After the Summer Theater burned down while we were in high school, the adjacent 3 story wooden building with tiny rooms that had served as housing for the lesser actors and employees, became a rooming house with very cheap rooms.  At least three people from our class stayed there at various times.  (They can add their recollections if they like and I hope they will.)  I stayed there two summers while home from college and working at the Pavilion.  The walls were thin boards with no sound barriers.  On one side of my room I had a local janitor coughing his lungs out with emphysema or lung cancer or both.  On the other side one of our female classmates who occasionally had rather loud and passionate evenings with her boy friend.

The residents were the cast of a musical or Dickens novel of the depths, just a bit too absurd for a Dostoevsky novel of gloom and despair.  The parents of another schoolmate a few years behind us also lived there, down on their luck and often full up with alcohol.  The wife regularly berated the meek husband and occasionally beat him, once with a hot iron.  The owner's mother also lived there, passing her final years and maintained by her son the impresario who had owned the theater.  She was a very motherly Italian woman who took me under her wing.  My first comercially published story was about the Artists' Colony and "Mamalina" as we all called her.

In sorting old letters I found a copy of a letter I wrote to a friend at Duke on June 29, 1960:

We had a fire in this rat trap of a building last night.  A roomer came in drunk about midnight and fell asleep smoking in bed.  The cigarette dropped to the floor and set the rug on fire.  A woman passing down the hall saw smoke rolling out underneath the door and knocked loud enough to wake the guy up.  He fled stark naked, and soon a host of other rumors were forming a bucket brigade in clearing stuff out of the room.  I thought we had all become orphans, but soon the blaze was out and everyone was joking about it and reminiscing about the last fire.  When another drunk tried to extinguish the flames with his beer.  This one was almost as absurd: one man was using his deadpan as a water carrier.

Except for drunks, and one near accidental drunken suicide by a man falling off the fire escape, the week has been uneventful.  It is about time for me to start looking for excitement.