Brynna Fish Interview, 17 August 2023

Abstract

Brynna Fish (b. 1957) grew up in Youngstown and studied social work at Yeshiva University before moving to Cleveland Heights in 1979. In this interview, she discusses her involvement at the intersection of Cleveland's Jewish and lesbian communities, as well as her work with coordinating the annual Womyn's Variety Show and music festivals with Oven Productions and her founding of Chevrei Tikvah, a gay and lesbian synagogue, in 1983. She reflects on various gay and lesbian bars in Cleveland, and changes in Pride events since the late 1980s.

Interviewee

Fish, Brynna (interviewee)

Interviewer

Habyl, Riley (interviewer)

Project

LGBTQ+ Cleveland

Date

8-17-2023

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

128 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Brynna Fish Interview, 17 August 2023" (2023). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 701010.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1264

Transcript

Riley Habyl [00:00:05] Today's date is Thursday, August 17th, 2023. This is Riley Habyl with the LGBTQ+ Cleveland Voices Oral History Collection. I'm interviewing Brynna Fish at her home in Cleveland Heights. So hi, Brynna. Thank you very much for speaking with me today.

Brynna Fish [00:00:20] Absolutely. Thank you. And also, thank you so much for reconsidering the name of the project [from Queer Cleveland Voices to LGBTQ+ Cleveland Voices]. That means a lot to me.

Riley Habyl [00:00:28] Thank you very much for speaking with me about it. To begin, could you please state and spell your name for the record?

Brynna Fish [00:00:33] Absolutely. It's Brynna Fish, B-r-y-n-n-a F-i-s-h.

Riley Habyl [00:00:40] Thank you. So where and when were you born?

Brynna Fish [00:00:44] I was born in Youngstown, Ohio, [redacted] 1957.

Riley Habyl [00:00:49] Could you tell me a bit about your childhood and life growing up?

Brynna Fish [00:00:52] Sure. I had a great childhood in Youngstown. My grandparents were very active in the Jewish community, as were my parents. And then I got very active. My parents got divorced when I was six or seven. And nobody talked about it then. And then my dad got remarried. My dad got custody of us, which was also not really heard of in the sixties. And my dad met a woman and we became the Brady Bunch. So I have a younger brother and sister. My stepmom had three kids. And we really were the Brady Bunch—except we had two Davids, which was awesome. I went to day camp at the JCC [Jewish Community Center] and had a crush on a counselor named Jeanette. And I had a sense then that there was something different about me, but in a special kind of way. In high school I met a gal who was a year younger than me, and we became girlfriends, and lovers, and thought nobody knew about it. Later I found out that my—. One of my best friends in the mid-eighties (dog sneezes) in the mid-seventies, came to my house and said, "You know, I knew about you in high school, and I defended you to everybody because people talked." But I did not feel any prejudice or bullying in high school. Although in the sixth grade—. And I loved this. In the [sixties], I did have a crush on a girl named Bonnie, and she and I were best friends. And there was Teen Night at our local JCC—Jewish Community Center—and one evening I came out of a stall in the bathroom and two of my friends were in there, Wendy and Sidney–Cindy. And they did bully me, and they roughed me up. Pushing me around, knocked me into the paper towel dispenser in the sink, and all the while saying, "You're a lezzie. You're a lezzie. Brynna loves Bonnie." And then they left. I never told a soul about it. In the early eighties, I played a women's coffeehouse called The 10th Muse that was run by the—. Or it was founded by folks who were at Kent State at the time, students at Kent State. And—. Okay, now I don't really know who it was founded by. But there were folks there from Kent State who were involved in Kent State's LGBT thing. And the coffee house was held at Hillel on the Kent State—near Kent State campus. And during the break, I went to get a cup of tea from the little concession and Wendy—who beat me up in the bathroom—was there, and she was the president of the LGBT-whatever-it-was at Kent State. And then years—. A couple of years later, I saw Cindy at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. So I love that both of them, from their early internalized homophobia, had recognized something in me that was in themselves. And, and so, of course (dog barks) I forgave them.

