Media, PA - 1981-1983
elysistrata long ago asked me when I was going to write about my years living in Media, PA - so
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I was 20 and living at home after two hedonistic and unproductive years at that college in the hills of West Virginia, when my friend Ruth called me up and said there was a room opening up in the house where she lived outside of Philadelphia and did I want to come check it out? I did. So early one morning I hopped the cross-country bus (literally cross-country - this was the Los Angeles-New York bus. I met a woman who was traveling from Albuquerque with her young daughter. They'd been on the bus for three days. They were amazed by the sight of contour farming, the method of farming on hilly ground where you plant crops in alternating bands across the slope to keep the topsoil from eroding downhill - it was summer, and I suppose the green and gold stripes of soybeans or corn and wheat across the fields were beautiful to someone from the arid southwest, although growing up with them I took the view for granted) and hied me off to Philly.
Ruth's living situation was this: A bunch of people, ages 20-something to 30-something, lived in this big, somewhat run-down Victorian house on a couple of acres of ground in the lovely town of Media. Everyone had their own room, common areas and housekeeping were shared equally, food was bought from a collective budget and dinners eaten communally. They ate vegetarian, in part because it was less expensive than eating meat, in part because some of the people were veggies and it made more sense than cooking two or more different entrees. A couple who had until recently lived in the house still kept a large garden in the back, and two guys, one who made custom furniture and one who repaired and refinished old pieces, rented the carriage house for their workshops. Several of the people in the house taught at a private, progressive school called The School in Rose Valley. It felt like a grown-up place, and I thought I was ready to be on my own.
So about two months later I moved in. The residents at the time were a couple about 10 years older than I with a baby who they were raising vegetarian (a concept I had never even considered); a single woman who had recently come back from a year teaching in Harbin, China; my friend Ruth; and me. Around the same time, a guy moved into the room above me for a couple of months, and the only thing I remember about him is his first name and the loud enthusiastic sex he had with his girlfriend, who was only supposed to visit on the weekends but as we quickly discovered was actually there almost full-time and not contributing to rent, utilities, food, etc. When he and his GF left, we went through a roommate "vetting" to fill his spot - the tradition, when there was a open room, was that candidates (usually responding to an ad in the local paper or a posting on a bulletin board) would come for dinner and we'd be able to find out if we thought they'd fit in. Even if the roommate fit didn't work out, we often made new friends.
That first time, the person we thought would be the best fit was R., who was a theater historian and doing some work at the Theater for the Living Arts in Philly. She seemed nice and interesting and we invited her to join our happy band, and all was lovely peaches and cream until a couple of weeks after she moved in when she revealed that she'd spent the previous year in a psychiatric institution in fetal position. She never said why, and we never asked, but it became clear very quickly that whatever it was, she wasn't completely better. She got involved with Ruth, who had a bad habit of sleeping with her housemates (more on this later), and it moved from sex to obsession almost overnight, with scenes like this: Ruth is in her bedroom with her headphones on and the inside latch hooked (because otherwise her bedroom door swings open.) R. comes to talk to her, knows she's inside, and concludes quite paranoidly that since Ruth won't talk to her she must be mad, and R., after knocking on the door and yelling loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, eventually climbs out onto the flat roof outside Ruth's window and starts screaming at her through the open window. She didn't stay long after that episode.
Subsequent fascinating-but-failed roommates included Al, who seemed like a nice enough guy but really didn't have a clue how to deal with strong women, and having moved into a house full of them encountered lots of ego-bruising moments and a fair amount of tension, and Richard, he of the bushy beard and Neanderthal brow, the macrobiotic diet (cabbage with vinegar! steamed millet!) and the pillow-punching anger management. He scared me more than a little.
It wasn't all drama and tension - far from it. I learned immediately that I knew absolutely nothing about cooking vegetarian, and the lovely and gracious Alison took me under her wing and introduced me to The Vegetarian Epicure and the Moosewood Cookbook, of which there was only one at the time :). Fortunately I knew how to cook - i.e., how to follow a recipe, and how to have multiple dishes come out at the same time, etc. - although I credit my time there with teaching me how to actually COOK - i.e., take a recipe and tweak it to my taste, or make substitutions based on what was actually in the house. Everyone took a night to cook dinner for all, and weekends were self-serve. (I sometimes took the opportunity to char up a nice piece of steak. Fortunately the dedicated veggies among us weren't averse to having meat cooked in the same pans they used.)
We had bits and pieces of rumored history on the place - I wish now I'd gone to the local historical society and gotten the facts. Media had once been a hot spot for wealthy Philadelphians to get out of the city; a resort hotel had once stood on the cul de sac that branched off opposite the house, although it had long since burnt down and only the front steps remained. Supposedly our house had been built as a summer home by a Philadelphia quarry owner. We had a guy come by one time who told us that the original house had probably just been two rooms up and two down, and the quarry guy must have built on to that.
