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[0:00] Jess Rothschild: This is Finding Fire Island, Season 2, Episode 7, A Town Without Pity. I'm Jess Rothschild.

[0:13] Jess Rothschild: Today we're featuring a one-on-one conversation with filmmaker John Waters. Plus, we're diving into a collection of stories, characters, and moments that never quite fit anywhere else, but are too good not to share. Although John Waters is synonymous with Provincetown, he's spent plenty of time on Fire Island. He's performed his solo shows in both the Pines and Cherry Grove and is back at the Ice Palace this summer. So what's John Waters' Fire Island origin story?

[0:46] John Waters: I went with Divine and Divine had a house there and you could take a little plane from 14th Street or somewhere, a helicopter, and it landed a seaplane that landed in the water. And then you waded ashore with like Vietnam pictures of holding your luggage ahead. And I would do that with Divine. It would land in the water and you'd get out and wade ashore. And I remember it was $25 or something, which was really a lot. That's how I used to go there with Divine.

[1:17] Jess Rothschild: What's your take on Fire Island versus Provincetown? Key differences as someone who lives in P-Town?

[1:23] John Waters: The Pines are almost completely gay, where Provincetown has a lot of hipsters, too. Straight hipsters. There's a little more variation. And the weirdest thing is lots of tourists come to Provincetown, but they come to look at drag queens with their family, which is not unhealthy, I don't think. I don't think there's that many kind of tourists really to come to Fire Island. You have to sort of be invited. You can't just go there and walk around all day. Well, I guess you can. I see people when you get the ferry that that's what they're doing. But mostly, see, I went to Provincetown always, since 1964, when I was in high school. It used to be when you were when I was young in Provincetown, you never told your family you were going to Provincetown.

You'd say Cape Cod because they knew if you said you were going to Provincetown. And I remember going through the meat rack. I remember going through that and being like, wow, this is like John Retchie. But Provincetown had a similar thing. They still have Dick Dock. I guess it's the same completely.

[2:21] Jess Rothschild: Are you surprised by anything on Fire Island?

[2:23] John Waters: Yes, because it's not even normal gay. It's kind of weird gay rules to their what you do and how you how you react and how you party and everything. So I think it really if you haven't ever been there, it's hard to imagine what it's like, because, yes, you could say, oh, there are no bikes and no cars. But the reality of that is very, very different than where everybody lives, no matter where you are in the world. And in Provincetown, it was always an artist community. An artist community is used to just mean gay. That was just a nice way to say it. But Provincetown, there were always straight guys, too. And the straight guys were the bartenders in the gay bars. And as long as they never fell, as they put it, they made a fortune. Are there any straight guys in the Pines?

[3:12] John Waters: You'd be surprised. Yeah. So I think it's hard to imagine, because in Provincetown, it feels like the completely gay community. But I guess Fire Island, the Pines is gayer. It's even gayer. And today, I think it's so radically different, where it's so amazing to me that trans seems to be accepted by young people in two years, where gay people, it took two centuries. But now you hear conservative parents saying to their trans children, can't you just be gay? So I try to picture all the changes that have happened and how much certainly better it is than when I was growing up. But then it was fun being an outlaw, too. Sometimes you get too accepted. And it's like becomes middle America. There is middle gay America, definitely.

[4:03] Jess Rothschild: Go deeper on middle gay America.

[4:07] John Waters: Well, middle gay America, look, there is such a thing. And I'm that's great that there can be such a thing that would be impossible when I was young. But Fire Island was always there and Provincetown was. So it was always a place that the code word was art community that meant gay, even though the art community in Provincetown until pop art was completely mostly heterosexual, abstract expressionist.

[4:36] Jess Rothschild: I can't believe that you have been in Provincetown since the 1960s, yet have never been to tea dance.

[4:42] John Waters: I don't know, because I never followed gay rules. The first time I ever went in a gay bar, I thought I might be queer, but I'm not this. Sometimes I don't like I can't stand gay bars. I hate the music, music, terrible and gay. I always did better in straight bars with three crazy gay people that would be there. They would find me and I'd find them. I'm the only gay man that has never been to tea dance in the entire town. So I don't know. This looks square to me.

[5:14] Jess Rothschild: So you just don't get the appeal of a gay happy hour, period.

[5:18] John Waters: I just think gay is not enough. It's a good start. You know, just because you're gay doesn't mean you're always good. And I don't want to be around everybody that's exactly like me. I don't want to just hang around with people that look like me or I have an affair with Steve Buscemi. It makes them feel empowered. It makes them feel like they're in control for the first time in their life, that they are the majority, which is a feeling that confuses me. I never wanted to be the majority, but there you are the majority. That's why sometimes I go to one of the two straight bars because I like I like minorities. Why? Because I've always felt like a minority in any group of people, meaning that I didn't fit in, but I never wanted to fit in.

And that was what Bohemia was. And that's what rebellion was. You didn't want to fit in. And in Provincetown, sometimes I don't want to fit in the gay crowd either. So I like it when it's confusing. I like to hear straight people's worst night, too.

[6:30] Jess Rothschild: How has it been for you growing older in the gay community? And what do you think 30-year-olds will never understand about the older gay generations?

[6:35] John Waters: The younger people understand me and my films. That's the thing, because they know my films and everything. It's a very different world for me in the gay community, because it's not just I'm walking around without my shirt. I've never done that in my entire life, even at the height of when I looked the best. I never was a muscle Mary. You know, I don't know. It's a culture that I know about. And I lived in San Francisco. I lived through all the Castro, all those years and everything. But to me, the hippie gay thing and the cockettes and all that was more radical and more to my liking than, say, clones, old school gay, but maybe good old school gay when it was illegal and when it was, yeah, before AIDS.