Riley Habyl [00:05:10] (dog growls) Could you tell me a little bit about your educational background? Where and when you went to school?

Brynna Fish [00:05:16] Yea. So, I went to—. You want to know, like, elementary all the way to college?

Riley Habyl [00:05:26] High school and college primarily. (crosstalk)

Brynna Fish [00:05:27] Okay. So high school I went to Liberty High School in Youngstown. And then I went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. But I really wanted to go to something—a college that was progressive and very liberal. (dog collar rattles) And my parents couldn't afford that out of town, you know, out of state, places that I wanted to go to. And so I was grateful that somebody who was a year older than me already at Miami University told me about a program called the Western College Program. So, this was Miami University—. Two years before I went to Miami [University]. So I started there in the fall of '75. I was in the second graduating class of this program, so sometime in the early seventies. Western College for Women. That was founded actually before Miami University closed down, and Miami bought the campus that was across the—. I'm going to say, one of the main roads, but very rural main road. And it was an interdisciplinary studies program with a community aspect of the program. And it was perfect for me, so that's where I went. And I spent four years living in the dorm. I became an RA [resident advisor] my junior and senior year. And part of what I loved about the program is some of the staff and professors lived in the dorms. There were also houses on the campus that some of the profs lived in. And it was—. It was small. You know, there were, I don't know, 80 or 90 of us in a class. And so we got to see it grow while I was there. But also, we got to create our own major. So the first two years we spent in the core curriculum classes. And in the second two years, we had less core curriculum and more focus on whatever our individual, I don't know, major was. So I created a major in—that combined photography and writing and journalism. And every student had to create something that was, like, even more intense than a master's thesis. And what I created was a project that was poems and photographs at the time. And I—. I'm so curious about this now as 66 year old lesbian. I said that I made up a persona, and the persona was the author of these poems on three topics. So it was the relationship with the persona and her girlfriend, that was really my girlfriend—and the persona and my mother, who I had a quite a challenging relationship with—and the persona and my grandmother, who had recently died. But that my professors let me get away with the persona part was fascinating. I don't think that would happen today, but it was the seventies. Anyway. And so my girlfriend came into town for my presentation, and my parents did. My mom and my dad, my stepmom. And I remember her calling me in college, maybe my junior year. And, you know, we had phones in our room, but we had a system. If I needed to talk to my parents, I called collect and said, you know—. We had a code. And then they called me back. And it wasn't like today, everybody's talking on their phones to each other. So when my step mom called me, I thought, "Oh, somebody died or was in the hospital or something." And she's just chit chatting with me. And finally I said, "You know, what—. Is something wrong?" And she said, "Well, I called to tell you that in high school I knew about you and Nancy. And it's fine with me, but don't tell your father. It will kill him." Okay. So then, the next year—the end of my senior year—they're both coming to see my opening gallery thing and poetry reading. And I'm like, "Mom, he's going to get it that I'm a lesbian." "Oh, don't worry." It was pretty awkward, but it was also really exhilarating that I got so much support from the folks around me in my college. But I'm glad I remembered this. So my girlfriend, Nancy, from high school—. Near the end of senior year when I knew where I was going to college and I was ready to move on, she informed me that she had been working independently to graduate a year early—and she applied to Miami and was accepted into the Western College program. And she wanted us to be roommates. And I was like, "Well, okay." And then we got to school, and