HOLLY NADLER
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While the following is not a snippet from that cheesy book, Vineyard Confidential, Oak Bluffs native Kate McLean is living with 10 boys in San Francisco. Also three girls.
It started when she moved to the Bay Area last December (don’t you love the way today’s Vineyarders can just pick up and go thousands of miles from home; back in the day, their farthest destination used to be a weekend in New Bedford.)
Kate’s pal, Meagan Rossi, from Edgartown, was already in situ to show her the ropes, i.e., look both ways before crossing Castro and head over to Haight-Ashbury to see how your parents used to live. Now Kate’s kid sister, Fiona, had a friend in San Francisco named Dave, who said Kate could stay with him and his seven male roommates (plus two dogs) in their 6,000-square-foot ex-ironworks loft in the Mission District. Well, Kate was the Woman Who Came To Dinner because she never left.
Meanwhile six degrees of separation kept on bestowing benefits. Dave recommended Kate for a job at FaceBook where the brass were seeking a speaker of French (you’ll recall that Kate’s mom, Bree, taught French at the high school and the whole family spent a year in Cherbourg back in the early 1990s, umbrellas open and at the ready). Now the population in the loft is up to 14. With seven partitioned bedrooms in addition to one large guest quarters, that’s not necessarily a squeeze, though the numbers of bathrooms is exactly one. “I shower at work,” says Kate with a laugh.
In June the lofties are hosting 27 bicyclists coming to town for a marathon. Kate doesn’t remember whose idea it was to put up the pedal-pushers, but she doesn’t appear fazed by it. The roommates cook together in the industrial-sized kitchen, and chow down around a 25-foot-long trestle table made from rescued planks. The loftniks are particularly proud of the entertainment center they created from cast-off movie seats rising stadium-style above a de rigeur 72-inch television screen.
This week — this blissfully balmy, sunny week — Kate is visiting on Island with her boyfriend, Nick, another loft lodger, and together they’ll be taking a road trip back out west, ever the truest test of romantic compatibility.
Oak Bluffs resident Tom Dresser’s long-awaited book, Mystery On The Vineyard, from The History Press will have its launch on Sunday, April 27 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Featherstone. The event will include book chat, people chat, and refreshments. The story is about our spookiest unsolved murder here on the Island. Not to give anything away but it was a dark and stormy night on June 30, 1940. The setting was the gothic dormitory of the Rice Playhouse rising high over the bluffs in East Chop and . . . well, you’ll have to read Tom’s book to learn whodunnit (or didn’t!)
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