A Book Is Launched

An eBook, at any rate. I've got reviews in the local newspapers in the Fairhope, Alabama, area, where much of That Was Tomorrow takes place, and am awaiting a surge of sales on my website and at the Internet retail sources like amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Vook. Yes, I said Vook. Check it out.

That Was Tomorrow is a historical novel. Most of the story takes place in the remote reformist enclave of Fairhope, a real place that seems very unreal today, but it begins in Hoboken with a poor-little-rich-girl heroine raised on upper Hudson Street in the early 1900s. She escapes through a helpful and loving aunt who raises her with her rambunctious family, is educated in Quaker schools, and decides to become an educator herself.

This takes her to the Alabama town where a unique form of education is being practiced, and where she thrives and considers life as a New Woman of the 20th century.

The book has been on amazon dot com since the end of April, and was reviewed there by 11 people so far. The following reviews include some of those and others from the publications I mentioned.


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Timbes knows of a secret place, and once she gets her wagon rolling, she carries us there with grace and intimate charm…a strange yet familiar world is here for the taking.

That Was Tomorrow drops itself squarely in the middle of Fairhope’s golden era. It is the 1920s…via narrative fiction, Timbes has lifted this world from the dust of time and holds it up for us to inspect to the best of our abilities. We are allowed into the town via its unconventional ferries and dirt-road main streets. We are invited into its leading hotels and community gathering points. She lets us wander through the classrooms and sit with the children as they are taught by the Organic Method. We are treated to an intimate and personal account of life as it existed nearly a century ago in a place now accessible by car but almost impossible to find again in the mind.

While this is Timbes’ first novel, it is her third book on Fairhope. She is herself a graduate of The Organic School, and she served as the curator for the Marietta Johnson Museum in Fairhope. She grew up in Fairhope, left for the world at large, and came back. And left again. Educated in the same place and manner she describes, she has cultivated a precise and careful prose uncommon in popular fiction. Her nuanced, period tone carries us easily backward to the innocence and charm and guileless rhythms of 1920s Fairhope. Her fiction is lively and ambitious. That Was Tomorrow is a historical novel, so her literary license comes with some restrictions. Yet she seamlessly twines Fairhope’s known personages into her own creations, allowing the reader to speculate beyond the range of straight fiction.

Although her descriptions of seemingly insignificant details such as the layout of a cottage, the flora on a specific street, the intricacies of a folk dance, or the plot line of a stage play can be viewed as overly worked, they actually carry the true substance of her effort. It is precisely through this detailed reconstruction of the daily lives of the citizens, the teachers, and the students that we find ourselves ultimately swimming far, far below the surface of the Fairhope we can drive through today. And when we surface, is it our eyes that are changed, or has tony, flip-happy Fairhope once again become full of thinkers and artists and bons vivants? Read; then decide. It’s certainly nice to think so.

For anyone wanting a realistic portrayal of yesterday’s sleepy South, a more informed connection to modern Fairhope, or a working re-enactment of Marietta Johnson’s Organic Education philosophy, Timbes’ book is a clear choice. She escorts us into the cliffs and gullies, the dirt and the shine, the people and the place, and the village on the bay that was a utopia for the taking. Jump in. Mobile Bay hasn’t felt this good in decades.
                                                                Rex Anderson, Mobile Press Register

It's hard to believe that there was once a time in this country, between the Last Great War and the inevitable onset of the next one, when there existed utopian communities across America, testing shared principles of civic idealism, personal actualization and the common good. And it's harder to believe that one of the more interesting was located in the Red State of Alabama, in the coastal community of Fairhope. In That Was Tomorrow, Mary Lois Timbes brings the improbable to life, complete with complete with believable, flesh and blood characters all living out their hopes and dreams in a concretely described, lush Southern setting. Take a trip to Fairhope. You will not only discover a progressive community of the past, but also what is finest in the American character. believable, flesh and blood characters all living out their hopes and dreams in a concretely described, lush Southern setting. Take a trip to Fairhope. You will not only discover a progressive community of the past, but also what is finest in the American character.                                                           
                                      Jonathan Odell, Author, The View From Delphi, The Healing

Historical fiction is a much abused genre. Too often fascinating people and events are treated like museum pieces - fragile, silent, and dead.
 
