Do the clicky.
YALE.
Common theme? Stuff happens to people's heads in my plays.
I'll be at all of 'em. Come visit.
Does this mean I need to go find a new city to fall in love with?
Oh screw you, Gawker, with your confounded Dagger Of Irony...
So good that Joan needed a stunt double to pull it off...
Questions:
KENTUCKY. Teaching at a low-residency MFA program. Which I love.
Hey, today marks the first time in my blog history that I ever got in trouble for a blog post. Does that make me powerful? In a way? No?
In other news... Davey rolled over!
Some shots from the colony (bigger with the clicky):
NOTE: Some photos were removed at the request of the Millay Society.
Vincent did not have children, but she had bucketloads of friends who would motor up to her huge property in Austerlitz and cavort for weeks and months. On the grounds were a clay tennis court, a small tree-enclosed amphitheatre ("the dingle"), and a pool fed by a mountain spring. The pool is now home to mice, frogs, and other local critters.
Swimmers were not permitted to wear swimsuits under any circumstances.
The tree-covered bar next to the pool, where guests would dry off while sipping their gin rickeys.
The little shed where Vincent wrote some poems.
Vincent's driveway.
R.I.P., darlin'.
Gorgeous autumn sky.
Right before fall fell.
Right after, one week later.
...
I love autumn.
She named her property after a wild plant that grows in the Berkshires.
The old barn. She ordered it from a Sears kit. It was renovated and now has bedrooms and studios. This is where I slept and worked.
Heed the terrifying sign, all ye who trespass...
There were many many (MANY!!!) dead bugs in the barn. Flies mostly. They would buzz around in circles, drunkenly, dozily... they knew they were supposed to be dying, but the cold weather hadn't packed a sufficient enough punch to knock them out, so they kinda just flailed around in a hazy purgatorio until their bodies gave out. The window over my desk seemed to act as a triage unit for dying flies. They would writhe about their last hours in a pile of corpses, causing loose material to rain down through the screen. Each morning my papers would be covered in a light dust of tiny legs and transparent wings and other insect body parts.
Another casualty.
Try as it might, this air freshner simply could not quell the overwhelming stench of bug-death.
Okay, here's where things might get a little creepy. Edna St. Vincent Millay died Oct. 19, 1950. Her sister Norma moved into her home directly after and lived there for 36 years, without disturbing ONE ITEM in the house. She slept in the guest room and kept her toiletries in a shoebox on the dresser. She left Vincent's clothing in the closets and hung her own on the shower rod in the bathroom. She died in the 80's and the house has been perfectly preserved.
This fellow is about to take us on a tour through the house. (Note the shirt.)
The ol' chap loves to tell the story of Millay's death while his spooked listeners stand at the bottom of these steps...
"One night she was working on edits to a manuscript at this very chair... she became sleepy... she had a glass of white wine in her hand... she lifted the glass and made her way up the stairs... by the sixth step, she began to feel woozy... she placed her glass down and fell backwards, promptly snapping her neck. The groundskeeper found her the next day slumped on the landing, the half-drunk glass of wine still perched on the sixth step."
Vincent's pots and pans. Her devoted husband did all the cooking.
She loved watching the birds out her window.
Okay, you get the point. Here are the other photos I took down:
- A painting of Vincent and her husband swimming naked in their pool.
- A typewriter
- Bathroom bottles, with witch hazel still in the bottle.
- A bottle of medication, half-full
- A long tail of Vincent's ACTUAL hair, flame red.
That *might* win the prize for freakiest item, incidentally. Vincent's mother was a hairstylist and used to make real-hair weaves for her clients. She also made dolls for her daughters using weaves from their own real hair.
- Drawers filled with her underwear. (That photo may have been the one that got the Millay Society all tweaked.)
- Monogrammed bathroom towels
- A beautiful sequined gown. (She was quite the clothes horse.)
- A newspaper from 1949.
- Books. She had a HUGE library. She was an avid reader.
She was also a raging alcoholic and drug addict. Several yards from her home buried in the woods is a gin-bottle graveyard, where she tossed the remains of all her illegal contraband during prohibition. The forest floor is also strewn with empty morphine vials.
...
"Full gallon."
On our last night at the colony we tromped up to the tennis court and mixed up some fierce gin and tonics...
...and watched the sunset and lovingly toasted Vincent's memory....
... and then we came back down and raged into the wee hours like a fucking disco inferno. Vincent would have been proud.
