arriving in Austin. Is that correct?

“No, that's not correct. Don't you see a problem with this?” I asked.

“You have paid for two packages,” she said.

“Yes, but the two of us cannot take up four airplane seats that are not adjacent to each other no matter how porky we are. Hell, if the seats were contiguous we could use the elbow room, but as it stands this is just wrong.”

She did not have a sense of humor. She said she'd check into it and call me back.

By this time Medicare took me off hold and I explained that the new chair had not been delivered, the current chair had both wheels leaning north, sending Dad in circles, which was what the wheelchair supply company was doing to us.

I have to say, the Medicare (government option!) people got right on it, checking the records and transferring me to the fraud division. I hope the chair people have good lawyers.

Okay, back to writing. But then the doorbell rings, setting the dogs off. Some teenager wants to re-seal my driveway. No thanks.

Barnum and Bailey had just calmed down when the doorbell rings again, with a hapless salesman trying to sell me a frozen side of beef. “Sorry, eating light these days!”

Then Expedia comes back on the line telling me they are e-mailing me a letter to sign and fax back immediately, swearing I will call off the Visa investigation until they sort it all out. Failure to do so would cancel both packages and keep me from going to Texas not to see the bats.

I considered it.

There goes the phone again. No, I don't want a special credit card rate.

Looky here, Fed Ex just showed up. And the grass cutters are here. Cue the dogs. Honestly, I don't know how I had time to work. But I'm considering getting a job.

Fall 2009

HOW REHOBOTH BEACH LIVED UP TO THE MEANING OF ITS BIBLICAL NAME AND FOUND “ROOM FOR ALL”

Recently, I was asked to write an article about “the gaying” rather than the “graying” of Rehoboth for
Delaware Beach Life
magazine. Our gay history has always been of interest to me, so I tackled the job and learned a lot - including how our town, which is named for a Biblical reference meaning “room for all” came to be the joyously diverse place it is today. Here's a bit of what I learned.

For a beach town founded in the 1870s as a Methodist Meeting Camp, Rehoboth Beach developed a gay sensibility surprisingly early.

In the late Victorian era, when the religious camp was abandoned, the area attracted visitors from within Delaware, assisted by a new boardwalk along the ocean and a railroad running directly from the Western part of the state to Rehoboth Avenue.

Lore has it that the du Pont property, between the ocean and Rehoboth's Silver Lake was where Rehoboth's gay reputation began. As early as the 1930s and well into the 1940s, actress Tallulah Bankhead, whose family lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, brought her Broadway and Hollywood cronies like Libby Holman, Noel Coward and Greta Garbo to frolic at the du Pont mansion. They were guests of Bankhead's dear friend, DuPont heiress Louisa D'Andelot du Pont Carpenter – the married but whispered to be sapphically-inclined socialite and aviatrix.

In the 1950s, Rehoboth earned the nickname it still has today: the Nation's Summer Capital, with Washington, D.C., lawmakers and their staff members fleeing the sweltering city summers for weekends or vacations at the beach. Then, just as now, both the legislators and their support staffs included quite a few gay people. And Rehoboth Beach was just far enough
away for deeply closeted singles and couples to enjoy themselves in relative anonymity. “Although we weren't called gay then. We were still homosexuals,” jokes one Rehoboth old-timer.

He and his cronies recall a very cultured, sophisticated gay scene. Hundreds of gay men would gather at what became known as Carpenter Beach in front of the du Pont mansion to relax on the sand, set up chess and backgammon boards and play volleyball.

UNDER THE RADAR

From the 1950s through the early ‘70s, the gay scene moved exclusively between beach and private house parties, since there were no specifically anointed gay bars. Even if there was a welcoming bar, liquor laws at the time prevented anyone, gay or straight from walking around carrying a drink. Under those circumstances, even if gays gathered at a gay tolerant establishment “it was almost impossible to meet anyone other than the fellow sitting right beside you” recalls one patron of the former Pink Pony bar on the boardwalk, where The Boardwalk Plaza now stands.

While it catered to a predominantly heterosexual crowd, gay men frequented the early evening happy hour. While not gay himself, owner Jim Booth is remembered as gay-friendly and happy to have had this new clientele. Up the block, The Pleasant Inn, at Olive Avenue and First Street, and several other guest houses, had a word-of-mouth reputation as gay-friendly as well.

With the ever present threat of exposure that could lead to loss of employment, or even imprisonment, most of these vacationing men kept strictly to their area of the beach and partied mostly at their closest friends' homes. Each weekend, small dinner parties, many formal and elegant, took place at numerous antique filled homes around Rehoboth Beach. It was a very discreet, very chic gay crowd.

