LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMP Memories: Rehoboth's Gay History Once in a Blue Moon |
by Fay Jacobs and Libby Stiff |
This is one article in a series of remembrances, oral histories and tales of the way we were in gay Rehoboth during the Twentieth Century. The short vignettes are based on interviews, newspaper clippings and whatever lore has been passed down through the years in our gay-friendly town. Twenty years ago this spring, the Blue Moon rose over Baltimore Avenue and it's been shining on Rehoboth ever since. But on the Restaurant's opening night two decades ago it was a very different Baltimore Avenue and a very different Rehoboth Beach. Blue Moon owner Joyce Felton sat and talked with Letters on a rainy spring morning in her now legendary restaurant, recalling a time when there were no other commercial establishments on the second block of Baltimore Avenuea street filled with guest housesand only The Wooden Indian and Joss held court in the ocean block. "It's been a long, long evolution," she recalls, "and I'm so thrilled to sit down and reminisce with you because this is actually the first time I've been interviewed by anyone when there wasn't some kind of big controversy going on. It's great to be able to sit here and celebrate our upcoming 20th anniversary." So how did all this happen? Joyce and her business partner, Victor Pisapia, met at a party in New York, where Joyce was working managing restaurants for Macy's. Victor, who was part owner of Rehoboth's five year old Back Porch Restaurant, invited Joyce down to check out the beach. Soon she was managing The Back Porch and envisioning going into business with Victor at another location. "We wanted to open a kind of urbane place with a chic, hip atmosphere. I picked up on the growing gay sensibility and clientele in town right away and knew that there were folks heregay and straightwho were ready to share our vision." They purchased the circa 1907 house in December 1980, but the tenant's lease wasn't up until April, so they could do nothing but sit and worry. "People told us we were crazy, that nobody in Rehoboth would come to Baltimore Avenue to a restaurant," she says. When they finally took possession of the place, they had only six weeks to put the restaurant togetherand they did it on a shoestring. Victor sold his car, and Joyce borrowed $10,000 from her parents so they could buy used equipment, chairs and tables at auctions. "I had my parents scraping and painting chairs," Joyce recalls. With the waiters topping off their outfits with blue leather ties, jazzy artwork on the walls and an ambiance developed by some of Joyce's friends from the New York design world, the Blue Moon made its opening night deadline. On the weekend before Memorial Day 1981, with the polyurethane floors still drying and the Liquor Board due any second to check the place out, Joyce and Victor opened the doors. And it was mobbed. But unbeknownst to the patrons out front, the kitchen was in chaos. Because the temperature gauges hadn't been set properly, the fire protection system went off, spraying the area with chemicals. Undeterred, Victor started cooking dinners on a stove in an apartment behind the restaurant. And then it started to rain. "You had to see us, holding umbrellas over trays of food as we rushed them into the restaurant. Things were taking longer than they should, but we were serving champagne and asking people to be patient and somehow it all worked. We served 87 dinners that first night!" The restaurant really took off that first summer as Joyce and Victor concentrated on establishing a dinner crowd and staying open on weekends until 4 a.m. to catch the crowd coming back from the Boathouse and the Renegade. "I wasn't looking particularly to gays, I wanted it to be all inclusive. But the community is savvy and we seemed to fill a need for a place to go. It had been an era of group houses and private dinner parties and then late nights at the Renegade or the Boathouse. Maybe some people went to cocktail hourthe Pink Pony used to be a spot, but now things were changing. These were the folks who discovered the Blue Moon. The timing seemed so perfect for what we were doing. "Of course, we had no idea that our diverse clientele would get us in any trouble. There was such bliss in our ignorance as we worked day and night just to make it all work," says Joyce. Meanwhile, as the Blue Moon was getting excellent notices from food critics from the New York Times and Gourmet magazine, they were getting a different kind of notice from some folks in Rehoboth. For all the people delighted to have this upscale urbane restaurant in town, there were other people, very vocal, who were not happy at all. You can read about it in part two of the Blue Moon tale in the next issue of Letters. Can you tell us more about these and other Gay Rehoboth memories? Rehoboth residents and visitors wishing to contribute their recollections, photos or other printed matter, may contact the authors through CAMP Rehoboth, or email Fay at mvnoozy@aol.com or Libby at lstiff@hotmail.com. We'd love to hear from you! |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 3, Apr. 7, 2000. |