UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES 
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1105
GOLDWOMON, SUE (Legal Name Goldman, Susan)

GOLDWOMON, Sue (1947- )

Narrator:  Sue Goldwomon
Interviewer:  Abbie Hill
Date:  June 14, 2010
Location:  Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History #1105
Subject:  Sue Goldwomon details her life in Madison.  She spoke of growing up in Milwaukee, coming to Madison in the 1960’s, her decades of involvement in women’s music and lesbian culture, her business Lunacy Distributors, her shows on WORT-radio and her relationship with the love of her life, Arlene Zaucha.
Transcriptionist:  Abbie Hill (8/26/10 thru 10/15/10)
Auditor:  Abbie Hill (10/15-16/10)

00:00:00

AH:	Hi, I’m Abbie Hill.  In June 2010, I interviewed Sue Goldwomon for UW Madison’s Oral History Program.  Sue is definitely a cornerstone for modern lesbian history in Madison and over the years, I’ve interviewed her several times.  What follows is a one minute clip of an interview I did of Sue in 1995 for WTSO radio, where Sue tells us the many groups she’s participated in since coming to Madison in 1966.  Then, we go right to the interview from 2010.

SG: 	 I’m Sue Goldwomon and I’ve been involved with a literal laundry list of different groups:  Madison’s first lesbian organization, which at the time that I was involved was called Madison Lesbians, Madison’s first gay center, Madison’s first women’s center, Women’s Transit Authority, a women’s prisoner support group, Anna Crusis Women’s Choir, WI Women’s Land Co-op, Women’s Independent Label Distributors (this was a national organization), Womonsong, Madison’s second women’s choir, a Latin American women’s support group, the National Lesbian Feminist Organization-Wisconsin Chapter, Madison’s Jewish Lesbian group, the Her Turn Collective at WORT, Madison’s Lesbian Herstory project, and I presently work with Apple Island Productions and also deliver the Feminist Voices every month.  And there have been some others, that’s probably enough for now.

AH:  And now the 2010 interview begins.

00:01:25
SG: 	 I will give you the name I use, rather than my official legal name, which is Sue Goldwomon and I was born on Oct 31, 1947, Halloween.

AH:  	So, you didn’t change your name legally?

SG: 	 I have never changed my name legally and I didn’t do it for many years because my mother was still alive and I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of doing it.  And then there was the whole settling of her estate business that dragged on for awhile and now I actually have no really good excuse.  So, well, I was born in Milwaukee.  

AH:  	Do you have a sense of the socio-economic class of your family and how did that affect you?

SG: 	Um, I would say that we were middle class, comfortably middle class.  We lived in the suburbs of Milwaukee, several different suburbs, but always in the suburbs, never in the city.  Um,  my mother did not work outside the home.  There was enough money so that my mother could stay at home and parent us, which was a good thing because my father was on the road working, and so my mother basically raised us for much of the time until I was about 10, because my father was gone so much, working.  He was a traveling shoe salesman, so he drove around the state of Wisconsin and parts of northern Illinois and um sold shoes for Endicott Johnson to stores.  He sold shoes wholesale.  He was a very good salesman, which is why we were well off.

AH:  	And how were you affected by your socio-economic status?

SG:  	Well, I didn’t have the struggles of many other people, that’s what I would say.  Um, you know,  I didn’t have to worry about going to a good school or being beaten up on the way to school, or if my parents were going to be able to have a car or not, or would we always have to be dependent upon public transportation, which actually we were with my mother cuz she never learned to drive until I was 13.  So, we used public transportation all the time when I was growing up.  But you know we didn’t have to worry about where our next meal was coming from.  We went on vacations, not necessarily always fancy vacations, but sometimes we’d go up north to visit family.  Sometimes we would go to like New York or Washington DC, places like that.  My parents liked to travel.  They were interested in having those experiences and having us have them.  So we were able to do those things.  We never went camping in my family.  I learned to go camping but it wasn’t because of my family.  

AH:  	You don’t have a large family?

SG:  	Well my parents, both of whom are deceased, and my sister, and me.  And various pets, at various points in time.

AH:  	And what kinds of religious activities were part of your childhood?

SG:  	Well, I came from a not very religious Jewish family.  So, even though starting at about 2nd grade through 10th grade, I was forced by my family to go to religious school, I really took very little away from it and my family went to synagogue only in the fall for the high holidays.  So, we were the twice-a-year-Jew kind of people.  It was much more of a cultural thing than a religious thing in my family.

AH:  You – were you batmitzvahed?

SG: No.  

00:05:15
AH: 	And how did you come to live in Madison?

SG:  	I came here to go to school in 1966, the fall of ‘66 and I never left.

AH:  	Did you graduate from the University of Wisconsin?

SG:  	Sooner or later.  Not very immediately.  There were many other important things than going to class.  So, I came here during the Vietnam War era.  So, I participated in the Dow demonstrations and the Black students strike and you know, other kinds of social movements that were going on and it was a lot more interesting and exciting than going to class which was mostly boring.  You know, I confess that I was the first person in my family to go to college and I had sort of been given this impression that going to the University was going to be -- I was going to be surrounded by all this great information that I would be able to just soak up like a sponge.  Well, that wasn’t the case.  So, in retrospect, it probably would have been better if I would have gone to a smaller place but I came here and there were many good things about coming here.  But actually attending the University of Wisconsin was not really one of them.  

AH:  	And, when did you come out as a lesbian?

00:06:35

SG:  	I came out in 1968 so I was a sophomore in college.

AH:  	How did you feel about coming out?

SG: 	 Ah, it was actually very exciting for me, I have to say.  I had wondered – I had tried to 
figure out where I fit in things.  I was never someone who had a lot of dates with the boys.  I was always much more interested in my friends, other young women and girls.  I went to camp in the summer and was really in my element.  It was an all girls camp, YWCA camp, Camp [Tilahkee?] and it was a very important thing for me personally in a kind of influencing my life way.  I felt at home there in a way that I didn’t always feel at home in other kinds of situations.  So, when I actually came out and it’s interesting because when I first came to college, I met a woman who had a friend who lived elsewhere and they talked to each other all the time on the phone and the one who lived in New York came to visit here, etc.  And I didn’t know what this relationship was but I surely knew that that was a relationship that I wanted.  

AH:  	And that sort of paved the way for you to examine your feelings?