This underground society communicated quite clandestinely in Washington, D.C., during the week, arranging parties
and overnight guest accommodations. When the men, along with an increasing number of lesbians, came to Rehoboth for the weekends, they could gather in an atmosphere relatively free from threats of exposure or physical danger.

One lesbian couple, Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford, lived on Laurel Street in Rehoboth. “As far as we knew for sure, in the 60s and 70s we were the only ones,” Anyda recalled in 2005, just before her death at age 95. She and Muriel, would take long walks around their neighborhood and every now and then they would spot a man or woman they thought might be gay as well. “We said, ‘Look, there's a shush.' We couldn't even say the word homosexual.”

While The Pink Pony was destroyed by the great 1962 nor'easter, the Nomad Village, a motel, bar and package store which opened in 1960 just south of the Indian River Inlet, survived the storm. According to former Nomad employee Jim Short, Randall Godwin and his wife, Betty, opened the Nomad with no thought that it would become a huge part of Rehoboth-area gay history.

“I didn't start out to have a gay bar, but it just sort of happened,” Randall Godwin said in an interview more than a decade ago. He said he opened a separate room for gays because he was afraid there would be fights with the straight bar patrons if he didn't.

“It's generally accepted that straights think I caused what was then called ‘the gay problem' in the area,” Godwin said. “But it's not true. They were already coming here from Washington, D.C.” Because traditional families weren't supporting Nomad Village the way he envisioned, “economically it just made sense to cater to the gays,” Godwin said.

Word spread that the Nomad back room was a great meeting spot for closeted folks from D.C. and, increasingly from Philadelphia and Baltimore, too. In the years right after the 1969 Stonewall riots for gay rights in New York City, the bar's popularity surged.

Rehoboth resident Fran Hueber and his late partner, Ross
Alexander, met at Carpenter Beach in the late 1960s and frequented the Nomad. “It was a very low-key sort of gay society here,” Hueber recalls. Alexander opened one of the first gay-owned retail businesses in town: Joss, an upscale gift shop at the corner of Baltimore Avenue and First Street, where a furniture store now stands. When Alexander died in 2002, the couple had been together for 37 years.

Many folks who went to the Nomad in the '60s and '70s remember being asked their names and having to sign in. Godwin insisted that this was not harassment – rather, he was just trying to keep the place a private club so he wouldn't be harassed. “We charged $5 to join and then a $3 cover with three tickets given out – good for three beers or two drinks.”

THE DISCO ERA

From 1972 though the 1980s, the Godwins fought the county over Nomad Village's zoning designation. And more than once they heard tales that lawmakers and county officials were “not going to do anything to keep that queer joint open,” he recalled. But open it stayed, and by the mid-'80s it was catering to an increasing number of lesbians visiting Sussex County as well.

Throughout those years, Rehoboth's reputation as a traditional family resort continued to build, while at the same time, more gay visitors arrived. Two gay dance clubs, the Boathouse and the Renegade, opened to celebrate the disco era, and 300 to 400 gay men could generally be found on the beach at the south end of the Rehoboth boardwalk on most weekends. The numbers swelled on summer holiday weekends.

On July 4, 1973, the Boathouse, opened by Francis Murphy, a Wilmington gay bar owner, and a straight couple, Sid and June Sennebaum, premiered at the water's edge in Dewey Beach. Wanting to ensure that the former Hawaiianthemed bar turned gay establishment would be a success, and free of harassment, Murphy hatched a unique business plan. He'd hire football players from the University of Delaware as
bouncers. But he had rules. In exchange for their promise never to utter one syllable of anti-gay talk – on or off the job – and to be fully supportive of the operation and its patrons, Murphy agreed to pay them $75 a night, which was double what other bar owners paid. As an added incentive, their girlfriends were welcome at the bar and could have free drinks. But one breach of the rules and they would be out without their fat paychecks. It was a winning contract.

The Boathouse was a spacious room, with a long bar at one side, and a big dance floor at the front. At high tide on the bay, water sometimes crept up to the porch, which was out over the water. Former patron David Leigey remembers that more than once customers helped sweep out the tidal waters from the brick floor.

With a clientele of 70 percent men, and 30 percent women, the place was generally packed with area visitors and the increasing number of gay men and women settling in coastal Sussex.

Former patrons tell amazing tales about the Boathouse. In addition to the hundreds of gays vacationing in Rehoboth and coming to the Boathouse, the club attracted FBI and CIA agents, U.S. senators, and members of the Washington Redskins. People came to Rehoboth just to go to the Boathouse.