That Was Tomorrow avoids these pitfalls, giving us a vivid portrait of a time and place in history filled with colors, scents, sounds, and a strong sense of the future.

Along with heroine Amelia, we explore the turn-of-the-century Utopian experiment known as Fairhope, getting to know the colony's eccentric citizens, their habits, their politics, their fears, and their dreams. It is a coffee-fueled, romance-filled, full-sensory trip back to a dynamic time in a very unique place - and is well worth the visit.

                     Michele Feltman Strider, Author Homecoming, Hometown

The character depictions in Fairhope, some fictional and others not, are the highlights of That Was Tomorrow, together with the details of the activities such as folk dancing and singing that occupied such a central place in the Fairhope school. Having written on Fairhope before (A Fair Hope of Heaven and Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree), Timbes hits her stride in the telling of these tales…That Was Tomorrow is a very good read, well-written, nicely laid out and gives just enough coverage to the somewhat raffish character of the colony in those early days to underline the point that, in a very unprogressive state, a flower grew and flourished.

                                                                              Ralph E. Thayer, The Fairhope Courier

If your appetite is whetted--and I hope it is--go to my website for more details and buttons where you can order the book directly from me or from any of the sources. Or go to your favorite online book retailer (i.e., amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, or Vook. Yes, I said Vook) and search for That Was Tomorrow.

The Way We Thought We Were

A friend of mine once explained his breakup with a beautiful young woman from Iowa, "She saw the movie Annie Hall when she was a teenager and decided then and there she was going to be like Annie Hall and move to New York and seduce a witty Jewish guy like Woody Allen. After she moved in she discovered I was Jewish only on my father's side and was no Woody Allen. It was all downhill after that."

In the early days of the Internet I got interested in chat rooms. Now, of course, I use Facebook as a virtual time sink for semi-personal relations, but back then I had a lot of fun in a chat room of my own I called The Algonquin Round Table. I had fancied that the name would attract wits and wags from all over the country who knew about Dorothy Parker and the denizens of the so-called round table of the 1920s. For the better part of a year I kept it going, but I all too often I had to explain what the original round table was and try to keep the conversational patter at a level that would invite wisecracks and witty comments. People did come in as alter egos and one young woman dubbed herself Holly Golightly (I know it's the wrong period, but she was allowed in in the spirit of the game. She had seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's and obviously it struck a chord with her). 

To make this long story short, she attracted one of the young men in my vicious circle so much that one weekend he hopped a plane from Denver, where he lived, to meet her in Seattle, where she lived. The visit was a fiasco. I don't know the details, but I suspect he was expecting Audrey Hepburn to greet him as much as she expected George Peppard to step off that plane.

Maybe it's common for adolescent girls to latch on to a particular image of someone they see in the movies to define their expectations of the next phase of their life. What then, I asked myself, did I see myself as? The answer came to me right away.

I was Leslie Caron as Lili, naive, hopeful, a little tacky, but oh so charming and elfin and young, young, young, like a kindergartner let loose among the grownups and choosing to play with the puppets. I loved that movie. I remember bawling out loud at it. I think I was it. And part of me still is. Do you know who you thought you were? How did that work out?

Amelia of Hoboken

That Was Tomorrow, a first novel that has begun life as an e-book and may eventually be published under my own imprint, has a Hoboken history and is not autobiographical but does deal with some situations that have happened in my own life. 

I began the book in Hoboken, where my leading character was born. I would take young Amelia King through a privileged childhood with a nanny from hell, a repressed woman with so many hangups that little Amelia’s only refuge was in a game that involved torturing her teddy bear in order to save him.

