Tricia Vita

Today I honor the legacy of Louise Lauretano DeMars, the longtime director of Connecticut's Carousel Museum, who passed away last week. If you've never been to the Bristol museum - it was founded in 1990 and has a wonderful collection - you're in for a treat. I got to know Louise in the late '90s when she hired me as manager of the museum's Mystic branch and we've kept in touch over the years. The Mystic museum was located in a fun center, which I loved, coming from a carnival family. I also enjoyed giving tours and being alone with the antique horses for a few minutes when we closed for the day. Thank you, Louise. You will be missed.

My newly published oral history with John Philip Capello is the culmination of a twelve-year search for the mystery artist who carved faces into rocks at Brighton Beach in the 1970s! The carvings have remained out of the public eye because they're usually buried in sand. Many thanks to photographers Bruce Handy and Jim McDonnell for their help solving this mystery. This is a very satisfying way to end the year. You can listen to the interview in the Coney Island History Project oral history archive.

I was delighted to receive this book in the mail today! A successful grant application that I wrote for the Coney Island History Project is published in Tell Your Story and Make Your Case: A Workshop to Build Grant Writing Skills. The workshops will be offered by the Museum Association of New York in each of New York's ten regions in the fall of 2021. The proposals featured in the book will serve as a model for workshop attendees.

The grant application that I wrote was awarded funding for general operating assistance by the Pomeroy Fund for New York State History in 2020. The series of grant-writing workshops are supported by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

"Who wouldn't want to belong to the Dreamland Social Club?" I wrote ten years ago in a review of Tara Altebrando's book set in Coney Island. "In this novel for teenage readers, the club is an unofficial group frequented by a freaky clique at Coney Island High School. Among its members is Babette, a goth dwarf who befriends the novel's 16-year-old heroine Jane with the explanation: 'You seem cool. And you've got carny blood, even if it's highly diluted.' "

During the pandemic, Tara and her husband Nick began adapting the novel into a stage musical with her 13-year-old daughter singing the part of the main character Jane.  I caught up with the author via Zoom and recorded her oral history for the Coney Island History Project. You can listen to the interview here.

Ali Lemer and I have been working together virtually as co-producers with Charles Denson of the Coney Island Stories podcast since just a few weeks before New York declared a state of emergency in March 2020. It was great to finally meet in person, fourteen months later, at the Coney Island History Project! And I'm really proud of what we've accomplished with the podcast. You can listen via Apple, Spotify and coneyislandhistory.org/podcast. 

Excited to share this article in Brooklyn Paper about Coney Island Stories, a new podcast which I co-produced with Charles Denson and Ali Lemer. It's now available for listening via Apple, Spotify, and other podcast app, as well as the History Project's website. When we started to have to work from home because of the pandemic, there was time to actually create the podcast. I wrote the scripts trying to find common themes to bring together from the Coney Island History Project's oral history archive. New episodes coming in 2021!

I have a Christmas surprise and delightful personal news to share: The Ten-Woman Bicycle, a feminist fable that I wrote in college and later published in Ms. Magazine's Stories for Free Children and as a children's book in Europe and the UK, will have its world premiere  as an orchestral work by composer June Bonacich! Originally planned as a live concert for International Women's Day, due to the pandemic a portion of the work will be performed on December 22nd as part of the Community Women's Orchestra's Holidays at Home concert via YouTube at 7PM PST, 10PM EST