Charity Robey

Becky Cole, finding a way with words

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Becky Cole sees positive changes on Shelter Island.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 19, 2017

There’s one picture of Becky Cole that she can stand looking at. It was taken in 2005, when she and other members of the Writers Guild were on strike outside Wainscott Studios.

She held up a sign with three rows of numbers that the strikers flipped to count the days of their protest. When they got close to 100 days, someone took a picture of Becky with her sign and it ran in The East Hampton Star.

“I looked a little ragged,” she said. “But also bemused and defiant. I like that.”

Becky grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a 1960s household she described as “bohemian” led by parents who were well-educated and creative. Bernard Cole was a photojournalist with assignments allowing him to travel widely and often. Becky’s mother, Gwen, was an artist who created detailed, exquisitely-drafted works.

Although Becky was an only child, she had a half brother and sister from her father’s first marriage; siblings she only got to know when she was nearly grown. “As an only child, I spent a lot of time alone,” she said. “I think it’s where a lot of my creativity came from.”

Becky’s parents were introduced to Shelter Island in the 1950s, spending summers here when Becky was 6. “I lived in the city, but I grew up out here,” she said. “There is something about that yearly check in — you come out and stay till Labor Day, unstructured time. Total freedom.”

A good student in grade school, in junior high Becky began to struggle with what would be diagnosed years later as dyslexia. By the time she was 17, she dropped out of high school, moved out of her parent’s apartment and went to work. “I was in a hurry to grow up,” she said.

Her first job was in a studio that did work for catalogs, setting up jewelry to be photographed. Assigned to arrange 140 wedding bands for a shoot, her arm was twitching somewhere in the middle of the second day of ring-arranging and she knocked half of them over. She was immediately reassigned. Her boss told her he needed a way to keep track of the jewelry that came in to be photographed, and Becky established a merchandise control system to do it.Next, she wrote advertising copy for jewelry catalogs, “going to the thesaurus and making a list of synonyms for scintillating, brilliant and exquisite,” she remembered.

Becky moved into medical writing, supporting herself writing about disease, health and nutrition. A book-packager hired her to write books on fiber in the diet, and when she got a call about working on a book to be called “Loving Longer,” she guessed correctly it was a study of premature ejaculation. “They wanted me because of my medical background,” she said, “but they really just needed a writer.”

Becky wrote a script for the televisions series, “Cagney and Lacey,” that was made into the episode, “Right to Remain Silent,” which aired in 1986. Although she was paid almost nothing, it got her into the Screenwriter’s Guild. Starting in 1990, Becky was a staff writer for “One Life to Live,” responsible for a script every week, and sometimes two or three. She loved the work and the people she worked with until new management came in, fired the film and theater people who had been producing the program and replaced them with marketing executives.

When a new producer asked for a story line involving a romantic relationship between two characters, the unintentionally cringe-worthy plot twist was shelved when one of the long-time writers informed the executive that the characters she wanted to marry each other were brother and sister.

In 1994, when the soap won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series Writing Team, Becky was one of the eight writers honored. “We walked off stage, were handed our Emmys and were busy noticing that it’s really easy to stab yourself with the wings — very pointy! And there was Gladys Knight walking towards us saying she loved the show.” Becky said. “It was a very warm few minutes.”

As part of Shelter Island Library’s series Friday Night Dialogues, Becky will discuss her experiences writing for the soaps on Friday, January 20.

She had kept up her relationship with Shelter Island, even when living and working in the city. Her mother and father were full-time residents once they retired, and after her father died in 1992, she continued to spend extended time on the Island with her mother, moving out to care for her in 2000, and eventually inheriting the family home on South Ferry Road where she lives.

Becky admits to a few missed opportunities. “I wanted to marry, I wanted to have kids, but I missed all my deadlines,” she said, “Those are huge regrets in my life.”

After leaving the world of daytime drama, Becky worked refinishing furniture, a skill she learned early in life from her uncle. She is also an active volunteer, especially when editing and writing is involved. She’s worked with the 2Rs4Fun program that helps Shelter Island School students improve their writing and reading skills, and she offers editing and writing expertise in the Ferry Writers group that meets twice a month.

For almost a year, Becky has run a popular Shakespeare reading group at the library, preparing extensive notes to stimulate the group discussion for each play the group reads.