The front walk and porch were inlaid with tiles of polished stone in different colors, pinks and grays and whites and beiges. Azalea hedges lined the walk from the stone pillars at the street to the front porch, about 75 feet, and in the spring they were a 6' high mass of scarlet blossoms. The rhododendrons around the house grew up to the second floor windows. Roses, lilacs, and daylilies sprouted in every corner of the property, among oak trees that were more than twice the height of the house. White and pink dogwoods, mountain laurel, and a couple of magnolias all bloomed within a span of weeks. Spring was gorgeous there. If I could bottle that memory I could be young forever.
Beside the driveway grew a weeping beech whose branches draped to the ground, making a cool cavern underneath, with a bench hidden inside for the perfect place to escape with a book. One weekend we held a garden party and tied back the branches like curtains so we could put the drinks table (mint juleps!) under there. I wore an ankle-length white cotton dress with eyelet around the bodice and puffy sleeves. We had men there in knickers and argyle vests and straw boaters, women in picture hats crowned with ivory roses, one man in an ice cream suit and gloves (Ruth came to me and told me she'd once dreamed that Tom Wolfe came to a party at the house, and here was that very image in the flesh. Eerie, but she had some gifts that way.) Later it rained, and we moved the badminton net into the library, and the croquet game ran through the dining room and up the stairs, with the wickets held up by stacks of books.
Current and former housemates, as well as other teachers and friends of theirs, gathered weekly to play "Irish music", which was as new to me as most of the rest of things. Every Tuesday about a dozen people would come for dinner and later retire to the library (yes, we had a library, with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fireplace, a window seat, and 12' windows), playing fiddle, hammer dulcimer, mandolin, guitar, flute, pennywhistle, etc. I was introduced the music of Turlough O'Carolan and the delights of hand percussion. Steve & Alison had a whole box of castanets, maracas, spoons, cat's-paws, shekeres, and hand drums, and one evening as we played people began one by one to set down their instruments and pick something out of the percussion box... until everyone was playing one, and we jammed along for a while, and suddenly, like on a silent signal, everyone STOPPED. We looked around at each other, hearts pounding, and everyone looked the same: stunned, joyous, and full of amazing magical energy. I've participated in a lot of intentional drum circles since then but not once have I experienced the synergy of that spontaneous drum.
I think this is long enough for now - more later.
**********************
I was 20 and living at home after two hedonistic and unproductive years at that college in the hills of West Virginia, when my friend Ruth called me up and said there was a room opening up in the house where she lived outside of Philadelphia and did I want to come check it out? I did. So early one morning I hopped the cross-country bus (literally cross-country - this was the Los Angeles-New York bus. I met a woman who was traveling from Albuquerque with her young daughter. They'd been on the bus for three days. They were amazed by the sight of contour farming, the method of farming on hilly ground where you plant crops in alternating bands across the slope to keep the topsoil from eroding downhill - it was summer, and I suppose the green and gold stripes of soybeans or corn and wheat across the fields were beautiful to someone from the arid southwest, although growing up with them I took the view for granted) and hied me off to Philly.
Ruth's living situation was this: A bunch of people, ages 20-something to 30-something, lived in this big, somewhat run-down Victorian house on a couple of acres of ground in the lovely town of Media. Everyone had their own room, common areas and housekeeping were shared equally, food was bought from a collective budget and dinners eaten communally. They ate vegetarian, in part because it was less expensive than eating meat, in part because some of the people were veggies and it made more sense than cooking two or more different entrees. A couple who had until recently lived in the house still kept a large garden in the back, and two guys, one who made custom furniture and one who repaired and refinished old pieces, rented the carriage house for their workshops. Several of the people in the house taught at a private, progressive school called The School in Rose Valley. It felt like a grown-up place, and I thought I was ready to be on my own.
So about two months later I moved in. The residents at the time were a couple about 10 years older than I with a baby who they were raising vegetarian (a concept I had never even considered); a single woman who had recently come back from a year teaching in Harbin, China; my friend Ruth; and me. Around the same time, a guy moved into the room above me for a couple of months, and the only thing I remember about him is his first name and the loud enthusiastic sex he had with his girlfriend, who was only supposed to visit on the weekends but as we quickly discovered was actually there almost full-time and not contributing to rent, utilities, food, etc. When he and his GF left, we went through a roommate "vetting" to fill his spot - the tradition, when there was a open room, was that candidates (usually responding to an ad in the local paper or a posting on a bulletin board) would come for dinner and we'd be able to find out if we thought they'd fit in. Even if the roommate fit didn't work out, we often made new friends.