she really thought we were going to have this isolated lesbian utopian relationship. And I was ready to stretch my wings. And it wasn't that I was interested in any particular human being. I just didn't want to be bound by that. And in that fall, she tried to kill herself because I basically said, "You know, we're not in a relationship anymore." And that outed me in my dorm. But again, I was really pleasantly surprised that nothing bad happened. So, she went on to stalk me. So she left that year, freshman year. She came back sophomore year, or junior year. I forget. And I was getting these letters—typed letters mailed to my post office box or, you know, the dorm post office box from a person named Frank. But—. You know, like, "Oh, I noticed you've got a camera. I noticed you're taking these classes," and it was really creepy. And I shared these—. You know, like, the second or third time I got a letter I shared it with the head res[ident advisor] in the dorm. And they took it to the police, and then the letters stopped. Okay, fine. Then I got a job at a Jewish camp—overnight camp—in the middle of Missouri, based out of the St. Louis JCC [Jewish Community Center]. And I show up to staff training, and there's Nancy. And I'm like, "This is really strange." And she became friends with a gal named Marty, who obviously was a lesbian—and another staff member and, and badmouthed me to this person—and then went to town with a bunch of counselors to do laundry and never came back. And so then I get pulled into the director's office, and we have Nancy's mother on the phone. "Do you know where she is?" I'm like, "I have no idea where she is." So that was—. That was strange and sad. But that—. So that was college. Then I went on to—. So I graduated in '79. I was supposed to move to Boulder, Colorado, with my girlfriend—who I met at that camp that Nancy stalked me at—the next summer. So between my junior and senior year, I met this girl Jodi and I was convinced we would spend the rest of our lives together. After graduation, I had all my moving boxes in my parents living room labeled '908 Pleasant Street, Boulder, Colorado.' She had gotten an apartment for us. She still had—. It was three years difference, so I guess she had three more years of college, and I was confident that I'd get some journalistic or photography job in Boulder. So then, literally like two days before I was supposed to get in my car and drive to Boulder, she called me in tears saying her parents had just figured out that we were lesbians and were going to cut—. If she didn't agree to go home to Memphis and see a shrink, they would cut her off from the family. And she was very close to her family, plus her family was very wealthy. So cut off meant from the family and financially. So—. Broke my heart. I did have to tell my father then. And there was a place in our house where—. In my parents' bedroom there were two chairs and a lamp between them. And that was the place that if we were ever in trouble, that's where one parent or the other had the talk with us. So my—. I went to my—I call her my mom, but my stepmom first. And I told her and she said, "Well, now you have to tell your father. Go upstairs." So I went upstairs. I was standing, looking out the window. He walked in. He put his hands on my shoulder behind me and said, "I don't know why you are the way you are, but you're my daughter and I love you." And then he walked out. And I was like, okay, well, that was maybe easier than I thought it was going to be—but also still really awkward. And he ended up getting lung cancer and dying very quickly in '83. So that's four years later. And literally on his deathbed in the hospital when he was incoherent, I said, "Dad, I hope you can hear me, and I'm so sorry that this has been so hard for you." And he sat up, became very lucid, and he said, "Brynna, I love you, don't worry about it." And that was like the last lucid, coherent thing he said. And he was gone a couple of days later. So I ended up staying in Youngstown the summer after I graduated. Getting a job at the JCC [Jewish Community Center]. And I didn't really know what to do with myself. I got a job offer. I was active in this—very active all through high school through this Jewish youth group for the conservative movement called United Synagogue Youth. I had been the regional president