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When the managing editor sent for me with a note saying I had been given a summer assignment "out-of-town," I made a dash for his office as if I were an Olympic gold-medalist. I loved Boston and my job as a music critic on the staff of an international daily newspaper, but the heat and humidity in that town during July and August melted my cool and made me irritable half the time despite the fun of covering the Boston Pops' summertime symphony series.
P'town! Hooray! I thought, reveling in the possibility that I might be off to Provincetown. I had heard scuttlebutt around the newsroom about a story the chief wanted written on the rapid growth of that former fishing village clinging to the shifting sand dunes at the tip of Cape Cod. It had become not only a major tourist destination, but also a gay mecca - which was what interested me.
I zoomed into his office and sank almost breathless into the chair facing his desk. "Yeah, boss? You wanted to see me?"
He gave me a nod and said, "It's not P'town, so wipe that smile off your face. All you young guys want is an ocean breeze and some mermaid wriggling her tail around the dunes! I've got something more interesting in mind."
Ha! I thought. More interesting than mermaids it better be!
I had something else wriggling around in my mind!
"It's the Berkshires for you, my man," he went on, "great music in the great outdoors! You're going to spend the summer covering the Tanglewood Music Festival. What do you think about that?"
Provincetown would have been wonderful, but Tanglewood was even better. Being a strawberry blonde with the pale skin that goes with it meant that I was no sun baby. Trips to the beach were actually dangerous for me. In those days before products were invented to protect the skin from the ultra-violet rays of the sun, I had to cover up with pants and caps and long-sleeved shirts to ward off a third-degree burn, but it was worth it to look at the half-naked guys. Hell, I couldn't even go fishing because the reflection of sun rays off the water burnt the inside of my nose!
Tanglewood was an estate in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts where the Boston Symphony offered a midsummer series of open-air concerts in a band shell at the base of a grassy hillside. Chamber music was also served up in the ballroom of a mansion on the estate. Being equidistant from Boston and New York, the series attracted people equally from both cities. The classical-music gay crowd from New York, who preferred Tchaikovsky (a gay Russian composer) to the beaches at Fire Island, and the same from Boston, who preferred the music of Mendelssohn (a German-Jewish gay composer whose music was banned by the Nazis) to the gritty pleasures of Cape Cod sand, assembled there.
I was more often a patron of Boston's venerable Napoleon Club, still extant as a sophisticated "silverfox" ("wrinkles") bar, than of the now defunct Punch Bowl, at that time a paradise of "twinkies" and "rough trade." Therefore, when my editor told me Tanglewood, I felt a rising warmth in my crotch.
I headed out of town on Route Two riding my trusty Vespa, a powerful motor scooter of the time, with my two dachshunds hanging out of an
orange crate strapped to the back. I was a motor-scooter aficionado in those days, having driven a Lambretta 150 (which I had named "The Road Angel") from Cape Town to Cairo in Africa, and another Vespa throughout Western Europe. I loved scootering around beautiful New England on weekends with the pooches riding pillion, in training, as it were, for later when I would take them with me to France.
I had found a cottage to rent for the summer in a rural area near Tanglewood. The owner was an elderly woman who lived in a pre-Revolutionary house at the front of the property alongside the highway. My little place nestled in a grove of elm trees on the banks of a creek, with a private road and an RFD (rural free delivery) mailbox of its own.
The dogs loved it there. A local farmer built them a dog run that spanned the water where they swam and frolicked every day. It was an idyllic spot, where I spent my off-time hours reading some wonderful books with my back propped against an elm trunk and my butt cozily nested on a patch of soft moss.
As I was not what you might call a dedicated cruiser, I found few opportunities to connect with some of the hot dudes I spotted at the concerts. Also, I was there to review the music, not to quietly enjoy it. That was work. There were interviews with guest artists, composers and musicians, and I had deadlines to meet, so my sex life turned into a sort of love fest between me and my steady date, Miss Rosy Palms. Ahem.
With no solution in sight, I despaired of pillow talk to sweeten my nights. Then one morning, there came a knock at the door. I opened it, and what did I see but a gorgeous man in a uniform, an older guy wearing a billed cap, waving a letter in front of my face.
Part 1 | Part 2
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