Amelia was born in the late 1890s into what was known in Hoboken as the upper crust—the moneyed families who inhabited the mansions of Castle Terrace and Hudson Street. I gave her a sympathetic grandfather who happened to run a prosperous business, a dry goods store on Washington Street, and a father who was a doctor with alcohol and drinking problems. Her mother was the daughter of the hardworking Irish couple--the eldest, prettiest daughter, somewhat inhibited and socially insecure. This backstory became a bit convoluted as I had a beloved aunt rescue Amelia from the cold-hearted mother and the evil nanny and take her to live with her family of four boisterous children in Philadelphia. Amelia was enrolled with her cousins in progressive Quaker school, and she decided early on that she wanted to be a schoolteacher herself.

I sent Amelia off to Mt. Holyoke, which is where the model for this character, Grace Rotzel, actually did matriculate. I kept almost nothing of Miss Rotzel’s character in my creation of Amelia, as I knew so little of what she was like. I didn't think about it, but through this character I was able to work out some of the problems of my own young womanhood and make this one work better than mine had. Amelia was to become, by her own choice, a “new woman” of the 20^th century and carve out a life for herself outside Hoboken, starting with a trip to the utopian community of Fairhope, Alabama, to study with the visionary educator Marietta Johnson. Like Grace Rotzel, she would spend most of the 1920s in Fairhope, working under Mrs. Johnson, and ultimately leave it to start a similar school in Rose Valley, PA. 

One Hoboken chapter takes Amelia on a walk from the train terminal to her family home on Hudson Street to announce to her parents her decision to move to a faraway community to study the new approach to education among a community of reformers. In my own life the parallel was a discussion between me and my father, many decades after Amelia's awakening, about my wish to become an actress and drop out of college to go to acting school. By the time I came to the last draft of That Was Tomorrow, the chapter of the father's alcoholic rehabilitation was no longer in the novel. My father was hardly the model for Dr. King, but the scene certainly took me back to the moments gathering the strength to tell him of my plans. (In my own case, Daddy suggested I live at home and save money for the school myself, and I did just that, working as a copy girl at the Mobile Press Register for almost a year. I didn't go to the American Academy of Dramatic Art after all; at the end of the year I chose to get married instead.)

Most of the Hoboken stories had to be omitted to focus the book on Amelia herself and the life she creates. The kindly grandfather who left Amelia enough money to allow her to pursue her dream of teaching school in the remote, earth-changing village, is reduced to a few mentions. Descriptions of early Hoboken were edited out, some of them fanciful anyway (I had created a singing shoeshine boy hanging around the terminal, based on stories of the revered Italian singer Jimmy Roselli who actually lived in Hoboken a generation later; I reluctantly cut this character out of my novel for space.) There is affection for old Hoboken in my narrative, even though I never experienced it. Every step I take in Hoboken informs me and sends me into a reverie about the history of the city, and I hope That Was Tomorrow has enough of Hoboken in it to be of interest to those who live or visit here now. The e-book is available on amazon or from my website at www.findingfairhope.com. E-books are the wave of the future, and you don't even need an ereader. They can be downloaded right onto your computer.

Dinner With Margaret

Margaret called me a few days ago--a voice from the past. I was embarrassed that I hadn't gotten in touch with her since my move. At that point I'd expected to be seeing a lot of her, and no doubt I would have if I had just informed her that I had moved to Hoboken.

I knew her in college, oh those many years ago, and got in touch with her when I was househunting and had all but decided on Hoboken. I remember asking her if people in Manhattan were still as reluctant to venture off the island and see their friends in New Jersey as they were when I lived in the city in the 1960s and 70s. She assured me that there were plenty of people in the city who went off the island all the time. Luckily, she was partly right about that. On the other hand, I still find some resistance when I try to pull those entrenched New Yorkers out of their nests. Some don't  even venture out of their neighborhood (say, the Starbuck's at W. 92nd St.) very often at all.

But I was remiss in ignoring Margaret. I had a good long natter with her about living in New York when we had dinner in 2007. We talked about our college days and about Jerry Newell, our mutual friend from the art department, a unique and extremely entertaining person who lived larger than life and who left us in death some ten years before. Margaret was on the periphery of my life in those days, but was very close to Jerry and we both missed her terribly.