“It is truly the best thing in my life,” she said. “I love that prep work.”

She claims the distinction of sharing a bed with William Shakespeare, since the entire left side of her bed is “all books on Will. He takes up a little more than half the bed — he’s kind of a sprawler.”

Becky likes some of the changes she’s witnessed on the Island over the years. For example, when she was growing up this was one of the most conservative voting districts in the country, but in the last two presidential elections the Island voted for Obama and for Clinton, a development she observed as a poll-watcher. She also cites a more open-minded attitude toward people moving here from off-Island.

“I think it has become much easier for an outsider to get into Island life,” she said. “I think the movement of so many summertime people to become full time residents had something to do with it.”

Bluegrass band heats up an icy Saturday night.

ANNETTE HINKLE PHOTO The Lonely Heartstring Band in performance Saturday night at the Shelter Island School auditorium.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 19, 2017

An inch of icy snow coated Shelter Island Saturday night, but it would have taken a blizzard to keep Islanders away from the annual January bluegrass concert, an event that never fails to blow away the bleak.

A capacity crowd removed their outerwear, pulled off their mittens and put their hands together as The Lonely Heartstring Band kicked off Sylvester Manor Educational Farm’s 2017 Concert Series at the Shelter Island School auditorium.

Tom Hashagen was the host of the evening, and his group, Tom and Lisa and Friends included vocalist Lisa Shaw on keyboard, Steven Uh on fiddle, Henry Goode Jr. on bass guitar and Scott Hewett on drums. They dived into the song “Hungry Man,” made popular by Louis Jordan in 1949, and set the tone for an evening in which eating was a recurring theme.

The Lonely Heartstring Band’s lead singer and guitarist, George Clements wooed the crowd by introducing “Deep Waters” from the band’s new album, saying, “We’ve played a few islands, this one is an Island unto itself.” The song, with lovely lilting harmonies and fiddler Patrick M’Gonigle’s sonorous yearning passages was like bluegrass songs of the humpback whale.

The band played great bluegrass arrangements of pop music, especially on the Paul Simon song “Graceland,” where bassist Charles Clements showed his artistry. In the second set, the band rocked the J.D. Crowe song, “Born to Be With You” with nary an untapped-toe in the house.

Near the end of the band’s first set, a possible source for the soaring tenor, Mr. Clements vocal stamina was sourced as he expressed enthusiasm for the ginger orange cupcakes on sale in the lobby. He had already eaten one before intermission.

The band mainly skipped the hard-drinking, train-riding, prison-abiding genre of bluegrass in favor of fresh takes. George Clements and Patrick M’Gonigle wrote most of the bands distinctive songs, in which the tides do more rolling than the trains, whales mourn instead of doves, and songbirds sing out against the environmental toll of mining fossil fuel — themes not always associated with traditional bluegrass.

Matt Witler on mandolin and Gabe Hirshfeld on banjo rounded out the band with skill, heart and extremely fast fingers. In Mr. Hirshfeld’s charming introduction to his song, “Big Bruce” he revealed that he named this lovely fiddle tune for a French bulldog he met in a bar, a break with the bluegrass tradition of naming songs after coonhounds.

Mr. M’Gonigle announced that George Clements had enjoyed a second cupcake during intermission, to good effect judging from their rendition of “Songbird,” a protest waltz — a genre they may have invented — with close harmonies and haunting lyrics about the mining of the Alberta tar sands.

The Lonely Heartstring Band delivered extraordinary musicianship and a sound that wove bluegrass tradition with contemporary themes. This was the first in the Sylvester Manor series that will bring bluegrass, Celtic and Northern fiddle music to Shelter Island in seven concerts and barn dances throughout 2017.

Confessions of an airbnb user

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 12, 2017

Renting through airbnb is like getting married in Las Vegas.

 

It’s convenient, it’s easy, but is it really the best way to make such an intimate connection? I say this as one who has been on the demand side of the vacation rental sharing economy.

My mother is in her 80s but she doesn’t let that stop her from organizing family trips. She can usually get seven or eight of us together, with ages ranging from preteen to octogenarian.

Our first airbnb experience was an apartment in Paris. It wasn’t really big enough for me, my two sisters, four nieces and my mom, but once a few of the nieces had been persuaded to sleep on the floor, and my mother volunteered to take the couch, we all had a place to rest.