SG:  	Well, I actually met my first lover through this woman who lived here.  Although she didn’t introduce us to have that happen.  But, that was how we met each other, was through this woman, who was a lesbian, a word that I didn’t really know at the time but I learned it.

AH:  	And, was she also a student?

SG:  	Yes, she was a student.  Well, she was sometimes a student anyway.
  
AH:  	And how did that – can you describe your first relationship?

SG:  	In what way, Abbie?  I mean it’s a little -- it’s pretty broad.  Can you focus?  Focus it, a little?

00:08:51

AH:  	Well, what I’d like to wind up talking about is how these relationships – how the relationship you’re in now is different than this first relationship.  So, if you can think back to um who that was and how long you were together and whether it worked or didn’t work…

SG:  	OK, I can do that. OK.  Um, she was a little older than I was.  She had been involved with women before.  She was very closeted and much of the time we were together, which was about 3 ½ years, she was also seeing men and infact she had an abortion during that time, which my aunt gave her the money for.  And, she was not someone who was into roles.  She had a major alcohol problem.  She was in a lot of ways much more carefree or adventurous than I was, I think.  We actually -- she came from Milwaukee as well, from another suburb that was close by, but she was you know, in some ways a more worldly person than I was, I think.  And being with her was very freeing and exciting for me.  While she didn’t necessarily want people to know, I would have been happy to stand on the corner and scream it because that was how excited I was.

SG:  	Um, there was no lesbian community then.  I’m sure there were lesbians and eventually, even while we were together, we did meet some.  But, it was not something that we talked about in those terms.  And the women I referred to earlier, the one who lived in New York and the one who lived here, we would hang out with and speak with, but the word lesbian was never spoken.  And so we sort of -- to a certain extent we sort of operated in a vacuum.  We spent time with other people but not mostly other lesbians, except for these 2 women, and then eventually some other women who we met, but we really didn’t socialize too much with.  I still see some of those women today.  Some of them still live in Madison.  And I would say we’ve all changed.  They drank a lot and were into sports.  I don’t know, other stuff and that was not me.  And like I say, there was not a bar scene for women then.  So, it wasn’t like you could go even on a certain night of the week necessarily, to a bar that had a women’s night.  If it was a gay bar that had a women’s night, that wasn’t really going on… as far as I knew, at the time, anyway.

AH:  Did you live together?

SG:  	We did.  I was actually living in the dorm when we got involved and she was not, although she had lived in the dorm, Sellery Hall.  We lived in Sellery Hall.  And that was how I met her, when I lived in Sellery Hall.  And then she left school and moved to San Francisco for about 6 months, and then she came back and I saw her again, and she was living in an apartment on Regent St, above where the Hong Kong Café is today.  At that time, that was not what was there.  But that was all right, and she was living there, and I got to spend kind of more and more time there.  She was working at the time at the State Historical Society.  So, I used to go and visit her at work, and hang out there, and we would go and eat behind the Union, and get stoned, and I would go over to her house and hang out and I don’t know, eventually… Eventually we got involved in a physical way, not just like hanging out and talking to each other, in a being friends kind of way.  And I really – I stopped living in the dorm.  I mean I was officially living there.  My parents were frantic, I think.  They tried to reach me.  I was never there.  My roommate never knew where I was and, you know, they were upset about many things that I was doing with my life then.  They were upset about my political activities, in the fact that they kept me out of school.  They were upset about my smoking marijuana and dropping acid.  They were upset about my possible involvement with this woman, which was eventually confirmed, and you know, it just wasn’t what they had in mind for me.  

AH:  	So you did come out to your parents.  I imagine that was a pretty stressful thing to do in the late 60’s.

SG:  	Well, I think the answer to that is yes and no… about coming out to my parents.  That is, I would go and visit them less and less and my father would say, “Well, aren’t you involved with her?  Well, what are you doing? You know she’s not a good person.”  
And I would say, “No, no.”
And my mother would say, “Quit harassing her, she thinks it’s OK.”
And my father would say, “Yes, she thinks it’s OK, but she shouldn’t think it’s OK.”
And, you know, they were not getting along.  They didn’t know what to do.  And my father and I were actually quite estranged by the time he died in 1970.  And after that, I really did go and talk to my mother in a more serious way about it.  But my father and I kind of never settled that.

00:14:55

AH:  	But the relationship made you happy.

SG:  	Yes.  Definitely.

AH:  	And confirmed that you were a lesbian.

SG:  	Absolutely.  For me it was a real finding myself thing.

AH:  	Over the years have you had lots of relationships?

SG: 	 (laughs) What is a lot?

AH:  	Well, I don’t know… 

SG:  	(laughs) Yeah.  

AH:  	You’ve been with lots of women?

SG:  	Well, probably about 18 or 20.  Is that a lot?  I don’t know.  But it’s all the way from the one night stand thing to the almost 25-year thing, I mean there’s a big range in there.

AH:  	And I’m assuming when you’re talking about the almost 25-year thing, you’re talking about your current relationship.
	
SG:  	Yes.  That’s correct.  By far, the longest relationship I have ever had.

AH:  	How did that relationship start?

SG:  	Arlene.  Arlene Zaucha.   We met each other working on Her Turn the women’s news program at WORT, the listener-sponsored community radio station.

AH:  	Do you know what year that was?

SG: 	 Yes.  We met each other in 1983 but we didn’t get involved with each other until 1985, because I was seeing someone else, and she was still getting over a break up with someone that she had had, a relationship that she had had, and we were both not in a place to do that, and I wouldn’t say we saw each other and went, “Oh, we have to do this.”  But I liked Arlene right away.  I thought she was so cute and smart and you know, everything.  Arlene says that when we did some kind of training thing for the radio and we went to have lunch together, we sat down and she poured out her life story to me.  I don’t know if I would put it exactly that way, but we obviously liked each other right away.  

AH:  	And how long have you lived together?

SG:  	We have lived together since 1987 because we spent the first year of our relationship really getting to know each other.  You know, it takes awhile.  I mean being friends for a while you get to know people some, but once you’re in a relationship you know everyone ‘s putting their best foot forward for a long time.  So, it takes a while for everybody to sort of relax and you can really be yourself; she can really be herself.  So, we did that for a year.  And then we spent another year talking about whether or not we wanted to live together and how that would be, and what we thought the problems would be, and what we thought the good things would be, and how we were gonna deal with lots of things that are connected with living together.  And then we did.  And we have lived together ever since.

AH:  	And what kinds of things do you like to do for fun?