I remember when an upperclassman commented about Margaret that she had the face of a Modigliani, hence the reproduction here. She had a long, strangely beautiful face, glorious, flowing, honeycolored hair, and a tendency to be in the background, observing everything. She was very scholarly and made perfect grades. She could whip out a Dorothy Parker epigram when she felt it was needed, and, like me, she was fascinated by Jerry's wit and boldness.

It was Jerry we had in common. Maybe that was why I hadn't contacted her; the association was and is still a little painful. But Margaret received the alumni bulletin that had my name and phone number, and she called to see if I'd like to join her in an art opening Thursday. I realized I could and that I wanted to, so I met her at the gallery on 21st Street and 11th Avenue and we went to dinner afterwards. She suggested a nice restaurant on 10th just off 23rd, which had good food but was noisy and crowded as New York restaurants tend to be these days. It wouldn't bother me except that such places require screaming, especially if your companion is 70 or older, may have some hearing impairment, and you have a lot to talk about.

What we talked about, mostly, was our college days and the people we remembered. I went to that school for only one year; Margaret had stayed on and graduated, so she had acquired a larger following, which included many faculty members. She reeled off names of some of the people she had kept contact with, including my old English 101 teacher, Walter Coppedge. She had spoken to him on the phone recently.

"You ought to get in touch with him," Margaret said above the din of shrieking 30somethings accustomed to eating in the midst of clamor and chaos. Mr. Coppedge was one of those people who ignited me and set me on the road to writing. I remembered his class vividly. He taught us how to read Shakespeare, drilling down on all those light/dark, moon/sun, day/night images of Romeo and Juliet, and arranging a showing of Olivier's sterling film of Henry V at what he called the "local cinema palace." Coppedge was working toward his Ph.D at Oxford and affected an overlay of a British accent on top of his Rosedale, Mississippi cadence. It worked.

My best memory of this professor, however, was when I selected as a topic for my weekly essay, "What I Really Want from Life." My friends in the dorm were more than skeptical. This was a tall order. I was sure I could do it, and sat down and whipped off a rather snappy, as I recall, three-page, handwritten on lined paper, treatise on wanting a glamorous life which included the requisite husband and 2.3 children plus the ability to be my best self at many endeavors. I remember that the prose flowed rather easily, but when I turned it in I had no thought that the essay itself would change my life.
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Mr. Coppedge was a rather cynical man at that point. He knew he was meant for better things that teaching mediocre minds at an obscure little college in Alabama. He was discouraged because he hadn’t been granted his doctorate from Oxford. He was hard on us. But at the beginning of the class, he said, “Miss Timbes, will you meet with me briefly after class?” My girl friends turned their heads to look at me; I didn’t know what to expect that he’d say. Had I gone too far, reached too high?

After an anxious class, Mr. Coppedge said to me in the hall, “ I’ve been having a rather bad time since I got back here. I haven’t seen much of interest in this class. I’ve been thinking I may have made a mistake to come back to teach. I had come to dread the reading of the weekly essays. I sat in my home going through piles and piles of absolute drivel , and suddenly I came upon your theme!”  At last he took a breath and tried to think of what to say to me. 

 “You can write.”

 He handed me back the paper, with a 94 grade on it, no blue-pencil marks on the margins, and simply the comment, “Damnation! You can write!” scrawled at the bottom. At the top was an A-.

From then on, my fate was sealed. 

The day after dinner with Margaret I inscribed a copy of The Fair Hope of Heaven to Mr. Coppedge, wrote him a fan letter, and put them all in the mail to the address I found for him on the Internet. I also directed him to my website and gave him my home address and phone number. I hope he gets in touch with me. Most of all, I hope he likes my book.

And yes, I'm looking forward to many more dinners with Margaret.