What we lacked were any kitchen cabinets, or even shelves. The owner stored all of her dishes, including pots, plates and glasses on the floor of a dark alcove next to the sink. As we made dinner each night, a niece was sent into the alcove to get plates and glasses, and after dinner another niece put the washed and dried dishes back on the alcove floor.

After a few days, we noticed that some of the dishes had cracks and chips. Slowly we discovered that the process of retrieving and replacing the dishes had not been an orderly one. About half of the plates, and most of the bowls, were broken as a result of being stepped on, stacked unwisely or otherwise jostled.

I left the country before the moment of reckoning came. I’m told the broken dishes were just one of the affronts that the owner of the apartment cited when she informed my mother that there would be no refund of the security deposit, and not only would she never rent to my mother again, but she would mention the vandalism of her apartment on the airbnb site, ensuring that my mother could never use airbnb again.

Not only was my mother able to rent from airbnb again, but the next Paris apartment she found came with its own menagerie — a horde of French-speaking mice who gamboled across the kitchen floor, stopping off at the garbage can before continuing through the dining area to the balcony via a tiny hole in the sliding glass door screen.

They were a merry tribe and seemed amused when we jumped on the dining room chairs and shrieked as they completed their dash to the balcony. The owner of this apartment sent someone over to check on the situation. She noticed an open bag of grain in the cabinet and tossed it, which did not stop, but seemed to take the edge off the mouse activity.

I know that any kind of houseguest, paying or not, can damage things, but when it’s someone you know it doesn’t seem so bad. For example, when my mom and her friend Betty stayed at my place when I was away, Betty mistook the radiator cover in the bathroom for a clothes hamper. Several weeks went by before I figured out the source of the strange, singed smell and opened the radiator cover to find three towels, a pillowcase, and a washcloth stuffed around the fins of a blazing hot radiator.

The Berlin apartment my mother found through airbnb was owned by a business professor who left town when school was out, and seven of us stayed there for a week. There were no screens in the windows (the custom in many parts of Germany) and no clothes dryer, since most Germans apparently hang their wash to dry, considering it to be more healthful and easier on the planet. But winged creatures did not fly in the windows, and we enjoyed the sight of each other’s underpants hanging like Tibetan prayer flags in every room.

The one exception to our comfort was the owner’s placement of a cactus collection on the steps leading up to a loft where four of us slept on pads and foldouts. To visit the bathroom at night, we had to descend a steep and winding open staircase, clinging to the banister. It was impossible to avoid clutching the cacti.

This resulted in intermittent yelps that woke the household.

We left the professor’s apartment more or less intact, garnering a positive airbnb review from him: “It was a nice experience with this group, well organized, clean and quiet, eager to see Berlin.”

A local carpenter told me about a lost letter, still in its envelope, that he found in the wall of an old farmhouse he was renovating. The letter dated 1890, was written by a man whose family was renting the house for the summer while he was working in Manhattan. The rent was five dollars a month.

That century-old letter reminded me that although Shelter Island residents have been renting their homes to make money for a long time, everything about that transaction has changed. Long gone are letters of introduction and visits to see the property and assess the trustworthiness of the renter. Forget about brokers, or references, and especially forget about a family with the inclination to rent for more than two weeks.

The online marketplace has made renting someone’s home in a quiet residential neighborhood as effortless and anonymous as staying at the Holiday Inn off exit 72 of the LIE. And if my neighbor’s house is listed on airbnb, I better prepare myself to hear some breaking dishes, shrieking and yelps this summer.

Matzo ball soup, a medical miracle

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO The cure: They don’t call chicken soup ‘Jewish penicillin’ for nothing.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 12, 2017

Neither flu shots, nor surgical masks, nor repetitive handwashing can save me from my January fate.

Sooner or later, someone in my house will require a life-saving dose of chicken soup, and it’s up to me to come through. They don’t call this stuff Jewish penicillin for nothing.

In the lineup of necessary life skills, the ability to make chicken soup is somewhere between delivering a baby and performing the Heimlich maneuver. You probably don’t need to do it every day, but when the time comes, do it right.

The first principle is to start with a whole chicken. The soup depends on the bones and skin of the bird for the magnificent flavor of the stock.

The second principle is to deploy the so-called holy trinity of onion, carrot, and celery to flavor the soup. The combined flavors of these three vegetables mystically elevate chicken soup from broth to healing substance, and provide color and fiber as well as taste.