That first time, the person we thought would be the best fit was R., who was a theater historian and doing some work at the Theater for the Living Arts in Philly. She seemed nice and interesting and we invited her to join our happy band, and all was lovely peaches and cream until a couple of weeks after she moved in when she revealed that she'd spent the previous year in a psychiatric institution in fetal position. She never said why, and we never asked, but it became clear very quickly that whatever it was, she wasn't completely better. She got involved with Ruth, who had a bad habit of sleeping with her housemates (more on this later), and it moved from sex to obsession almost overnight, with scenes like this: Ruth is in her bedroom with her headphones on and the inside latch hooked (because otherwise her bedroom door swings open.) R. comes to talk to her, knows she's inside, and concludes quite paranoidly that since Ruth won't talk to her she must be mad, and R., after knocking on the door and yelling loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, eventually climbs out onto the flat roof outside Ruth's window and starts screaming at her through the open window. She didn't stay long after that episode.
Subsequent fascinating-but-failed roommates included Al, who seemed like a nice enough guy but really didn't have a clue how to deal with strong women, and having moved into a house full of them encountered lots of ego-bruising moments and a fair amount of tension, and Richard, he of the bushy beard and Neanderthal brow, the macrobiotic diet (cabbage with vinegar! steamed millet!) and the pillow-punching anger management. He scared me more than a little.
It wasn't all drama and tension - far from it. I learned immediately that I knew absolutely nothing about cooking vegetarian, and the lovely and gracious Alison took me under her wing and introduced me to The Vegetarian Epicure and the Moosewood Cookbook, of which there was only one at the time :). Fortunately I knew how to cook - i.e., how to follow a recipe, and how to have multiple dishes come out at the same time, etc. - although I credit my time there with teaching me how to actually COOK - i.e., take a recipe and tweak it to my taste, or make substitutions based on what was actually in the house. Everyone took a night to cook dinner for all, and weekends were self-serve. (I sometimes took the opportunity to char up a nice piece of steak. Fortunately the dedicated veggies among us weren't averse to having meat cooked in the same pans they used.)
We had bits and pieces of rumored history on the place - I wish now I'd gone to the local historical society and gotten the facts. Media had once been a hot spot for wealthy Philadelphians to get out of the city; a resort hotel had once stood on the cul de sac that branched off opposite the house, although it had long since burnt down and only the front steps remained. Supposedly our house had been built as a summer home by a Philadelphia quarry owner. We had a guy come by one time who told us that the original house had probably just been two rooms up and two down, and the quarry guy must have built on to that.
The front walk and porch were inlaid with tiles of polished stone in different colors, pinks and grays and whites and beiges. Azalea hedges lined the walk from the stone pillars at the street to the front porch, about 75 feet, and in the spring they were a 6' high mass of scarlet blossoms. The rhododendrons around the house grew up to the second floor windows. Roses, lilacs, and daylilies sprouted in every corner of the property, among oak trees that were more than twice the height of the house. White and pink dogwoods, mountain laurel, and a couple of magnolias all bloomed within a span of weeks. Spring was gorgeous there. If I could bottle that memory I could be young forever.
Beside the driveway grew a weeping beech whose branches draped to the ground, making a cool cavern underneath, with a bench hidden inside for the perfect place to escape with a book. One weekend we held a garden party and tied back the branches like curtains so we could put the drinks table (mint juleps!) under there. I wore an ankle-length white cotton dress with eyelet around the bodice and puffy sleeves. We had men there in knickers and argyle vests and straw boaters, women in picture hats crowned with ivory roses, one man in an ice cream suit and gloves (Ruth came to me and told me she'd once dreamed that Tom Wolfe came to a party at the house, and here was that very image in the flesh. Eerie, but she had some gifts that way.) Later it rained, and we moved the badminton net into the library, and the croquet game ran through the dining room and up the stairs, with the wickets held up by stacks of books.
Current and former housemates, as well as other teachers and friends of theirs, gathered weekly to play "Irish music", which was as new to me as most of the rest of things. Every Tuesday about a dozen people would come for dinner and later retire to the library (yes, we had a library, with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fireplace, a window seat, and 12' windows), playing fiddle, hammer dulcimer, mandolin, guitar, flute, pennywhistle, etc. I was introduced the music of Turlough O'Carolan and the delights of hand percussion. Steve & Alison had a whole box of castanets, maracas, spoons, cat's-paws, shekeres, and hand drums, and one evening as we played people began one by one to set down their instruments and pick something out of the percussion box... until everyone was playing one, and we jammed along for a while, and suddenly, like on a silent signal, everyone STOPPED. We looked around at each other, hearts pounding, and everyone looked the same: stunned, joyous, and full of amazing magical energy. I've participated in a lot of intentional drum circles since then but not once have I experienced the synergy of that spontaneous drum.
I think this is long enough for now - more later.