Return To Hoboken

A few weeks ago I was visiting my daughter in Kingston, NY, and she told me about a cute little Craftsman-style house nearby that looked like something I'd like to live in. Once in a while, visiting her, I think maybe I would like to live a little closer. To get to her and my grandsons I have to catch a #126 bus from Hoboken to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York before I take the two-hour bus ride to Kingston. The bus from Hoboken to the city is a short ride--20 minutes tops--but sometimes I have to wait half an hour for that bus to come. Plus, it's a fifteen-minute (walking briskly) trek from my apartment to the bus stop. When the weather is bad I wonder whether it's worth it.

But Kingston? There are lots of things I like about it. It has a historical section. It has a few good restaurants. And Alison, her ex-husband, her two sons, and her current significant other are all there and they have a lot of friends. On the other hand, it's a good two hours to the city, more like 2 1/2, and it is pretty much a distant outpost. I said, surprising even myself, "I don't want to move to Kingston. New Paltz, maybe."

I've written before about the adjustment to Hoboken after having lived 20 years back in my hometown of Fairhope, Alabama. I missed the Northeast and Hoboken was as close to the NYC I remembered from living there in the late 1960s through the 1970s. It has the best of New York, with easy access to the city, and the easy going vibe of a small town. An example of this happened just this morning at the A & P. When the groceries piled up I realized I didn't have the cash for it so I opened my credit card wallet to pull out my bank card and discovered it wasn't there! All the usual things ran through my mind, but first off I thought I had probably left the card in the machine at the bank when I took out cash two days ago. I couldn't picture a thief in Hoboken stealing my card, but ran through the litany of things I must do in case that happened.

I paid for my groceries with my American Express card, grabbed my heavier-than-expected plastic bags of groceries and headed toward home. As my anxiety grew I decided the best way to alleviate the situation would be to go five blocks out of my way to the bank first. On the way, I remembered the time, soon after moving to Hoboken, when I left my wallet with my credit cards on the counter at the post office on Washington Street at 8th. When I realized where it was, I hurried back and the lady behind the glass said she'd seen it, checked out my address, and put it in an envelope for the mailperson to deliver to me! I wrote a blog post about that. You bet I did. This time, I hoped that the bank was as friendly as the post office.

I went up to the window at the bank, which, luckily, was open until 3 P.M. on Saturdays. I explained the situation to the teller and she said, "Let's go have a look."

She asked my name, and when I said "Mary Lois" she said, "We have it." I guess I'm the only Mary Lois in Hoboken, and also I'm the only person who lost an ITM card two days ago, and everybody in the bank was waiting for me to miss it.

My heavy packages felt much lighter on the way home. Hoboken is a nice town in every sense of the word. And it's a town I feel at home in and am in no hurry to leave. 

The Band and Me

This is not going to be another obituary for Levon Helm. If you want to read such, the absolute gold standard for obituaries, chock full of stories about Levon Helm, was in the New York Times. Read it here.

This triggered my own memories of The Band, Bob Dylan, and a time in New York when I was young. No, I wasn't a folk groupie, or a Woodstock alumna, or even a starry-eyed kid waiting for Bob Dylan's next record. I was in my late 20s, an actress working at temp secretary jobs in New York. I was married to an actor, Jim Vann, and we were both Dylan fans and idealistic folk music fans. We were just a little older than Dylan's demographic, but we loved hippies and thought of them as an exotic new species on the horizon. We thought they were the hope of the world. We were almost the only people we knew who didn't smoke pot or experiment in the drug scene.

I had a temporary assignment as secretary to an executive in a little music company. This was a mainstream company, classy offices, upscale address. All I did was a little steno and typing, and it was only for a couple of weeks. It was on Madison Avenue, I believe, maybe up in the 50s. I wouldn't know the man I was working for if he walked in the door today, but I can remember this: He was related to the Gershwins, and he was trying to persuade one of the daughters to give him the rights to record some of the brothers' recently discovered music. This would have been a huge get for him as the very young head of a small New York company. He was enthusiastic to the point of obsession about the prospect of making it big in the business. When he learned a bit about my musical tastes, he told me about this great new sound, the band who used to be Bob Dylan's backup, who had rehearsed in a pink house in a remote town near Woodstock. He waved the album "Music from the Big Pink" at me, played some of it on his fabulous sound system, and after work I went out and bought the album.