Longtime couple Lee Mills and Don Gardiner, who now have a home and business in Rehoboth, remember a visit here in the summer of 1975. “The stretch between Ocean City and Dewey was a barren wasteland except for the Nomad – which is where we heard about The Boathouse. We drove to Dewey, turned off Route One and just followed the stream of boys heading toward the water from all directions.

“The place was really jumping. It was magical – even though it was in town, it was like a desert oasis,” Mills recalls.

But the good times lasted only a few years, until the Boathouse burned down. Was it intentional – a hate crime before that phrase was even made into a law? There are suspicions but no answers.

In May 1980, the Renegade dance club, owned by Glen Thompson, a D.C. bar operator, opened on Route 1 just outside Rehoboth. Condos and a carwash now occupy the site.

Busy from the first night, the Renegade was a smash. But less than eight weeks later, on July 4, 1980, the place burned to the ground in the middle of the night. Was that a hate crime? Thompson doesn't think so. “We really had no trouble with the local people.”

Whatever the fire's origin, it devastated the business and the summer crowd. Determined to rebuild, Thompson worked closely with Sussex County officials, who did everything possible to help the Renegade get its permits to reopen by Labor Day, Thompson recalls.

By a conservative estimate, 30,000 people dined, danced, saw shows, and in later years sang karaoke at the Renegade each year. It was also a custom for clubgoers to wind up at the Robin Hood Restaurant on Rehoboth Avenue for late-night breakfasts.

“Rehoboth was an integral part of my coming out,” says Eastern Shore native and former Rehoboth resident Jon Mumford. “It was magical because it was the only place I knew there to be other gay people. I remember crazy nights at the Renegade.”

While the early years saw the Renegade hosting many more men than women, by the mid-'80s, when the dance floor filled for the disco tune “It's Raining Men” there were lots of women there, too.

Rehoboth resident Julie Peters remembers good times at the Renegade. “It was really the only place to go to dance and it was always packed.”

THE MOON RISES

The late '70s and early '80s hold special significance for Rehoboth's gay community because it was the dawn of Rehoboth Beach as a culinary destination. Within a couple of years of each other both the Back Porch and the Blue Moon
restaurants opened. The Back Porch came first, opening in 1974 under owner Victor Pisapia and partners. Then, a few years later, Pisapia teamed up with Joyce Felton, a former New Yorker who worked at the Back Porch, to open the Blue Moon. It began a partnership that would dramatically alter the resort dining and gay nightlife scene.

On the weekend before Memorial Day 1981, with the polyurethane floors still drying and the liquor board due any second to check the place out, Pisapia and Felton opened the doors. And the Moon was mobbed.

The restaurant took off that first summer, as Pisapia and Felton concentrated on establishing a dinner crowd and staying open on weekends until 4 a.m. to catch patrons coming back from the Renegade.

As the Blue Moon received excellent notices from food critics at the
New York Times
and
Gourmet
magazine, the establishment got a different kind of notice from some folks in Rehoboth. For all the people delighted to have this upscale, urbane restaurant in town, there were others, very vocal, who were not happy at all.

Sometime during the first summer of operation, Rehoboth Mayor John Hughes, who has since completely changed his negative feelings about Rehoboth's gay population, called Pisapia and Felton into his office. It seems that somebody sent the mayor an article describing what he called “gay food in Rehoboth.” Pisapia, who was closeted at the time, stayed very quiet. Joyce, on the other hand, wanted to know just exactly what made food gay.

“It's your clientele,” came the answer. The mayor explained that there was no way this town wanted a gay restaurant. It was a warning.

While Pisapia and Felton worked seven days a week to keep the restaurant going, a mobilization began in town. There were meetings, sides were drawn and, as Felton recalls, rumors of an organization called AGVO – anti-gay vigilante organization. Just as Pisapia and Felton were frightened by the reactions the Blue
Moon unleashed, so too were the members of the opposition frightened by this new community they feared and didn't understand.

Amid the controversy, the Blue Moon continued to attract its diverse crowd and diverse reactions. It wasn't unusual for the restaurant to be pelted with tomatoes or beer cans from passing cars, just as it wasn't unusual for the dining room to be filled with both gay and straight diners, local business people and politicians.

According to Felton, on the night then-Governor. Mike Castle was having dinner at the Blue Moon, a full 16-ounce can of beer was hurled through the window just moments after his party departed. Fortunately, no one in the dining room was hurt – physically.

Things really heated up when the Blue Moon's neighbors got into the act, calling the City to complain about the bar and its clientele. If the police backed off and took a less aggressive stand about complaints, obsessive phone calls against the eatery forced them right back into the middle. Complaining neighbors and anti-gay residents had an agenda and the police were bound to investigate every call.