Soundtrack: Cambridge, 1970's
In the mid 70s, I was living with my then-boyfriend, John, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was working a job making wrought iron grilles and fences while trying to be a painter; I was waitressing at the Orson Welles restaurant while trying to decide whether to be an academic or a dancer. It was a time of changes, to say the least. Here are some notes:
The Welles, as we called it, had started as an art-movie house. All of us who worked there were over-educated. I had a philosophy degree; the fellow who tended bar and apportioned tips (we shared with the kitchen) had a master’s degree in math. We joked that we’d never have to worry about his getting the percentages right. Another waiter had a degree in history. The restrooms sported high-falutin’ graffiti: “Morris Lewis doesn’t prime his canvases.” The cinema next door ran the reggae film The Harder They Come as the midnight movie for an entire year.
Picture Sara the bricklayer, a tall refugee from her WASPy upper middle class family and her parents’ stultifying notions of what a woman’s life should be, sauntering across a construction site carrying two buckets of mortar, followed by two men each struggling with one, and jauntily singing, “It’s so nice to have a man around the house.”
Ahmed, her boyfriend (not the suitor her parents had in mind) and manager of the Welles, played the soft country-inflected Fleetwood Mac on the restaurant sound system all day long, over and over. At home, we were listening to Parliament/Funkadelic and the Meters, or Keith Jarrett’s cool piano improvisations (The Köln Concert). I was crossing music boundaries every time I entered or left the house.
Once, John and I were riding the Green Line and passed the first pride parade I’d ever seen. The crowd marched down Boylston behind a banner that proclaimed, “WE’RE COCKSUCKERS!” What a gleeful surprise it was to see this bold proclamation of freedom, right out there in the open.
Sometime during that year the city passed the first (to my knowledge) no smoking in public ordinance. It was a joke! The police said there was no way they’d enforce it, and it didn’t last.
A poster in the Hundred Flowers Bookstore, which I’ve regretted not buying ever since: an ironing board with an iron sitting on it and the text “Strike while the iron is hot — fair wages for housework.” Imagine…
Casual sexual assault in the streets; how I steeled myself every time I left the house, alert to the passing grab or insult disguised as “appreciation.” How later I learned that someone on the block had told my boyfriend that he liked the way I looked and he’d rape me anytime he wanted. When John, furious, vented to a neighbor, he was told: ”Don’t worry about that, we’ll take care of it.” We never knew exactly what that meant, but it certainly involved some kind of male violence.
I had t-shirts printed with portraits of Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf, and one I was particularly proud of, with a delicate line drawing illustrating the words “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Toward the end of that year, John and I decided to get married. (Stevie Wonder on the stereo: “I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever…”) We went to the hippie bakery near Harvard Square to get some confections unlike the traditional wedding cake. The helpful workers were happy to show us their brownies and cupcakes until it dawned on them: “You’re getting married? We don’t do wedding cakes; we believe marriage is chattel slavery.” We went to the Portuguese baker in our neighborhood, East Cambridge, and she was delighted to make us the carrot cake we wanted, with violets on the icing.
Through all of this, Fleetwood Mac was playing on the restaurant sound system. I had to leave the country to get away from it, thus missing the rest of the 70s.
Wendy McVicker is the current Poet Laureate of Athens, OH. This means she is zooming, chalking poems on the sidewalk, posting to the Athens Poet Laureate Facebook page, and missing in-person readings and performances with her musical partner, Emily Prince, as another language altogether.