of it when I was in high school, and the guy who was the regional director was also the part time Hillel director at Miami University. So he would take me to the conventions and I'd be staff. And I was also active at Hillel there. And I was the Jewish guitar song leader, and that's what I did at this camp in Missouri. But anyway, so he was going to retire and recommended that I take his job. So while I was, you know, in this sort of summer shock of—my girlfriend's not accessible to me, and I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my life—I get a phone call inviting me to go to New York and apply for his job, which I got. And—. So that was the fall of of '79. And they said I could live anywhere in the five states in a major city. But my mother was from Cleveland, and I was familiar with it, so I chose Cleveland and I moved here, and—. And then at a convention that I was responsible for in Louisville, Kentucky—I think in '80. Early '83, maybe '82—I met a gal in Louisville who was in rabbinical school at this convention that—. She was—. She grew up in Louisville, and they brought her in to be a teacher. And we had sparks flying. But, you know, we behaved at the—at that conference. But afterwards, she came to visit me and agreed to take a year off of rabbinical school to see if this relationship would work. And shortly after that, my boss in New York City called me and said, you know, "What happened in Louisville?" And I knew what he was talking about. Not—. I don't—. Not about Karen so much, the—my then girlfriend. But there were two kids. And in the early eighties that somebody would be out in high school was pretty rare. But in Cincinnati, there were these two kids—Leslie and Billy—and they were out. And at this—it was called a kenus, which is a gathering—they were being bullied. So as the adult in charge, I tried to make a learning thing about it and connected it to whatever the Jewish theme was, which—. I don't know. 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' or something. And some parents complained, and so I get this call from my rabbi. And he says, "Well, I have to ask you—." So I told him what happened. And then he says, "Well, I have to ask you a question." He said, "Are you a lesbian?" And I lied. I said, "No. Why would you think that?" I never, ever lied about it in my life, but I really felt like—fuck, my job is on the line. Okay, well, many months later, enough time had passed that I was like, phew. I get a phone call saying, "We've eliminated your position because of budget issues." And I was like, "There's no budget issues. I'm responsible for the budget, and I know we're okay." And they canned me. And actually, my dad was still alive. And then—. And he drove in, and the—. Corky and Lenny's is a deli that's in Woodmere, 271 and Chagrin. You could smoke in restaurants then. My dad was a chain smoker. So he drove in from Youngstown. We met there. He chain smoked while we talked. And he was like, "Brynna, we have to fight this." And I'm like, "There is no fighting this. There's—. We're not protected." And we're still not protected, but that was—. That was—. It was hard. I loved that job. But I stayed in Cleveland and decided to get my master's degree in social work. So then I went to Wurzweiler program of social work, which is from Yeshiva University in New York City. So it's an orthodox institution, but they have a great social work program. And of course, at orientation I met a lesbian. And we became pals, and we tried to start an LGBT affinity group in the social work school. And we were in a program called the BLOCK Program. It was an intensive nine-week summer program. And then we did—. Not remote learning because there were not computers yet, but we had assignments to do and we had a field advisor. So, a local person who supervised me. And anyway, so—. I don't know. A couple dozen people came to the meeting we had. And then we were basically not welcome to continue, and so we didn't. And actually, Yeshiva University is still struggling with having an LGBT alliance. And there's been lawsuits and blah-blah-blah—currently. But it was very easy to be out in New York City, and it was great to go to Pride there, and Christopher Street, and—. You know, the—. New York City, the population was so different and very progressive. So that's—. That was my education.