SG:  	Oh, travel is probably the first one.  Travel, music, films, reading, sometimes just going for a walk in a nice place, bird watching.  We’re not the like go-to-the-gym, running… all that stuff.  That’s not us.  I like sports, but I don’t do them myself.

AH:  	She’s a cook.  Do you both cook?

SG:  	We both cook.  Yeah.  We both cook and we like cooking.  That’s something else we share.

AH:  	And you garden.

SG:  	Yeah.  We actually have more garden now than we had when we had the house.  We have like 50 pots of stuff on our terrace.  Vegetables, not too much fruits, but rhubarb, I guess.  Is it a fruit?  Probably a vegetable.  Flowers, herbs, those kinds of things.

AH:  	And it seems to me that you really enjoy your home, too.  And you enjoy making a home together.

SG:  	Yeah.  And actually when Arlene and I first moved in together she moved into a house that I already owned and one of the things that she really wanted was for us to change around all the furniture in the living room so it would be not like it was when I just lived there before.  It would show that if we were gonna live together, there were gonna be changes.  I didn’t exactly understand at the time why she wanted to do it but you know…

AH:  	I’m part of this relationship and we can’t just have things the way you’ve always had them.

SG:  	Yeah.  That’s right.

AH:  	Do you think that you’ll be with each other til you die?

SG:  	Oh, Arlene asks me this kind of question all the time, Abbie.  (laughs)  “Are we gonna be together forever?”  And I will say what is forever.  I would say that we will be together as long as we both feel that the relationship is being a good and positive relationship for us and that we’re still growing and not being together just because we’ve been together.  We’re not interested in being together just to be together, no matter how long it would be.  I mean we’re not in it strictly for the longevity of it.  But, only if it’s really working.

00:20:28

AH:  	I would love it if you could tell me a story about Arlene, about something you’ve done, one of your favorite Arlene stories.

SG:  	Um, I’m sorry I didn’t know this before, Abbie.  I would have thought about it.

AH:  	Well, you can think about it and we’ll move on because maybe your memory will be stimulated by this question.  Because I do want to talk about your work at WORT and I think it’s significant that that’s where you met Arlene.  You just told me that you’ve interviewed over 150 people in the 26 years that you’ve worked for WORT-radio.

SG: 	 I don’t know.  It’s probably around 200.  I never -- That was just the musicians actually.  It didn’t include all these other people plus going back to the beginning.  I don’t really know.  I’m sure it’s over 200.  But, it’s a lot anyway.

AH:  	So, um what do you want us to know about your career there?  Your music career.

SG: 	 Well I wouldn’t -- It doesn’t start there is the first thing I would say.  During the 1970’s when the women’s music festivals started, I went to, I think it was the second National Women’s Music Festival.  It was held in Champaign/Urbana at that time, that was where it started.  And I went there and discovered this really wonderful culture that I really wanted to be a part of and I started to think about if I wanted to try to distribute some of this music, make it available to other women.  And I spoke with a friend of mine at the time.  I’ve lost track of her now.  Her name is Barbara French and she and I decided that we were going to do this together.  We were going to call our little distribution business French and Goldwomon.  And, we were gonna start to distribute women’s music in Madison.  Barbara lasted maybe 6 months.  And then she was gone and I renamed the business Lunacy Distributors, which was half a take on Luna, the moon.  It was one of those woman kind of things.  But, also lunacy, kind of the craziness of the whole idea and doing all that.  So, it was kind of a fun name, and it was also a silly name, and I liked that as well, and I used to haul around boxes of LP’s, vinyl, music on vinyl, to different concerts of the artists of the women’s music movement who used to come to Madison, and eventually I hauled them to other cities in the state as well, and I did that for about 5 years.  I was involved nationally with a group called the Women’s Independent Label Distributors Network and wrote a column for the newsletter and we used to have these big meetings every year where we tried to figure out how we were going to improve our businesses, and how we were going to deal with the women’s music labels that were never satisfied with what we were doing, and always wanted something different, and didn’t want to pay us what we were worth, and you know, that’s a whole longer story that I don’t think I’ll bother to go into here.  But, I did that and then I started doing the radio which I did for the long time we already referred to and in the 90’s I also worked at Apple Island on productions there for about 4 years with some other women who I would say we were a good match.  The four of us together worked well together and were able to bring really, a pretty good variety of women considering who was touring around etc., to Apple Island for other women to see.  I’m kind of sorry that that opportunity is passed now, not only for me, I couldn’t speak for the rest of them.  But a place like Apple Island which doesn’t seem to be something that is very important to a lot of women today.  I think what young women are interested in is much different than what most of us, well I’m in my 60’s now, I would say 50-60’s anyway.  Probably some women who are younger and older than that but not women who are mostly in their 20’s and 30’s.  Having a women’s space is not a thing that they think is a very important thing for themselves and so having something like that is something I miss.  But, I have called myself for many years a lesbian cultural worker because I have been involved since 1975 in things related to this.  

AH:  	And, specifically music

SG: 	 Specifically music, yes, specifically music.  Distributing music, producing music, playing music on the air, interviewing musicians

AH:  	Singing in women’s choirs

SG:  	Yes.  Actually both of Madison’s women’s choirs.  Anna Crusis, the first of Madison’s women’s choirs and I was actually a founder of Womonsong, Madison’s second women’s choir.

00:25:50

SG:	So, music has been a part of my life.  I used to go to summer music clinic when I was in grade school, junior high, high school.

AH:  	You’d come to Madison for Summer Music Clinic?

SG:  	I’d come to Madison for the music clinic here at the UW and met lots of other kids from all around the state, mostly other young women, one of whom is still a good friend of mine, actually.  

AH:  	So you got to see the birth and the rise of the women’s music movement.

SG:  	Yes, the rise and the fall of the women’s music movement, I would say.

AH:	  And why do you say fall?

SG:  	Well, all of those labels that used to put out that music, with one exception, which would be Pleiades, Margie Adam’s label, they’re gone.  The Olivia label has turned into a cruise business and now developing some kind of, I don’t know, women’s resort, women’s retirement center.  I’m a little fuzzy about exactly where it’s at today.  The musicians who used to tour are pretty much for the most part not touring.  Many of them are probably not even singing or performing anymore.  There are a few; there is still a small group that go around and perform.  There are young women now who have come up and are singing and producing their own music, mostly independently, which I think is wonderful and I’m glad that they’re able to do that.  And they distribute it when they come and do concerts and they distribute it over the Internet in various ways and I think that that’s a good thing but it’s not a conscious movement.  It’s not a situation where women are going, “Oh yes, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna learn all about the technical aspects of everything connected with this and it’s gonna be something that we’re all gonna do and learn together and it’s all gonna be done by women.”  That is way gone and has been way gone for a long time.

