Spring 1999, issue no. 89

The News of the Oaks

The Queer in Community

-Political-Internal and External Happenings-

Meanwhile back at home: the community decides to lower quota to 43 hours a week! Other OTRAS with a lot of support included allocating community labor for a member to work at a battered women's shelter once a week, and giving several members labor credit to provide massage therapy and yoga classes for the community.

Artistic Differences: our artist-in- residence, Cosima, has exhibited her paintings at a number of local restaurants and galleries over the past years. However, four days after she hung her paintings at her most recent show , the owner of the gallery/coffee shop asked her to remove some of her work due to it's "controversial" nature, which included a naked and very pregnant self portrait, a three-headed naked man with his guitar becoming genitals, and several others with similar themes. Cosima cooperatively substituted other portraits, allowing the show to go on, but not before being photographed and interviewed by the C'ville major daily paper.

-Business-

Various ex-members are involved in the tofu business these days. Free is working off his money debt to TO by working in tofu, and Denny Ray attended a meeting at Twin Oaks for the first time in 12 years, to advise the Tofu Management Team on tofu truck refrigeration repairs.

The hammocks business suffered a further setback when the Pier One Spring Order was very low. The new Business Management Team continues to develop new markets and new styles of hammocks to diversity our business.

There was good news when we received a $25,000 hammocks order from a disgruntled Hatteras customer. (Hatteras is one of our main competitors in the casual furniture market).

-Comings and Goings and Changes- From October to January:

New Arrivals: Ken , Todd, Elliot, Betty Jane, Dennis, Alyson.

Other: Hilke was here as a student resident, becoming an expert on us for her thesis, Elph and Jillian will stay another three months to continue working on the next edition of the Communities Directory, Pam experiments with a dual membership with Sandhill in rural Missouri.

MY LIFE IN COMMUNITY

by Erica

For many years I dreamt of living in a community, and in October of '97 I actually set out travelling to see what was out there. As a lesbian, I was interested in lesbian land communities, but after spending about ten months visiting them, I found that I really wanted more diversity and resource sharing than they offered. After much meandering and some disappointment, I found Twin Oaks, an egalitarian community in rural Virginia. It has always seemed sensible to me that we'd all benefit if we shared resources, and each worked according to their abilities to create a whole, where the individual isn't solely responsible for their own survival. In my travels to many different communities, I saw this type of sharing played out in a variety of ways with different levels of success.

Twin Oaks is a mixed community of gay, straight , and mostly white middle class college-educated folks experimenting with how to create utopia. As a lesbian woman, I am very happy to say that while we haven't achieved utopia yet, this is the closest crack at it I've come across. We're a community of about 80 adults plus children living in dormitory style housing on 500 acres between Charlottesville and Richmond. We have several income work areas which bring in our money, such as making hammocks, hammock chairs, other hammock products, and tofu and book indexing businesses. We grow a lot of our own food, have milk cows and much more. I'm training to manage our production woodworking shop where we make the hammock chairs.

In my travels to many different, mostly lesbian communities, I find what creates a "successful" and happy community, has much to do with how conflicts are managed and what norms are established to deal with people's issues and emotional baggage. I came with my own stuff concerning men and straight people and as a new member of Twin Oaks, have spent five months gradually coming to the wonderful conclusion that I am very well loved and supported, and that I am held in high esteem for my skills, and just for being me. It has been extremely healing for me, coming from a family where being a lesbian meant put downs and ridicule, and the clear message that I am not o.k., to joining this group where I can be totally out and me, and have that be just fine. I can't say that I've ever experienced this level of acceptance from straight society anywhere. Outside Twin Oaks , I had to be brazen and tough to be out, and I of course brought this perception of life with me, so I have many times assumed that my fellow communards would be the same. Despite my going into conversations with full shields up or being a bit thorny in my responses, they have over and over proved me wrong, and loved me anyway.