Riley Habyl [00:23:55] When did you come back to Cleveland from New York? Approximately what year?

Brynna Fish [00:24:00] Well, I'm—. I never left Cleveland, because I only went during the summers.

Riley Habyl [00:24:06] Ah, okay. That makes sense.

Brynna Fish [00:24:06] Yeah. Yeah, so it was three summers there. And my job at the time—. I got a job at the Bureau of Jewish Education doing their community programing. And I grew up actually really hating social workers because when my parents got divorced, my dad made me see a social worker who was out of Jewish Family Services in Youngstown. My dad later became the president of Jewish Family Services, which I loved. And—. But anyway. And so it was ironic that I went to social work school, but I never wanted to be the counselor or therapist kind of social worker. I was very interested in community organization and nonprofits, and so my concentration was community organization, program planning and administration. So.

Riley Habyl [00:25:06] What did you pursue after graduating from college and getting your masters?

Brynna Fish [00:25:10] Well, I stayed at the Bureau of Jewish Education, and—. Until—. Because of genuine budget cuts, my position was eliminated. And then I—. By then I had—. When I moved to Cleveland, I sought out the women's community here. And there was a bookstore on Coventry called Coventry Books [1824 Coventry Rd.]. It closed in '82, unfortunately, but—. So the first two and a half, three years I was here, that was like where the lesbians went to—on the bulletin board to see what was happening. And there was a thing called Oven Productions, and I went to some of their concerts. And then I moved into—. Okay, then my girlfriend Karen decided she wasn't really a lesbian and moved back to Philadelphia to finish rabbinical school. I don't think she ever did. But then I moved, and I met a gal, I think, who worked at Coventry Books—Marty Webb—and we decided to live together. And so we got a house on Compton, not far from here in Cleveland Heights. And we sought out other lesbian to live there, so three of us. And she was–. Marty [Webb] was in Oven [Productions], and I was hooked. I was hooked on the community, and the celebration of being a lesbian and also the—. I learned how to be a sound—run sound. We had our own sound equipment, and I really like that. I loved the performers and the circuit that would come through town. And I stayed involved with that. I'm not exactly sure. There came a point where the number of people coming to concerts was diminishing. Because k.d. lang came out, and Melissa Etheridge. Like in the heyday, you know, we'd get, 500 to 1000 people in an event. And the numbers were shrinking, and so it wasn't financially feasible to keep going even though we were a nonprofit. We didn't seek grants or anything like that. It was all ticket sales. And we had a Womyn's Variety Show every year, which was a local talent show. Debra [Hirshberg] probably talked about that. And so—. And I helped coordinate many [Womyn's] Variety Shows. And actually started doing a program book—getting advertisements as another source of revenue. And I remember at some point in the late '90s, early 2000s, I think I stepped away and—. And then we haven't had a [Womyn's] Variety Show in a while, which is sad to me, but it's—. Some people might think it is a good thing because we're accepted in the mainstream now. Except that there are still lesbian performers who do travel in a circuit, and—. (dog sneezes) Anyway. I miss very much those lesbians faces. What was the question you asked me?

Riley Habyl [00:29:04] Sort of, what you pursued after graduation.

Brynna Fish [00:29:06] Oh, right, right, right. Okay.

Riley Habyl [00:29:08] Speaking about that Oven [Productions]—

Brynna Fish [00:29:10] Yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:29:10] Could you sort of broadly describe the lesbian and/or lesbian feminist community in Cleveland as you first encountered it?

