THE
 MAVERICK  STAGE COMPANY
Presents

Daniel Eggink's
GHOSTS OF WOODSTOCK
featuring
Jewel
as

The first episode, or chapter, is set in 1920 at Hervey White's "Cafe Intelligentsia" in the old quarry off Maverick Road in Woodstock, scene of Bug's 18th Birthday party as narrated by him to Lacy and retold by her. In it Uncle Bug introduces Lacy to the gossipy American Art World of the 1920s. Robert Henri happened to be spending the summer living and painting in Dr. James T. Shotwell's house and spent long hours at the Cafe. On Bug's birthday, he was there with his most renowned pupil, painter George Bellows, and fellow artist, Eugene Spiecher. Millionaire playboy artist Robert Chanler ( Sheriff Bob to the locals) arrived in an open touring car with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor, Jo Davidson and the Metropolitan Opera Company's founder, Otto Khan.
    Bug's mother Cecily, who had been widowed by WW I, was an art student at Vasser when she married Dirk Flotink, Bug's Dutch father and  owner of a Woodstock farm, in 1901. She knew all the Woodstock artists and had been sketching them for years so when Uncle Bug shared his oral history of Woodstock with Lacy he was also able to illustrate events and personalities with his mother's drawings. Lacy has taken those pictures and stories as the subject of her "Ghosts of Woodstock" exhibit for the purpose of recreating Woodstock in the jazz age. Uncle Bug's description of his 18th birthday party opened, to her, a window to the past that proved to be a key to her understanding the future. Uncle Bug's 18th birthday party was his first exposure to the global network of big money art and espionage, a legacy that has now become Lacy's.
     Hervey White, "the Maverick", impresario and originator of the historic  outdoor Woodstock festivals, held every summer since 1916, was Bug's employer and even more explicitly initiated Bug into the freemasonry and art of dinner table theatre. Two other "Cafe Intelligentsia" employees imported from Greenwich Village, the anarchist cook, Hypolite Havel and gypsy hostess, "Romny Marie", gave Bug secret passwords and signs allowing him unlimited entry into the international demimonde.
So on with the show and let Hervey White speak for himself "from his own  unpublished autobiography now housed in the Woodstock Public Library. Here he introduces the premier ghost of Woodstock, Robert Chanler, and describes the building and naming of his cafe.
   "With crowds to feed at festivals and concerts, it was important to build a plant to give them service. The cafeteria system being the handiest and least expensive, I planned a structure that would seat sixty people. Three dinning rooms and a kitchen arranged in the form of a Latin cross. The kitchen in the short arm toward the pump, the three dinning rooms in the other arms with the serving room at the junction, counters, tables, benches, dishes all complete. Being a rustic open structure with slabs to wainscot. It was prettily picturesque with many gables for above the serving room a steeped roofed second story gave apartment with balcony platform for the cook.
     Then where to get the cook was the next problem. Greenwich Village all united on Hypolite Havel. At that time the Russian imitation was reigning in the village and its denizens all talking of the intelligentsia". I could never quite make out what the word meant and decided a place to eat might well define it. Only I changed the spelling to simpler English, much to the consternation of the pseudo Russians, but the "Intelligentsia" it is named to this day. The builder was Wallace Gray father of the Gray boys, an excellent joiner and recounter of ancient tales. " We must make it almost perfect," he kept saying. "The boys make your house too rough." I was so pleased with his ancient plural, I let him putter. It was all the old Anglo-Saxon left me from my Harvard days. We put in a stone floor, bad for dropping dishes but cool and in good taste with bark and logs Konrad Cramer painted a wooden totem on the tile chimney in the symbolic manner then called Freudian. Great merrymaking and great eating met together; Eugene Spiecher and George Bellows took the cake".
     Hervey White in his attempt to tell us about Hypolite Havel is reminded of a person he calls Siegfried Nacht which in turn reminds him of the story of a Mr. Lubin and the King of Italy which he doubts has ever been published.
     " Mr. Lubin was a jew from Sacramento. In the early mining days he kept a little cleaning store and sold only good overalls to the miners. An Irishman once threatened him if he sold him a bad pair he would come and wreck his little place altogether. (according to California oral history  the trousers were made of Canvas sail cloth and he added copper rivets to the pockets so that when weighed down with gold and rock the pockets woudn't rip from the trouser) "But the overalls were so durable and wore so well he made all the other miners go and trade there with the result that Mr. Lubin became rich and was looking for other worlds to conquer." (It would seem that Lubin is a name for the original Levi Strauss and the story apocryphal but considering Hervey Whites character there is probably more than a grain of truth in the tale.
      "Lubin became rich and was looking for other worlds to conquer. The Orange business was suffering from compassion. He organized the Orange growers association and made so much money that he pooled the wheat growers as well. His ambition now became international and he journeyed to Rome to start a world stock exchange and there became aquatinted with the Rossettis who said they could get him audience with the King "(Victor Emmanuel). after a two hour interview the king pledged his support of Lubin's scheme.
        Siegfried Nacht was a Viennese Jew who was an anarchist, a terrorist, denied citizenship throughout Europe, and got tired of it and decided to become a citizen of the United States. The age of the anarchist." he told me is ,"runs from 18 to the 23rd year. If we don't get executed by that time we settle down somewhere and  begin to grow cabbages. I have a job here and have taken out first papers. I want to be a conservative in the United States. His job was translating articles. I thought I knew the technological dictionaries from my experience in the Creror library but when I stepped into his office one day and saw a dozen that I had never heard of. He had a brilliant mind, was conversant with politics and a hater of tyrants and kings. I took him to various meetings of the garment workers. I remember meeting with Mary Austin there. It was through Grace Ellory Channing that I met Mr.Nacht
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