ACORN NEWS

A more detailed picture of Acorn's progress over the past year can be found in Peter's report comparing Acorn '98 to '97. (Data for December not included). In '98 we made 88% of the (gross) income generated in '97. Income from tinnery sales was 60% of that revenue, up from 33% in the previous year. Hammocks accounted for 16%, down from 47% in '97. Odd Jobs & Outside Work contributed 11%, similar to the previous year. Our Community Supported Agriculture project doubled in size to generate 6% of our income. Wage work at Twin Oaks (Rope, Tofu, Pillows and Conferences) contributed 6% of our income, as before. Other sources of revenue, in decreasing order of size, were: Massage, Retail Produce, Indexing, Reading Windows, FIC work, Hay Sales, Silk Scarves & Dolls, Wholesale Produce, Editing, and Flower Sales.

The increase in Tinnery income came at a high personal cost to Ira, who stepped up her managerial efforts as well as spending long hours in the tinnery production shed. By the end of the year the manufacture and marketing of candle holders and planters was truly a community business, with Kiya taking a major role in production and every single member helping with production, sales, or both. Over the Christmas season, we attended 2 or 3 craft shows simultaneously on some weekends.

Cricket is pleased with his part-time job with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Charlottesville. His knowledge and passion is put to good use answering telephone inquiries about heritage and open-pollinated varieties. Cricket continues as Agricultural Products manager for Acorn, and has planned out his crops for the 1999 CSA.

Flame has been working hard to build up sales of Women's Calendars, getting displays of this attractive chart for tracking mind-and-body rhythms into health food stores, health care provider offices and bookstores. Rainbow, Raven, Peter and others continue work on developing candle production and sales. Moonglow has taken a short contract for carpentry work in Louisa. Owl just completed her first thirty Cuzzles (custom-made wooden puzzles).

It's an exciting time for Tree, our long-term visitor manager and well-known communities movement activist. After saying for years that she really wants to live in a close-knit, polyamorous family unit, she will soon visit Oregon to explore living with a new lover and his family. Tree's multiple committed long-distance relationships, on top of her Acorn work, lead to marathon sessions of electronic correspondence - in a week when Acorn received 88 messages, 72 were for Tree. ;-)

Associate member Ken is exploring the possibility of returning to Acorn, despite various Twin Oakers urging him to stay with them. His son Sage was thrilled to ride the school bus to kindergarten for the first time a few weeks ago (Sage is the only Acorn child currently attending public school).

Ex-member Barr had a new baby, Joseph, born on Christmas Day. She lives close by along with ex-members Blue, Oriah, and other friends of Acorn.

Ways to support Acorn:
* Order a Women's Calendar, and show it to people you know (especially health care practitioners and herbalists) - contact Flame.
* Get your school or church to investigate Cuzzles for their next fundraiser - contact Owl.
* Sponsor a Community Dialog in your area - ask Tree for an organizing kit.
Acorn's phone: 540-894-0595.

A Day Without the Pentagon

Oakers practiced with the giant doves which Bread and Puppet Theatre had brought down from Vermont. We (devon , Melissa and i) charged down one of the park areas beside the endlessly jammed roadway leading to the Pentagon. One person carried the head and then one person on the end of each wing. If the wing and head watch each other, you can get a fairly impressive flapping display going on. Our dove crew attacked Andy while talking photos - those should be amusing pix.

Alyosha had tried to get arrested that morning with the Catholic Workers from Little Flower and DC, by pouring blood on the Pentagon steps (we were told the night before that this resulted in a 4 -month sentence for the last person convicted of a similar incident). But in fact the various police refused to arrest. The blood was cleaned nearly instantly by the crews waiting with water and bleach. It was a good day for activists in this sense - the police (except for the Metro Police) were not interested in making any arrests.

I counted 600 people near the beginning of the rally. The speakers started well. Daniel Elsberg (who was at my first arrest in 1986) talked about his experience inside the Pentagon, where he worked before he released the Pentagon Papers (the Top Secret Chronicles of the Vietnam War) to the New York Times and Washington Post. He recalled the day that everything changed for him, he was working at the Pentagon and looked out the window at a crowd of 300,000 people, including his two daughters - who were protesting against the War and he suddenly realized he was on the wrong side. He called on the Pentagon employees to do as he did and drop a stack of top secret documents on the press.

There were several lively bands and Marione was one of the few participants free enough to actually dance to the music. I thought this would be a place to try to promote Devon's abilities, so i approached one of the organizers, whom i knew from my work with Greenpeace in '94 and asked if it was possible for Devon to perform. She said she would check and soon told me 4 other groups had approached the lead organizers and they had just decided no for everyone, especially given their crowded schedule. C-SPAN TV cameras were covering the entire event instead of congressional hearings. We were pleased.

As the speakers became less interesting, the crowd migrated to the other end of the mall, where the Pentagon itself is and perhaps 60 police were protecting it. There was a short wall which the police were on top of and those who stood up on it ran some chance of getting thrown off. The crowd was chanting quite loudly and there was tension between the protestors and the police, a couple of people who stepped over the wall to their higher plateau got handcuffed and dragged away (to be released shortly after, but we did not know that at the time). Andy was on the wall with me and we were splitting our attention between crowds and the police.

At one point a cop pushed Andy over the wall, which would have been a bad fall if there had not been so many people to catch and slow it. I see Devon and ask if she will play to the crowd - she says "sure, but i don't have a guitar." I hop off the wall, run to the other end of the mall where I saw a guitar earlier in a case. No one seems to know who owns it, so i leave a note and my backpack and steal it. When i get back the crowd is even hotter, the police have pulled a few more people away. I hop back on the wall next to Devon and give her the guitar and she starts playing softly and tuning.

A moment later a protestor walks over beside me on the wall and says, "There are a bunch of people who are going to lock arms and go over to the police side of the wall, if you don't want to get hurt, you should probably get off the wall." I've been at this point in demonstrations a few times, it is the moment when the energy has to break in some way, something has to happen to transition the group out of it's rage. Often it is people doing something which gets them arrested - sometimes it gets ugly. I turn to Devon and say "Can you play now?" She goes into Tracy Chapman's "Talking About a Revolution" and the atmosphere melts. The group which was planning on locking arms and charging into the police decides they would rather hear the music. The crowd which was screaming a moment earlier is now singing, "...sounds like a whisper." Devon does one of her own songs and then the organizers come and ask the group if they will return to the other end of the mall for the last speakers and the last 30 minutes of televised coverage. The group starts to migrate towards the other end.

On the way back one of the principal organizers introduces herself to Devon and says "you were really good, can we get you to play at actions in the future?" Devon says "sure" and i say "you can get her to play today on the stage, if you can organize it." She smiles and says "i think i can do that." When we reach the other end, Devon discovers her finger has been bleeding all over our stolen guitar, she quickly carves a guitar pick out of a plastic ice cream spoon, cleans up the guitar and does her first televised performance. Two songs and a thrilled crowd later, i am beaming.

We pile the 15 of us back into the TO van and narrowly escape rush hour traffic. We are using the trivial pursuits cards and asking questions. I start to read one question and get as far as "Who is the singer..." and Calvin guesses "David Bowie'" which is in fact correct - we are all a bit amazed. While there were a number of good players my guess is the champion was Willie.

Using a combination of our recently accrued good karma and the HOV-3 lane out of DC, David drives home like the wind. Clocks slow to a halt as the van pulls in 10 minutes before dinner and our mini-reunion with our maxi-family.

An Open Letter to Kat Kinkade

You and I met 25 years ago when I was a member of Twin Oaks. We never talked for more than a few minutes. Then you were off to East Wind or someplace.

I just read the Washington Post Magazine piece on TO. I also saw the New York Times magazine piece. (People mail me this stuff.)

Kat, the Post piece made it out like you were a disillusioned old lady who considers TO a failure. Now, I know enough about journalism to take what I read with a lot of salt. But in case there was any truth to that idea, I want you to know that, for me, Twin Oaks was a huge success.

The Twin Oaks experience made a large difference in my life and had permanent positive effects which I notice to this day. A quarter of a cenrury later, many of my best friends continue to be alumni of Twin Oaks or Blue River (the 1974 down-the road TO spin-off that Jesse and I founded) or both.

I am a 1965 graduate of Yale University and 1973 graduate of Twin Oaks. Looking back, TO played a much more significant role in my life and development than Yale, even though the TO experience was shorter and cost considerably less. I read the Leaves with interest: I never read the Yale alumni magazine. I've been back to TO several time and never went back to Yale.

I am using this comparison because it occurred to me that my evaluation of TO depends on what I think it is. So if I think that Twin Oaks is the leader of a communal social movement in America, then it has failed, because after thirty years, the "movement," if there is one is smaller than in the 60's. If it's a Skinnerian experiment, it's probably failed. But when I think of TO as a radical experiment in educational institutions, it looks like an enormous success to me. Zero tuition. Self sustaining. Operates effectively even in periods of rapid turnover in both membership and leadership. Is fully owned by it's students. Who are also its teachers. Is a model of egalitarianism.

Kat, founding such an institution, even "by accident," is a remarkable achievement. And the fact that the institution doesn't necessarily bend to your will is one measure of its success.

So if it's an educational institution, what does it teach? How about "Life?" Egalitarianism. Organic farming. Getting along with people. What love is. And isn't. Applied environmentalism. Hammock weaving. Consensus government. Construction. Even the pros and cons of Skinnerianism. The list is endless.

When you look at TO as an educational institution, the turnover looks different. Turnover could be dropout. But it could also be graduation. 600 TO graduated out there somewhere in the world just might make the world a better place. Or try this: Wanna have your town in suburban New Jersey populated mainly by TO grads or Yalies? So anyway, I don't care if it's an educational institution or not. But you might want to think about what it is really, not what you hoped it would be. Whatever it is, it worked for me.

So thanks, Kat. And the rest of you, wherever you all are. It was good.

The other thing I find fascinating is that the institution is replicable. I think that the main reason it hasn't been widely replicated is that it defines itself as outside of the US culture. And the start-up is costly, either in dollars or in hardship caused by lack of them. Bring it inside the culture and it could easily be replicated. Inside the culture, a permanent institution with a start-up cost under a million, zero ongoing cost, and significant benefit to society is a good deal. Maybe we should write a cookbook on how to do it. Not the old TO book. Not ideological. A pragmatic how-to. Maybe we could leave out that destructive cultural expectation of sexual promiscuity. Come out of the closet as a Christian, Kat, and you could even marry the two concepts. Then we'd see hundreds of them, startups financed by mainstream Christianity.

Now that I've gone completely over the edge, I'll stop. It really doesn't matter. It worked for me. Thanks.
Best wishes to all of you.

"Spudly,"
Class of '73

Days of Past Leaves

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities has since been founded and other egalitarian communities have sprung up, with varying degrees of involvement by Twin Oakers, including nearby Acorn and East Wind in Missouri. A nascent community, including some Twin Oakers, is forming in Ecuador.

THE WALDEN INDEX

1. No. of video managers in 1998-4
2. No. of Twin Oaks meetings Denny Ray has attended in the past twelve years-1
3. No. of people hit on the head by acorns this fall-2
4. No. of people having tooth extractions in the last week of Nov-5
5. No. of people who broke their glasses this same week-3
6. No. of hours off for Solstice-8.5
7. No. of years that Shal has managed the hammock shop-15
8. No. of people voting for higher quota on the tradeoff game-2
9. No. of accounting systems now in use-3
10. No. of accounts-1500
11. No. of days sole planner Cosima ruled as Twin Oaks dictator-2
12. Ways of being off the farm and not using personal vacation balance-6
13. Rank of the word 'hooey' as word of the month in January-1
14. No. of walking sticks sold by Coyote while being a patient in hospital-2
15. Percentage of Hildegard's pigeons born male-100%
16. Chance of an ice storm on a Friday in January- 1 in 2
17. Gallons of milk produced each day by the cows-32
18. No. of lights left on in ZK recently at midnight-22
19. Number of pounds of people a hammock held during stress tests-1100
20. Number of months it took Dexter the cowdog to lose his fear of cows-19