Brynna Fish [00:29:18] Sure. I didn't really understand what feminist was. I didn't understand the—. Even though my dad ran a family business and—. Before they—my parents—got divorced, you know, we lived in the new suburb, and they had new cars, and we belonged to the Jewish country club. And then after the divorce—. And also, the family business fell apart. So, you know, I went from my mother going from Youngstown to Cleveland to buy clothes for us, because she thought there was nicer clothes here, to being raised by a single dad and having all hand-me-downs and used cars. I—. So I experienced the difference in how you live when your resources change. I didn't get it about the difference between a professional class, and a working class, and the socioeconomic, and poverty, and racism. And so I got an education in Oven [Productions] that was sometimes hard. And at the same time, I'm—. I was somebody who, I always—. I speak what I believe in. I'm not shy. I like to make connections. I like to build community. I'm sure there are people I owe apologies to. But I also learned about consensus, because Oven [Productions] made all its decisions by consensus building. So there was no voting. And if somebody was—had a difference of opinion, even if it was one out of the six or seven of us who were in the collective at the time, we had to keep hashing it out until everybody felt comfortable. And that was that was an amazing thing to participate in. And also because of being involved in Oven Productions, I started going to different women's music festivals. And I went to National Women's Music Festival as a participant. And I went to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for their 10th. They were started in '75. I went to '85—to their 10th as a festival goer. And then after that I went as a worker and I worked at—. For a couple of summers I worked at the New England Women's Music Festival. A couple of summers I worked at Sisterfire, which was a one-day festival in Washington, D.C.. A couple of summers at the National Women's Music Festival. I helped start this Association of Women's Music and Culture—which was basically the performers, the record distributor, distributors, the record labels and the women's production companies around the country. And then I got custody of my nephew [Shiah Fish], and that hampered my ability to do so much traveling. Fortunately, working for nonprofit organizations, I got enough vacation that I could go places. But I chose the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival as the festival that I would work at every summer. And I did that from '86 until 2015 when they when they closed—shut down. And that, that all started because of Oven Productions. And the way Oven [Productions] functioned around community and consensus is also a lot of the ways Michigan [Womyn's Music Festival] functioned. You know, there were the producers of the festival, but they really involved the workers in addressing issues and raising questions and hashing stuff out. And I appreciated that. And I learned that from Oven [Productions]. And then I started to learn about, "Oh, well, these—. This ideology is feminism" And I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense." And I also was one of the founders of Chevrei Tikvah in 1983, which was a gay and lesbian synagogue. Which I actually just learned that—this past Sunday—is officially gone. And the—. I was already organizing Jewish women's stuff here. We had a Jewish women's seder before Chevrei Tikvah started, and—for a couple of years. And then that—. We blended in with Chevrei Tikvah. And then I learned that gay men aren't feminists. And I'm like, "You're oppressed. Lesbians are oppressed. Bi [bisexual] people are oppressed. Why don't we have a commonality?" And then I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Because you earn more money, and you're inherently patriarchal. And it's not necessarily your fault because this—." You know, it's also the eighties, and there wasn't as much speaking out as there is now about this. And I don't even know what wave feminism we're in now, but—. It was the first—. I became a co-president of Chevrei Tikvah, I don't know, in the mid-'80s. And I quit because I couldn't tol—. I quit the presidency because—my co-presidency. I couldn't tolerate being in meetings with men that felt that their opinion and position had greater value than the lesbians'. And then the numbers that Chevrei Tikvah—. In the late 2010s and early, you know, the late 2000s and early 2010s, the numbers started shrinking. And in the reform synagogues, it was starting to be welcoming. And so we became a chavurah, which is basically like an affinity group. So we became a subgroup of [Anshe Chesed] Fairmount Temple, which is a large Reform synagogue here. And then even the numbers of the chavurah started shrinking. And the folks who were staying involved were the older folks. And I personally felt like, "Okay, I understand that because you older folks grew up where this was—had such a stigma." But the younger folks are trying to stretch our wings and say it's okay to be LGBT—. There wasn't even Q [queer] then. I don't even know if there was—. T [transgender] was just starting. Anyway. And I was the Jewish song leader person at those services and helped lead services. And even I started feeling like, these aren't my people. And new people would come to town and find us—young people, students, young professionals—and they'd come once and not come back. Because I think they looked around the room and went, "These aren't my people. These are old fogies." And there were a handful, a half a dozen people hanging on. Nobody really wanted to step up into leadership positions. And then COVID hit, and I started to see in the synagogue bulletin there aren't Chevrei Tikvah services anymore. And a woman who was involved very long—her name was Barbara Louise. Just passed away, and we had a very small memorial for her at Fairmount Temple. And that's when I learned that, you know, there's not really—. There's not a "there there" anymore. And I sort of felt like for the past decade and a half—put yourself out of your misery. Now, even the conservative synagogues are welcoming and they're—. There's an effort here for some of the progressive Orthodox synagogues to be welcoming. So, again, it's a bittersweet thing. Sort of like Oven Productions. Where, yeah, do I miss gathering with LGBT Jewish people? Yes. But I would rather gather with LGBT Jewish people from, you know, teenagers to the older folks, not just a little slice of us. So.

Riley Habyl [00:39:30] Speaking of Oven Productions, could you tell me a bit about more—. Er, sorry. A bit more about women's cultural production in Cleveland in the eighties that came out of Oven Productions? Like some of the events that they held, and some of the things that came out of Oven [Productions]?