Matzo ball soup

8 servings
One 4-pound chicken, whole
12 cups of water
2 cups onion and 1 cup each carrot and celery (the Holy Trinity) all cut into ½ inch pieces
1 tablespoon tarragon leaves
2-3 teaspoons salt
Fresh ground pepper
1. Rinse the chicken inside and out and pat it dry. Remove the flap of very fatty skin near the cavity, and the fat around the neck by pulling it away with a paper towel. Slice the fatty skin into strips, place the strips in a small skillet and cook very slowly over low heat to render the fat. Save the rendered fat (this is schmaltz) for the matzo balls and eat the crunchy bits of skin that remain to keep your strength up.
2. While rendering the fat, place the chicken in a deep pot with a lid, add the water which should barely cover it, and bring it to a boil. Turn it down to medium and cook the chicken, covered for 35 minutes skimming off any foam that appears.  Remove the chicken from the water and let it cool until you can remove and discard the skin. Remove all the meat and return the carcass and all bones to the stock pot. Reserve about two cups of the meat and cut it into bite-size pieces.
3. Bring the stock and bones back to a simmer and cook covered for about 3 hours, skimming foam if it appears.
4. Strain the soup into a 10-cup container and allow it to cool so you can skim off the fat that rises to the top.
5. Return the stock to a saucepan, add the vegetables and tarragon and bring it to a simmer cooking until the carrots are tender, about 20 minutes.
6. Add the salt and pepper, but don’t add all of the salt to the soup without tasting it. It’s very easy to add too much salt to chicken soup, and until the vegetables are cooked, you won’t really be able to tell whether it needs more.
7. Add the reserved chicken and reheat it to serving temperature.

For about 20 matzo balls, mix together:
1 cup matzo meal
4 eggs
¼ cup seltzer
¼ cup schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) or vegetable oil
Salt, pepper

Let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for 30 minutes and shape the balls with wet hands, drop them in boiling water, turn down the heat, bring back to a simmer, cover and cook for 10 minutes.

Strain the water and add the matzo balls to finished soup along with the reserved chicken.

Loren Reich, Living the 'Shelter Island way'

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Loren Reich

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 5, 2017

Loren Reich was a well-paid, internationally-traveling executive based in Manhattan, when she decided she was ready to move to the Island full-time in 2005, after years of coming out weekends. She saw an ad for an executive assistant position and when she got a call from the man doing the screening he had a warning. The position involved working at a laboratory run by U.S. Department of Homeland Security for the study of animal diseases.

He said, “Do you know anything about Plum Island?”

Tuning out hysterical warnings (from everyone) about anthrax, Loren did her own research and went out by boat to the island a mile and a half off Orient Point for an interview. “When they took me to the beach and I saw all the seals,” she remembered, “I said this is for me.”

She has the best commute ever, she said, and isn’t kidding. To get from the home on Shelter Island she shares with husband, Peter Reich, she boards the 6 a.m. ferry to Greenport, drives to Orient and boards a second ferry for Plum Island employees. The last leg of her journey goes through Plum Gut, an area that is No. 5 on coastalboating.net’s top 10 list of challenging waters in the Northeast. The site describes the chop as “jaw jarring.”

Loren grew up on Long Island. Her parents Rosetta and Leonardo were emigrants from Northern Italy, who met at a Sunday dance in Queens. A Venetian dialect of Italian was the primary language spoken at home for much of Loren’s childhood. Academically, there were high expectations for her, the oldest of three, and her sisters Louise and Paula. She remembers a recurring dream involving a shelf of books falling down on her head. “There was no such thing as failure,” she said.

Graduating Phi Beta Kappa and a semester early from Stony Brook University in December 1979, she quickly realized that even with a first-rate education “and two languages, you can’t necessarily get a job.”

She needed to learn to type.

A part-time job at Macy’s selling men’s colognes paid for her post-graduate study of shorthand and typing at Katherine Gibbs, and she discovered she actually liked working retail: “It allowed me to pretend to be an extrovert.”

Loren landed a job with an investment management firm, then moved to a French bank as executive assistant to the general manager, using her French and Italian along the way. She worked for several decades as an executive assistant for an Italian multinational energy company, Eni S.p.A., travelling widely and moving up through positions of increasing responsibility and salary to become a manager at the firm.