And then, of course, in Provincetown, AIDS killed almost everyone I know. So it's impossible still not to think about when you're there in the winter, you feel the ghost and you just feel how young people, can they ever know how horrible that was? And it's really hard to imagine, because it was just like everywhere just suddenly was shut down. And it was really frightening and unfair to people that died and didn't die. There's no reason they did or didn't or anything. So it was something that's so terrible in any gay community. I think that's the main thing. If you're older, you remember that. And you can never convey what that was like to young people.

[8:00] Jess Rothschild: What parts of today's gay culture completely turn you off?

[8:05] John Waters: The only thing I can say is when a strange gay man comes over to me and says, hi, girl, I say, excuse me, do I look like a girl? If I did, I really failed going out. It seems too familiar. Just because I'm gay, I don't think I'm a girl. So some parts of gay culture I run from. But yeah, Dina Martina is the best drag queen in the whole world and is brilliant and such a great, great performer. I just don't think gay is enough in itself. It has to be. I always think if somebody says I'm a gay filmmaker, I would think, well, you should say you're a filmmaker who's gay. Or just because you made a gay film doesn't mean I like it.

[8:49] Jess Rothschild: So you perform your one-man show in cities all over the world. What's different about performing it on Fire Island? Does the history of the place give the audience or you a different kind of energy?

[8:53] John Waters: Well, it's charged with queer history and it's being reinvented many different times. Sometimes it feels like a sex tourist place. So you have to really be good because people have other things on their mind they'd like to be doing besides laughing. So you have to compete with people being horny while they're watching you. Not because of you, with the other audience.

[9:23] Jess Rothschild: You're back at the Ice Palace this summer. When you're in Cherry Grove, what's your routine like? Where do you stay?

[9:27] John Waters: Well, I stayed somewhere. I don't know the name of the place, but it was when you walked out of the room, it was all older men walking around in towels with statues that look like bad swinger place in Las Vegas. But it was a famous place and it was also kind of a great place and I could feel the history and everything that was going on in there. But I guess I've never walked around in a towel in my life and I certainly don't plan to at 80 years old.

[9:55] Jess Rothschild: Wait, this sounds like the Belvedere in Cherry Grove.

[9:58] John Waters: Yes, that's what it was. The Belvedere. Yeah. But inside are all like Plato and like statues, Greek discus thrower and stuff. But it also feels like a very sexual place because people are walking around naked and stuff. It felt very John Ritchie. I mean, like it seemed very much like a sex resort, some places of it, like people were there, a destination sex vacation. That's what I say. I feel like a Manuel in Fire Island.

[10:26] John Waters: I love the season of American Horror Story set in Provincetown during the winter. It captured that eerie feeling of an iconic queer destination after the crowds disappear.

[10:31] Jess Rothschild: I like the American Horror Story that took place in Provincetown. I think it is a little like that, like zombies and everything. But I like it there in the winter when nobody's there. I try to go once or twice a year to the one week when no one's there just to feel the ghosts. And it's so the skyline and the skyscapes are so more radical in a different beauty than they are in the summer. But it's spooky and it's beautiful, but it's also even more remote.

[11:07] John Waters: No cars come down the street. When one car comes down, people run out of their house and try to have sex with them, get drugs or whatever. It's like completely still and you see one headlight slowly down the street and then they come creeping out. Who is it? Who's in town now? So that is a kind of weirdness that does make a kind of town without pity. And maybe, I don't know, maybe Fire Island can be a town without pity, too.

[11:45] Jess Rothschild: I asked Chris Levito if there's anything that would really surprise us about John White.

[11:51] John Waters: I'm going to I'm going to open Pandora's box. When John White was 16 years old, and this was proved because they found his diary. John, dressed in his mother's clothes, stole his mother's car and him and his friends.

[12:07] John Waters: John Waters was a young man, dressed as women, who was driving around town and got pulled over by the police. You can imagine it being in the late 40s, early 50s, that two young boys dressed in their mother's clothes driving around in a car, but since John's family was very well known and very upper class in the neighborhood, he got away with it. But what a devastating experience it was for him. So hence, possibly the thing of dressing in your mother's clothes when you're gay should not be done. And I think the trauma of that may have leaked into what he feels and how he handled that situation. But when my friend said he found his diary and read it to me, I roared because I was like, oh my God, it's come full circle.

[13:09] Guy Smith: Guy Smith is the Pines Party producer, and he described himself as having the soul of a Cherry Grove gay who just wound up in the Pines. My personality, if there wasn't so much production in the Pines, I would have been a Grove person, kind of like a dirty hippie burner sort of person. And I definitely felt comfortable in the Grove. Less wealthy, more integrated, more lesbians, more, I don't know, more kind of like radical fairy vibe to it. Whereas when I got to the Pines, it was very male, very masculine oriented. I was probably one of the youngest people in the Pines when I went. The Pines had been aging out. It was just at the end of the AIDS crisis, as it were, when now there were drugs.

But a lot of the people in the Pines were survivors of AZT and had survivors of a lot of emotional trauma that I didn't necessarily relate to exactly because I kind of came out right in the middle of it. I was 19 when I came out in Nashville, Tennessee. When I came to Fire Island, I was 27. I immediately bonded with a lot of people in the Pines who I'm still friends with, but they were elders. And I found a lot of mentors there, and they really sort of taught me what the Pines is about and how to be a good gay and what proper manners and what was important about being there that was not just partying and drugs.

[14:29] John Waters: How did they teach you how to be a good gay? