I only have these 10 miutes, but do you know about the women in the Rowayton Art Guild? Well it used to be called that, they were so so artsy craftsy, -ish women who did things at fivish and sevenish.. they always had Phil Booth "Hang Their Shows". He was one of the only men in Rowayton who knew how to operate a hammer, or a generator, or do anything more useful than screw in a lightbulb...the majority of men were in our little hamlet were, their wives cried, "just useless"....He was the man they ran to in Rowayton Estates when their husband, say, may have kicked the lawnmower blade while the machine was running, to loosten the clodded grass, and were lying on the lush green lawn gushing blood from a severed artery. He painted garish 10 x 12 foot murals of naked women reposing in front of mirrors to decorate the annual Fireman's Ball at Roton Point, and Mom always burned them the next morning because her son's little friends wanted to hang them on their 11 year old bedroom walls , next to the Little League pennants.
But one activity that Dad refused was the annual cleaning of the cannon. On the traffic triangle in front of Winthrop House, at the intersection of Rowayton Avenue and , a Revolutionary War cannon said, muzzle eternally at half mast.. black and sooty and corroding in the salt air. The -ish women mounted the cannon every April, and gripping with their thighs positioned themselves astride for most of a morning while they scrubbed and rinsed. It never looked any cleaner, and Mom would always drive by and out of the corner of her mouth hiss that they'd be better off with a man at home than perched on a phallic symbol on Main Street. I had to get clarification from Becky of course. She knew everything.....