The music was like nothing we'd heard before--and we had heard a lot of Bob Dylan, so we had heard some strange stuff. It was hard to think of these guys as a backup band for anybody, their sound was so unique. I'll never forget it booming at me on those huge speakers in that office. Years later my brother, who had been at the University of Alabama at the time, told me that The Band had been booked to play at one of the fraternity dances the night before the big game with Auburn. He said they blew the audience away by focusing on their job, playing their kind of music, and at the end the leader--my brother said it was "the one with the big head"--simply said,"Good night. Hope y'all win your ball game." This was a departure at the University of Alabama, where the bands know all the dances are partly football pep rallies (indeed, it might be argued that most of university life is a big football rally). It is expected that, if not playing "Stars Fell on Alabama," at least most of the night will be devoted to local chauvinism. The Band had a different agenda.

I still have one vinyl and one CD of The Band. The music doesn't sound a bit strange or revolutionary to me anymore. It was part of an era, a shred of hope against all odds, combining sounds of the past and an uncertain present with the defiant throb of the future. The era has ended. We have all moved on in spite of ourselves. The music pulls us back and slings us against the walls once more, but more gently now, as if the walls were nothing but a distant memory.

I'm at a point in my life where I'm forced to let go of old friends. It's not easy to do, and sometimes, as in a particularly well-written obituary, I'm drawn back to a place and time I had almost forgotten, and I have to do it again. Let it go; let it be. Rest in peace, Big Pink.

Hoboken Taps Its Feet

The scene is a church hall in Hoboken, New Jersey, where a former Broadway dancer is instructing a modestly talented class in the art of tap dancing. Each of the class members came for a different reason, most of which we learn during the course of the evening as we watch them magically become almost good--and we are pulling for them every minute.

Hudson Theatre Ensemble's production of Stepping Out by Richard Harris warms the heart and sets toes to tapping as it takes the audience through a labyrinth of frustrated hearts and semi-broken lives, all looking for an escape through tap dancing. As is to be expected from this excellent troupe, under the direction of Laurie Brongo, the play is fun and crisply performed.

Cristina Marie plays Mavis, the catalyst as dance teacher, who is sympathetic and wise even though she is going through a crisis of her own in her real life. Marie is a dynamite actress and dancer, coaching the clumsy and talented alike. Somehow we know all along she's going to get the best out of all of them. The script is predictable although it contains many little side trips and not a few unsolved mysteries and unresolved conflicts. But never mind about that. Life is better if you dance, isn't it?

The cast is interesting and each plays his and her own story at a professional level while admitting that if life wasn't so bad outside they wouldn't be here trying to tap dance. Even the pianist is frustrated about something, although it's less clear what. Dinah Gravel plays her quite seriously, with a bit of a sarcastic edge. I would have liked to have seen her really playing the piano, but I guess that's too much to ask. She had the role nailed, even with piped in music.

Florence Pape is always a joy to watch onstage, and the audience loved her as Vera, the bossy control freak to whom tap dancing is an escapist pastime. Other characters have more serious problems, like Emma Peele whose husband beats her and who gets a powerful dramatic scene that brought the role into sharp focus. Gregory Nye played the only male in the class with a studied unease that made his inept dancing appear to be good acting. In some cases I couldn't tell--and in this show it didn't matter.

The house was packed on opening night, and the air conditioning was faulty, which was a bother. Pacing could have been picked up in the first act, but that will all be worked out by the next performance, I'm sure. Stepping Out will run Saturday at 8 P.M., Sunday at 3 P.M., and next weekend Friday and Saturday evenings and a final matinee Sunday, April 22 at 3. Hudson Theatre Ensemble perfoms at the Hudson School, 601 Park Avenue. Go--and enjoy the show!