Like many Long Islanders, she wasn’t aware of Shelter Island. But her Aunt Clara bought a home in HiLo Shores, and when Clara’s daughter Roberta got married at the Ram’s Head Inn 25 years ago it was a big deal in the family.

“It was a very elegant wedding,” Loren said. “My Aunt Clara would have it no other way.”

Loren’s strapless, flowered dress and matching bolero was accessorized by an enormous black picture hat that looked like something Princess Diana would wear to Ascot. “I was dancing with my Uncle Tony and I had to take it off because it was tilting,” Loren recalled.

By the time she left the Ram’s Head for the North Ferry with her sister and sister’s husband, the unique darkness of streetlight-free Shelter Island had fallen. “We got very, very lost and it was very, very dark,” she said.

By 1998, Loren was living in Manhattan, working long hours, unmarried, saving money and deciding to buy a home of her own on the Island. “I came out on a magnificent September morning and stood right at the bow of the ferry,” she said. “Paradise was in front of me.”

The broker had instructed her to meet at the office, but when she got off the ferry and did not see a realtor’s office she asked a gentleman in a station wagon outside the ferry house if he knew the way. Loren recalls he said, “Yes, it’s right up the hill, but hop in and I’ll take you up there.”

During the short wait, another woman and her baby got into the car and the four of them drove up the hill to the realtor’s office, located next to STARs. Thinking she was in a cab, Loren tried to pay the driver, who refused her money, informing her that the woman with the baby was his daughter, who he picked up every week.

“‘I was just giving you a ride,’ he said to me, and I’ll never forget this, ‘That’s the Shelter Island way.’ Now having lived on Shelter Island for many years I understand exactly what he meant by that. There is a Shelter Island way. You just do things for your neighbors and your friends because we are on an Island and that’s how we are.”

A natural-born crafter, Loren never sees a flat surface she can’t improve with some paint, adhesive or a going-over with sharp scissors. Although her current passion is gum paste flowers, when she took possession of the Silver Beach house she immediately began putting self-stick tile in the kitchen, marking the beginning of a home improvement phase that would last for years.

“I proceeded to paint the whole house and remove the indoor/outdoor carpeting,” she said. “I was doing everything by myself with spit and tissue paper.”

In 2004, Loren’s Aunt Clara intervened with a suggestion. She recommended Loren do a professional renovation, pointing out that Peter Reich, a principal in Reich/Eklund Construction, was recently divorced and suggested Loren call him for advice.

They went to Southampton to look at countertops, had lunch and when Peter took a call from his daughter on the speakerphone on the way back to the Island, Loren was struck by the nurturing and supportive way he spoke with his daughter. She thought he deserved “a close look.”

While Loren was looking closely, Peter, a lifelong mariner, administered the boat test. “The first time Peter took me out on a boat, the waves were significant,” she said. “So I asked him, ‘If I were inclined to be seasick, I would be sick by now, right?’ Having passed the test, he gave me a kayak.” They’ve been married now for 10 years.

In 2013, Peter and Loren faced a crisis when Peter became seriously ill, eventually being diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Enduring chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, plus many weeks of isolation at home after the transplant, Peter eventually recovered in 2015. “I don’t like to see people suffer, and I am squeamish, but I gave him close to a hundred injections over the course of his treatment,” Loren said. “What helped me through that period was that ability to put a lid on the emotion and focus on getting Peter well.”

She still marvels at the change she made in 1998, a change she hardly understood at the time. “My life here is so full and complete and content,” she said. “New York, the place I thought was my favorite place, really no longer is.”

And the commute is better.

Loren Reich Lightning Round

What do you always have with you?  Pen and paper. I make lists.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  My Aunt Clara’s place in HiLo Shores on West Neck Bay.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Newport. We have a cottage, 800 square feet. A little sanctuary.

Last time you were elated?  The day that I passed my Project Management Professional certification exam.

What exasperates you?  Not having enough time to do all the things I really love to do.

Last time you were afraid?  During Peter’s illness, especially when we had been told there was no sign of cancer, but we didn’t know what he had.

Favorite movie or book?  ‘Gone with the Wind.’

Favorite food?  Pasta Bolognese, maybe the true Bolognese is a combination of beef and pork, but I grew up using just beef.