AH:  	A real community where women went to concerts to show their support, and hung out with each other, and did the work

SG:  	And to see themselves reflected in what they heard.  To a certain extent the women’s music movement was a lesbian music movement.  There were a few straight women who were involved with it.  Kristin Lems, who was the founder of the National Women’s Music Festival, is a straight woman.  But for the most part they were lesbian women and they were writing music about lesbians, about each other, about their relationships and singing it for other women who were, mostly but not exclusively, lesbians.  And that was something that had never been reflected anywhere, as far as I know.  Anywhere in the world, at any other time.   So this was our opportunity and after awhile it became financially very difficult to sustain this movement but also I think that people’s lives changed.  They changed as they got older.  They got into, a lot of the women, more permanent relationships.  A number of them had children and their focus was there.  They focused on their work in a more serious way.  And it was, as someone who tried to do it, financially… could any of us really support ourselves doing this?  Not very well.

AH: 	 You stopped Lunacy in…

SG:  	1981

AH:  	And why did you decide to stop it?  Are these the reasons why you decided to stop that business?

SG:  	I decided that that I had enough of the struggles of it.  Not necessarily the financial struggles of it, I didn’t lose money on this business but I also didn’t make money.  This was a pretty much break even kind of situation.  Mostly I was tired of the internal struggles of it all.  I liked a lot of the women.  I continued to maintain some kind of connections with some of them for quite awhile.  Some of them, if I would find them and get together today, I’m sure we would catch up and that would be great.  But I think that even by that time, things had shifted and a lot of the women who had been involved in this movement as far as trying to get the music out there were really not able to continue to do that.  And today there are two remaining women’s distribution companies and only one of them is actually doing any wholesale music anymore and the other one is doing only retail online.

00:31:03

AH:  	Where did you sell?  Where were your outlets for selling the music?

SG:  	Regular music stores, record stores in Madison, on State Street mostly… A Room of One’s Own Bookstore, the Madison Book Co-op long gone, and similar kinds of places mostly in Milwaukee, a few other places around the state, and at concerts.  Concerts and other kinds of events like the -- there was some women lawyers conference here and Margy Adam came to sing, so I went and sold things there.  Or, there were other kinds of women’s events I would sell for.  I had a table and I would set up a table and sell things.

AH:  	And… uh…so for a while you were doing both WORT and Lunacy?

SG:  	No.  Actually Lunacy was done in 1981 and I didn’t go to WORT until ’83.  So there were a couple of years there that I wasn’t doing any of that in any active kind of way.  I would still go to concerts.  Fallen Woman Production concerts or other kinds of concerts and festivals sometimes, but I wasn’t actually distributing anything, playing anything or producing anything for a couple years, but only a couple years.

AH:  	Did you start doing Her Turn or Her Infinite Variety?

SG:  	Her Turn first because Her Infinite Variety had a host that had already been there for awhile and it wasn’t until she left that I applied to be the host of Her Infinite Variety.

AH:  	So, Her Turn was the… Give me a little blurb about each program.

SG:  	Her Turn is the women’s news program; it’s a magazine kind of format program.  There are usually news stories rewritten from various print sources or these days, online sources, and also produced features and occasional live interviews, those kinds of things.  It runs for a half an hour.  There’s a collective of women, which have numbered as few as a handful or so and probably been as large as a dozen or so, depending on any particular time.  And Her Infinite Variety is a women and music show and initially it was founded to play the women’s music music, the women’s music that was available from this movement that we’ve been speaking about but eventually expanded to include music by all sorts of women, from all sorts of genres, from all sorts of periods of time and became much broader.

AH:  	And that’s a longer show.

SG:  	It’s 2 ½ hours.  It was 2 hours initially but grew to 2 ½ hours at some point in the past which I don’t remember the exact year frankly.

AH:  	And Arlene has never worked on Her Infinite Variety, except to help you?
SG:  	Yes, that’s true.  

AH:  	But she has been a full-fledged member of the Her Turn Collective.

SG:  	Since before I was there.  Since about 6 months before I came.  She came in August of ’82, I believe.  And, she’s still there.

AH:  	Oh yeah.  You still do Her Turn?

SG:  	No, I did Her Turn for awhile after I was doing Her Infinite Variety, but it was too crazy.  It was too crazy to be trying to do both of them and it was -- the music was my first love.  Once I got the music show it was probably only a matter of time before I would leave the news.  I like the news; I think the news is important, but it’s not a heart thing for me.  (pause)  Should I talk about my award, too?

AH:  	Yes!

SG: 	Oh all right.  Well, given all these things that I have been involved in, in this movement over the years, last year at the National Women’s Music Festival, Women in the Arts, which is the producer now of the National Women’s Music Festival, awarded me the Jane Schliessman Award to recognize my contributions to women’s music.  So, I was very happy actually to be honored by them and to have my work recognized in a greater kind of way.  I would say that even now people are -- I would say that there are many people now who acknowledge my work and that’s very wonderful for me because there are times when you labor in the Midwest, in a mid-size, Midwestern city, not on a coast, not in a big city… the women’s music movement was never, ever centered in the Midwest… in the East, in the West… even more the West than the East, but never really in the middle, even though things like Hotwire magazine were produced in the middle, out of Chicago.  But, somehow things have not been centered here and WORT, being a listener-sponsored community station, not a major public radio station, commercial radio station, or whatever… you’re always sort of laboring in the backwater but people do notice after awhile.

00:37:02

AH: 	Well, decades…

SG:  	(laughs) Decades, that’s right.

AH:  	You’ve been around for so long and you’ve interviewed so many people.  Of these 200 people you interviewed are there some really memorable interviews?