Brynna Fish [00:39:47] So the first concert that I went to was a Theresa Dell concert, and it was at Case Western Reserve University. And a friend of mine, Merle, who is still one of my, my dearest best friends—and just visited from Columbus this past weekend. She worked at Coventry Books, and so she took me to this concert. And actually, Debra Hirshberg was a ticket taker. And Merle was all excited to introduce me to Debra Hirshberg, who was also a lesbian Jewish person. And then I worked a show that was a woman named Rita Coriell [De Quercus]. She recently passed. And then maybe Ferron was next. And we did home hospitality then. And, you know, the performers' riders had things like, "clean sheets and a bedroom door that closes." And I was super excited to have Ferron sleep in my bed on a—clean sheets with a door that closed. Anyway. Oh, Holly Near. Cris Williamson. We did a Holly Near-Ronnie Gilbert show. There's a place on Mayfield Road called the Civic [3130 Mayfield Rd.]. It used to be a synagogue, and we had concerts in the main sanctuary. It was before my time, but Oven [Productions] started doing its shows at a church on Taylor Road. And we were having the [Womyn's] Variety Show also at the Civic. And it always humored me that, you know, we went from church basements to synagogues. And we did—. So, Olivia Records—which is still around now. They used to—. As a, as a record label they produced the records of many of the early women's music stuff. Cris Williamson, Margie Adam. They had their 15th anniversary concert and they were doing Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and New York City. And I was like, "Well, what's wrong with Cleveland?" We were the oldest continuously running women's production company at the time. We even started the women's production company a year before the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival started. We started Oven [Productions] in—. It started in '74, I believe. And, so I convinced Judy Dlugacz. You know, I had been around the festivals enough, and had met Judy [Dlugacz] and knew her. She also happened to be Jewish. And so I convinced her that Cleveland could provide a strong audience. And so, she agreed that they would do their first concert in Cleveland, and that would give them an opportunity to work out some of the kinks that might happen producing a show that included all the Olivia [Records] recording artists at the time. And so [Olivia Records 15th anniversary concert] came to Cleveland, and we had it at the Civic. I'm sure we sold it out. And I was—. I, you know, got the sound people. We brought in Myrna Johnston, who does sound at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. We used the local lighting company, but had women who ran the lights. And we had to build the sta—the, you know, what was the—. Pulpit? We had to build that out with scaffolding to fit all the performers. So I coordinated all that kind of stuff. And Judy [Dlugacz] was so impressed with the job we did here in Cleveland that she invited me to come and work on the other shows. So I got to go to San Francisco, L.A., Boston, and then Carnegie Hall. So that was really cool. Oven [Productions]—. We had a lot of shows that were in venues at—on the Case [Western Reserve University] campus. I used to joke that the [Womyn's] Variety Show, which happened the same weekend in February every year, that if we didn't—. We did mailings, right? All this is before social media, and so we did mailings. And I was involved in a lot of white-collar crime because I used the—I used to run fliers off. You know, I'd go in like on a Sunday and run the fliers off, put them through the folding machine. And then we'd go to somebody's house and put the address labels on them and sort them, you know, to be bulk mailed. Anyway, I used to joke that even if we did no publicity, the women would show up for the [Womyn's] Variety Show. And I always marveled like, "Where do these women come from, and why don't they still come to the concerts?" And that's how the [Womyn's] Variety Show lasted longer than us producing women's music and culture. And we did get a reputation here—like the League of Women Voters, the people that started the Near West Side Theatre. I'd have to wrack my brain. But it astounded me as I just went around my everyday life that people would say, "Oh, you're in Oven Productions." And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." At some point, '89-ish I think, when the Bureau lost funding for my position, I decided I was going to be a producer. And I produced—. I was taking these women's performers and putting them here in mainstream venues. So I did Kate Clinton, who is a lesbian comic [at] Peabody's Down

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