Red Light District

    Most of my Chautauqua experience was in a smaller microcosm known as the Cary Hotel. The girls' dorm was connected to the hotel and was upstairs of the employee dining room which was connected to the hotel kitchen via a breezeway-like structure we referred to as the pot room where the pots and pans were scrubbed by one of the guys endearingly referred to as Potman (followed by a couple of yuk yuks). More about Potman in another posting.

     Today I'll talk about the dorm. The top of the stairs had a small room to the left, with a single bed, that the hotel maid had. To the right of the stairs was the bathroom that the eight of us shared. There was no shower, just a bathtub on claw feet. Washing our hair was a challenge under the bathtub tap. There were two rooms, a double and a triple that faced the road, and another double next to the bathroom. The rooms facing the road had porches, but they were enclosed in white, foggy, plastic so the porches became an extension of the rooms, and the dressers were there to make more space for the beds in the rooms themselves.

     The first summer I was there, one of the girls who had worked there the summer before, (and was also someone referred to the hotel by Mr. Danieu!) said that the last year they had been tempted to put up a red light as a way of goofing on the adults running the hotel! I did not know what a red light hanging on a porch meant!

     But the second summer that I was there, the new girls in the dorm that year decided that the porch should be a porch, and they cut the plastic and rolled it up to expose the porch to the outside world. The proprietors of the Cary did not replace the plastic, but they were none too pleased with the look.

     I was not one of the people who cut the plastic.

     But one night I sat in a chair on the porch reading. All anyone could see from the road was that there was someone there in a chair. And I was reading, no lie, War and Peace!

I heard the manager come back from her evening out and let herself into the apartment below (which was on the other side of the employee dining room) – she was muttering unhappily to her husband-to-be, but I did not make out the exact words.

     I thought it would be amusing if she was mad at me – sitting there innocently reading War and Peace!

     But truth was on my side. The truth was my twisted reasoning for sitting out there on the porch that night – the truth was that I had not cut the plastic, the truth was that I was doing nothing more than reading War and Peace! The truth was more important than whatever Mrs. So and So was thinking. The truth would win.

      Yeah, one of those lack of common sense instances again.

      I heard later that Mrs. So and So was not happy about my sitting there like that, and she called me a name that meant a not savory female.

     Too bad for her.

    The next summer, I was not going to work there; I would find another job somewhere, somehow.

    But that next spring my brother, Clark, wrote a letter to the Cary Hotel, just like I had done two years earlier. He used the reference from Mr. Danieu. Clark never heard back from them.

     And I never told him or my parents the truth of the matter.

128 20150508 Chautauqua Part 3 Red Light District