SG:  	Sure.  Well, there are fun things like how many times have I interviewed Holly Near?  I don’t know.  But, Holly and I always just sort of pick up where we left off.  So, we talk about what we’ve been doing and how it’s been going and what she’s doing, which is why I’m interviewing her.  You do develop these long-term relationships with performers even if you don’t really see them very often.  Then there are people like Janis Ian.  Janis Ian, I interviewed before she came to Madison; it was probably some time in the 90’s.  I can’t remember all the details of the controversy now, but she at that time was writing for the Advocate, and she wrote something, which was very controversial for whatever reasons, and I asked her about it and she really got very snippy and didn’t want to talk about it.  She was almost sort of nasty about it, which as far as I was concerned was an important thing that was going on for her at the time.  Other people knew and I thought listeners would be interested but she just didn’t want to talk about it.  Then there was Anjelique Kidjo, who is a performer originally from Benin in West Africa, and I have liked her music for a long time and she was going to be coming here.  I listened to her music as I usually do and I wrote up a list of questions and I did want to talk to her about her music.  But I was unprepared -- to this day I never will forget that no matter what question I asked her, she took it, not only where I wanted her to go, in the direction I wanted her to go, but even farther.  So that she was even almost ahead of me for the whole interview.  And some friends of mine, who heard the interview at the time, still say to me, “That interview with Anjelique Kidjo was one of the best interviews you ever did.”  I really have to credit her and not me.  

AH: 	 So you were both really in sync there.

SG: 	 Yeah, you know sometimes it’s just like that.  Surely one of the most important things about doing an interview is talking to somebody who likes to talk.  If you don’t get somebody who likes to talk they just sit there and say yes, no… that’s about it.  It’s very difficult to have an interview with people who don’t really want to say anything to you.  And there have been those.  I’ve had those interviews.

AH: 	 You have to work like crazy.

SG:  	Yeah, it’s the longest 10 minutes you ever spent.  Whereas the other people, ½ an hour goes by and you go, “Wow, ½ an hour has gone by already?  We better be done now.”

AH:  	Has any of this jarred a story about Arlene?

SG:  	Oh God!

AH:  	You must have had some experiences working at WORT.  You know, last minute fixes?

SG:  	All right.  I will tell you a story about Arlene and it involves WORT, because actually it’s a story that we refer to every once in awhile and it involves a feature that I was doing at the time.  I was doing an interview with a woman who lived in a low-income housing project on the north side of town and she was very involved with the children of that community.  She was working with them on peace issues.  I interviewed her in a kitchen full of children and it was mostly her but some of them and I wanted to use music by a woman named Linda Hirschhorn and it’s called Circle Round.  It’s not a very long piece and it’s an acappella piece.  Arlene was going to do the engineering when we were going to wrap this piece with music for the air.  So, Arlene was sitting, doing the controls and I was sitting in the little studio and she was supposed to start the music and I was supposed to start to speak at a certain time and we must have had like 30 takes.  For some reason she could not get the music right or I did not come in at the right place or something was always off and so the music would start again.  (sings) “Circle round for freedom” and it would go on and on like this.  To this day whenever we hear that song or are in a similar situation, or recently Linda Hirschhorn came here to Madison.  We always look at each other and smile because we both just have this very distinct image of struggling, struggling to get this music and speaking right so we could do this feature.  It took us forever.  It was one of the longest things that we ever did at the radio station together, just because it was so constantly screwed up.

00:43:05

AH:  	And you’re still not – it still isn’t perfect.

SG: 	No, I think eventually it probably was perfect but I think it’s also lost to posterity thankfully.

AH:  	You’ve been involved in so many organizations and I’m really glad I have this list from 1995.

SG:  	Yeah, me too, because believe me, I know I did these things but for me to sit down and run off the whole list…
	
AH:  	I’m going to use this little clip where you list all of the things that you’ve done and I’m wondering, looking over the list, which one of these organizations affected you the most?

SG:  	(laughs) Oh, I don’t know.  Each one was important in it’s own way.  It’s pretty hard to just pick out one.

AH:  	Pick out a couple.  Pick out the top five.

SG:  	I’ll talk about a few and I don’t know if they’ll be the top five.  Madison Lesbians, Madison’s first lesbian organization, which had been called Madison Gay Sisters.  After my first lover and I broke up, I was faced with a what am I gonna do now thing and since I was not a bar person, I had to figure out how I was going to meet other women.  There was this group and I had never been involved with them, and they were meeting at 10 Langdon Street, at the time.  I decided one day that I would get up the courage to go.  They had had some kind of a record sale on Library Mall and I had gone by there, sort of ostensibly to look at the records, but the reality was to sort of check out and figure out who these women were.  So I walked over to 10 Langdon.  I forget what time of day it was, some kind of afternoon time, like 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  I can remember they were all sitting in a circle out on the lawn in front of 10 Landgon and I walked on the other side of the street.  I walked by and I kind of watched them and I walked down to the end of the block and I crossed the street and I started walking down their side of the street.  It’s only a couple of buildings in from the corner.  So I got to them pretty fast and I got there and I kind of stood there and they asked me to sit down and join them.  That was, in some ways, even though I had been out already even longer than some of them had – it was the first really out acknowledging kind of thing for me and there was a leap there involved for me, in getting up the courage to go to this group.

AH:  	Sure.  And this was like 1970?

SG:  	No, this was… what year would it have been?  1971.  Yep, 1971.  So, then I got very involved with that group and then you know et cetera…

AH: 	 Made friends

SG: 	Yeah, actually I’m still friends with some of those people today, even though I don’t see them very often either.  I still have ties to that group and ofcourse there are always the women who are lost and you do kind of wonder what happened to them, once they went their separate ways.  You know, left town, whatever.  Women’s Transit Authority was a really important group for me.  I was involved with the very early part of Women’s Transit Authority when everybody was using their own cars and we had to go to pay phones and call the women’s center and find out if there were any other women who needed to be picked up.  Eventually we shut down for awhile because there was going to be insurance and other kinds of legal problems, and eventually the group was reformed and used cars that were available from the University, and we had an office on Spring Street only a few doors down from the Back Door, which was the really biggest, most inclusive gay bar up to that time, that had been started.  It was nice because you could do your shift at Women’s Transit Authority and then you could just go down the street to the Back Door, especially if it was Thursday, which was women’s night.  There were many, many women involved with Women’s Transit Authority.  Its nickname was the Lezzie Lift.  There were surely women who were not lesbians involved, but there were many lesbians involved, and it was a time when many, many women were coming out and exploring that whole side of themselves and quite a number of them remained lesbians and some of them did not.

00:48:10

SG: 	 It was a really exciting time… the growth of women’s music, the growth of women’s organizations, women’s newspapers, women’s everything.  You know it was really the height of the feminist movement in this country and in other countries during the 1970’s.  I met a lot of really wonderful women in Women’s Transit Authority and I did that for maybe about 3 years or so.  I can’t remember how many years I was involved in Madison Lesbians.  It was a number of years, a big number.  Or, The Wisconsin Women’s Land Co-op – I did go through this back-to-the-land phase.  There were a bunch of women from Madison and also from Milwaukee who decided that we wanted to try and get a piece of land and have a women’s land place in Wisconsin and we used to meet one month in Madison and one month in Milwaukee.  We were driving back and forth having this long distance relationship with each other, trying to do this until we finally – there were 4 of us who found the piece of land that we eventually bought, which was near Tomah, Wisconsin.  It still exists today.  There are still some lesbians living there although I don’t frankly know who they are.  There are still women who go there and camp and hang out.  I really don’t know how many.  Probably mostly in the summer.  The land is paid off and it really was a fun thing for all of us to do and we got to meet each other.  A lot of the women from Milwaukee eventually moved to Madison and some of them still live here.

AH:  	This was the time of lesbian separatism.

SG: 	 It was.  It was the time of lesbian separatism and I would say that although I did many lesbian separatist things, I never defined myself as a lesbian separatist per se.  But I was basically a lesbian separatist.  I worked with gay men; I didn’t work with gay men.  Working with gay men was difficult.  You know, I tried it; I stopped doing it.  I tried it again; I stopped doing it.  I think that mostly what gay men and lesbians have in common is that we are far more interested in people of our own sex than we are with people of the opposite sex, but otherwise I’m not sure we always have a lot in common.  

AH:  	Well, I think sometimes when we unite in political struggle, and things like are happening today with the struggle for gay marriage, it’s a way that we can build a bridge.

SG: 	 And yes there are things that overlap but I think that lots of times, as I said when I was interviewed in 1995, I think gay men are first and foremost men.  I think there are a lot of men who don’t really like women, don’t understand women, don’t realize a whole lot about what being a woman means in our society… any woman, not just being a lesbian.  They don’t necessarily care to know any more, either.  Or, some of them think they already know, they already got there and they don’t have to learn any more.  I know men, but not closely.  I’m not someone who has a lot of close male friends.  I have sometimes had closer relationships with men than I have today, even straight men, but my world has revolved around women primarily, since I was 20.  And so for 40 some years, I have really chosen to spend my life around women and have women be my focus.  That’s really what it is; it’s not a matter of hating men as much as it’s liking/loving women and caring about women first in my life.  So, my experience with men has been sort of checkered, sort of up and down and not something – there are lots of lesbians who have close gay male friends or even straight male friends and lots of straight women who have lots of male friends and it works for them.

AH:	  But your spirituality is really driven by women.

SG: 	 Spirituality.  I really don’t consider myself a very spiritual person, Abbie.

AH: 	 But yet you’ve been in these Jewish lesbian groups…

00:53:10

SG:  	But the Jewish lesbian group – in some ways the Jewish lesbian group was probably the closest I ever came to being very Jewish in an actively religious way and even then it wasn’t a very actively religious way.  But, we did talk about being Jewish women and what that was for us and our experiences, the things that we shared and also in some cases the things we didn’t share, because a number of the women in that group had far less religious upbringing than even I had.  Some of them have gone on to become much more actively Jewish than I.  It was definitely a sharing of culture more than a religion, I would say, in the same way that I referred earlier to the fact that I am really a cultural Jew but not a religious Jew.
  
AH:  	Would you say you’re more political than spiritual?

SG:  	Definitely.  No question.  Politics defines probably almost every decision I make, even if it’s, by this time in my life, in an unconscious way.  There’s politics involved with everything you do- what you eat, what you wear, where you live, where you go, how you go.  Politics is an extremely important part of my life and it’s one of the biggest things that Arlene and I share.  It’s been one of our very major uniting forces.  

AH:  	Describe your politics.

SG:  	Progressive.  Radical.  Sometimes a little too far out for most people.  I will sometimes say, “I don’t want a bigger piece of the pie, I want a whole different pie.”  So, I would like there to be much more equality for everyone in the world in every way.  And in fact, there is surely enough money in the world for everyone to live a reasonably comfortable life and have all their needs met but the way the wealth is distributed, I don’t see much chance of that ever happening.  But, I would still like to see that be the case.  

AH:  	I asked you when I was talking about all these organizations you’ve been involved in -- I asked you which ones affected you the most.  I have another way of asking you about the organizations you’ve been involved with and that has to do with which of the ones have accomplished the most. 

SG:  	The most.  I wouldn’t say that I’m generally someone who thinks about things in that way.  I’m not someone who ranks things a lot.  So, I would say they all accomplished at least some of their goals.  They were all important things for me, enough so that I chose to put my energy and time there to try to make a difference.  Whether it was the women prisoner’s support group, or the Latin American women’s support group, or the lesbian or gay things, or the choirs, or the things at WORT, or Apple Island, or even my stint with Feminist Voices newspaper, I think they all were at least somewhat successful in accomplishing their goals.  They were all a part of trying to make a difference and to create a different world.

AH:  	Thanks for reminding me about Apple Island because I think that that’s a real important thing that you were involved in.

SG: 	 I think it was an important gathering place for women at that time, and it was a place where women could come together to be together, to socialize.  There were some class things that went on.  There was a women’s herstory project that went on.  There were meetings of various groups.  But, I think Apple Island’s cultural things were probably in the end the most important things that went on there.  I think that we were pretty successful in bringing women who were involved in different aspects of the arts to Apple Island, and allowing them to present what they had for an audience that would be interested and supportive and excited about what they were coming to see there.

00:58:50

AH: 	 Apple Island was a space…

SG:  	Apple Island was a space that was started by a woman named Lois Stauber.  She, after awhile didn’t want to be doing that anymore, and there was a collective that attempted to continue Apple Island unsuccessfully.  During Apple Island’s time I think it provided a really important opportunity for women in Madison to work together, to be together, to be educated about a lot of things, to have a lot of enjoyable and fun kinds of experiences.  Apple Island was great.  I miss it. I recently retired from almost 26 years of doing “Her Infinite Variety”, my radio show.  I have passed that on now to 3 women, all of whom are quite a bit younger than I am, which I think is a good thing.  I think it was time for some younger, newer blood.  Some younger, newer music.  Some different approaches to things, an attempt to reach an audience who I was perhaps not as successful reaching, even though I made attempts to reach them.  But I think that they had an idea that I couldn’t reach them, or this program couldn’t reach them.  That it was still mired in the past of the 70’s, which, if they ever listened to it, they would know that wasn’t true, but most of them didn’t bother, I don’t think.  I’m kind of hoping that they will now, though, and that they are.  So, we’ll see what happens.  But these women filled in for me during my leave of absence and then the 3 of them officially took over about 2 ½ months ago.  I think it’s a learning curve for them but they are doing well and getting better.  I’ve been listening a lot.  I’ve been trying to provide a little guidance.  I’m the mother hen; they’re the chicks.  And so I attempt to nudge the chicks in certain directions.  I still once in awhile go back.  I’m going to be going back in a couple weeks to do an interview on the program.  It’s going to be a pretty short interview but it’s going to be with a group that I first learned about last year, from Kentucky, called The Sirens, or The Sirens in the Woods.  They’re probably like late 20’s, early 30’s, a lesbian duo and they do a combination of music and spoken word, which really just wowed people last year at the National Women’s Music Festival.  They’re going to be back this year because they were one of the winners of the talent contest that they started to have at the festival last year, which is now taking place in Middleton, Wisconsin.  Rather than in some other state!  So they’re coming and a woman in town here who is helping to manage them is interested in having them be on the show.  Even though they are really the age of the women who have taken over “Her Infinite Variety”, for whatever reasons they were busy with this and that, or other interviews or other things and I was very excited to be interviewing The Sirens so I’m going to be going back and interviewing them.  I also, as someone who has inherited wealth, it has allowed me to have much privilege in my life and I have been in recent years, sometimes with Arlene and sometimes with my sister, trying to figure out ways to make that money reach out to others who have not had the same opportunities that I have.  So philanthropy has become a focus of mine in the recent years and trying to figure out how to do that in a way that I think will be the most effective, will do the most good.  And philanthropy involving projects concerning women and concerning lesbians for sure.

AH:  	Do you have a bucket list?

SG:  	No.  I don’t have a bucket list.  (laugh)  I would like to go to Australia.  I would like to go back to Europe.  The travel thing.  I love to see other places in the world; it’s always interesting to me to see how people do things, how people have done things, what it looks like there.  I believe that everybody in the world should go somewhere else.  Surely people in this country should go somewhere else in the world and realize that the world doesn’t just revolve around this country and this place and how things are here.  Everybody doesn’t have to be like us, talk like us, act like us, dress like us, sing like us or everything else like us.  In fact there’s a lot of really interesting stuff elsewhere and many people in this country just have no idea about it and I think it’s very sad.  I think that if everybody had the opportunity to go somewhere else and look around, they would look at this country differently and they would look at other countries differently.  It would be an experience that couldn’t help but broaden people’s horizons and get people out of this the only way to win things is to have a war.

01:04:16

AH:  	I assume you’re anti war.

SG:  	Yeah, I was involved with the Madison area Women for Peace group for a number of years when that group was still existing.  Since the Apple Island thing that was one of the things that I have been involved in… the Feminist Voices and the Madison area Women for Peace.  I’ve been doing peace demonstrations since… what year would it have been?   Probably in 1965 because it was before I was in college.  I was involved with a young Democrats group in high school.  Briefly, I was involved with them.  We came to Madison to do a mock Senate thing with the young Republicans group, and the young Republicans introduced a resolution supporting the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was involved with this country’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and I took the paper and set it on fire and burned it in a waste paper basket in the Wisconsin State Assembly Chambers.  Peace issues were important in my family.  I didn’t have to go nearly as far as very many people, who struggled through all sorts of things to get to the idea of peace.  It was an idea that I was raised with, so I was very lucky.  It was one of the reasons that when I came here to school in Madison, protesting against the war was more important than going to some English class. I have been a collector of lesbian pulp fiction and small press lesbian fiction for many years, and women’s print newspapers, magazines, all those kind of things.  I have donated – I finally decided it was far better – out of the closet, into the libraries!  It was far better for me to take what I had and try to figure out places to put it so that people who are interested now and in the future, and fortunately I think there are now people who are interested in finding out what happened in the lesbian and gay movement, in the women’s movement, in lots of alternative movements of the past 30, 40, 50 years.  Now it’s gotten to be long enough that there are people who want to learn about that, want to study about that, want to see about that, so I have been trying to divest myself of my many collections of things – not the books so much – but a lot of the other things and trying to figure out where to put those things so that others can see them and realize that even if a lot of those things aren’t going on today that they did go on then, and that they were very important things in all of us working together and trying to make change, to build movements to create change.  

AH: 	Have you given some things to the Wisconsin Historical Society?

SG:  	I have given some things to them, although as it turns out, not as many things as I would have thought I would have given them.  Someone who was going to help me do that, it turned out, only half helped me do that and it also turned out that the state historical society had more things than I had thought, which is a good thing.  So, I have donated those things to the LGBT Campus Center, to Outreach, some of them are still sitting in boxes in an office in the College Library, I believe.  They may eventually go somewhere but I am not certain where they are going to be.  I have sent things to the Lesbian Herstory Archives and to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.  Those are the main places that I have sent things and I still have some stuff.  The books are the things that I mostly haven’t been able to part with.  The rest of the things that I have, I’ve sent off – I do have a collection of things like programs from events that I’ve attended, cultural events concerning women and lesbians from decades, that I have in boxes still, that are not very organized.  I have some photos but not too many.  But I am trying to figure out what to do with that because I don’t look at these things enough.  After I’m gone I don’t know anybody personally who is going to care about these things, so you know, let’s put ‘em some place where maybe somebody else who might be interested will stumble upon them.

1:09:21

SG:	I’ve been interviewed about my book collection, as well.  But not for awhile.

AH:  	Your lesbian pulp fiction?

SG:  	Yeah.

AH:  	Sounds great.

SG:  	They’re very fun cuz they have these very lurid 50’s covers and the stories are fun.  Some of them have been reprinted which I think is a really good thing.  I think that lesbians today – it’s important for us to know that the lesbian publishing that happened in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and is still kind of dribbling on today that things went on.  There were many not positive stories about lesbians, but there were also many positive stories about lesbians then, not a lot of them, but some. I do think sometimes that relationships that are successful and long term happen because the 2 of you are kind of in the same place at the same time.  You know, I think we meet many people in our lives who we love and share a lot of things with.  I surely have.  The confluence of things in the universe, and I’m not a very spiritual person as I said, can sometimes be such that it’s one of those things that 2 people meet at this time and they’re both in whatever place that is that they need to be in, so that they can see that they can learn from each other, which I think Arlene and I still do.  We have pretty good communication.  That’s been one of the things that we talked about, even at the very beginning of our relationship.  Even if it was really hard to talk about, we were always going to talk about those things.  We weren’t not gonna talk about them.  So, I think that that has been one of our saving graces.  I think that we have in many ways, similar outlooks on the world, even though we can both be very positive about things or very negative about things.  I think that we have shared hard times and good times and have figured out how to support each other through all those times.  Arlene is, no question about it, the love of my life.  There may have been those other 18 or whatever women and they all had their place in my life but not the place that Arlene has occupied.  My relationship with Arlene is the 2nd longest thing I’ve ever done, right behind my radio show.  I would hope that I wouldn’t have spent as much time on it if it wasn’t worthwhile, and I think it’s been very worthwhile.  Very worthwhile for me.  I think that we have grown a lot, changed a lot, loved a lot, laughed a lot, cried a lot.  I think Arlene is cute and smart and fun and all those adjective kind of things and I still look at her with just love, love, love.  (laughs)

AH:  Ah!

SG:  	You know and that’s why when I said earlier it’s our 296th anniversary that really is indicative of how we are.  We still -- Do we give each other a card or a present every month?  Often, but not always.  Do we go out to dinner and celebrate?  Sometimes.  Do we do some other special thing, go some place for the day or whatever?  Sometimes.  You know, sometimes we do all those things and sometimes it’s just kind of a regular day that we acknowledge that it’s our anniversary.  Today we helped out a friend of ours who is not very healthy at this point in time, physically healthy, and that was how we celebrated our anniversary today.  So, I guess that Arlene is very special to me, very dear to me.  You know, forever?  I don’t know what it is but I’m still doin it… and so is she.

01:14:32

SG:	We didn’t talk about gay bars, how women used to stand outside the Pirate Ship where men would go and dance outside because there was no dance floor.  Or, the Stop Light, which I was just talking with DJ Wipperfurth about recently and it’s the first place I ever danced.

AH:  And that was downtown?

SG:	  It’s actually right about 2 blocks from where we are now, maybe not even 2 blocks.  It’s actually vacant, for rent, at this point in time, but it hasn’t been a bar for a long time.  Or, Going My Way, there’s one you would know about.  The Back Door we talked about a little.  Or, the Women’s Center that used to be at the University Y and then was on Johnson St.  It was on Johnson St when Women’s Transit Authority actually started.  Or, the National Lesbian Feminist Organization, which is going to be having a reunion later this summer.  Or difficult things for our lesbian community, like the Catherine Rouse-Joan [Kepecs?] murder incident, where Catherine murdered her former partner Joan and ah!  It was very hard.  Or things like the Lizards, or the demonstrations supporting Joan Roberts when she didn’t get tenure at the University.  Everybody thought it was because she was a lesbian; it was probably true, we’ll never know.  But, in any event she didn’t get tenure.  There are lots of things, lots of things that have gone on that we could have talked more about.  There’s a very rich history of activism here.  I sometimes say that Madison rests on its laurels and I really feel that today, because in Madison, but of course everywhere, really, there are so many fewer things that go on, that are really trying to create positive change.  Even Madison ‘s kind of been taken over by the greed of the world, sometimes I believe. Electoral politics has never been my thing.  I’ve always been the person who’s been interested in the grass roots, cutting edge, smaller, outside the mainstream kind of thing.  It’s far different than – some people tried to get me interested in some statewide group that was going to elect more Democrats in Wisconsin.  And they actually were successful in the last election in electing more Democrats to the state legislature, to the point where the Democrats got in control of both houses of the state legislature and the Governor, of course.  But once they got there, they couldn’t figure out how to work together, so what difference did it make?  Not very much difference.  I think that change always has to come from the bottom up not from the top down.  So, electoral politics has never been what I’ve chosen, except for my brief stint in the Young Democrats.  Or, my working for the election of John Kennedy when I was 12.  My parents were not supporters of Kennedy but I worked to elect Kennedy when I was 12.  Like I say, politics has always been a very important part of my life.  It was an important part of my family life.  And it was an important part of Arlene’s family life because her father worked for the Daley machine.  The first Daley, not the current Daley, the father of the current Daley.  So, politics was always an important part of her life and that is a lot of the reason why politics is such an important part of both of our lives.  We both have grown up with having this be such a big part of our lives, that it’s no surprise that we would come to this, come together and have this understanding about politics.  We both talk about how it would be almost impossible for us to be involved with somebody who didn’t share similar politics to ours, because how would we ever get along.  There’s so much of our lives that we would not have in common, that it would be very difficult to exist purely on a sexual or physical kind of relationship.  There has to be something much more than that for both of us, in order to have something that’s really going to have strong roots, a strong foundation.

AH: 	 So, it is almost your religion.

SG:  	Yeah.  I suppose so because you know Arlene is not a Catholic in an active way, any more than I’m a Jew in an active way.  Although the few times a year, or the one time per year that I get together with other Jewish women, Arlene is more excited than I am to do it. (laughs) 

AH:  	That’s so cute!

SG: 	 It’s true, too!  We get together in the spring for Passover and have a Seder for Pesach with kind of the remains of the Jewish lesbian group and other Jewish lesbians and their partners.  There’s usually a group of about a dozen of us and we get together at someone’s home.  We used to have a very lesbian, and then a very woman oriented Seder.  A whole Haggadah thing, a service that you do before you have the meal.  And the women now, who have become sort of in charge of the more religious aspects, are way more religious, and the whole Seder has become much more religious, in a somewhat alternative political, but not necessarily a lesbian or a woman’s kind of thing… a more alternative Judaism kind of thing perhaps, than it used to be.  And, it’s also gotten way much longer.  It takes forever to eat, forever, forever, forever.  But Arlene is always more excited to go than I am.  I don’t know.  I like to see these women and some of them I don’t see except for really once a year, and I go for that reason.  But some of the other aspects of it make me wonder if I should go anymore, if I should continue to go.  Because I sort of think it’s not fair.  It’s sort of like after awhile I stopped going to Womonsong because I enjoyed the socializing more than I enjoyed the singing, and I decided it wasn’t fair to go to a singing group if I wasn’t really that interested in the singing, but only in seeing people and talking to them.

01:21:59	End of Interview

		End of Oral History #1105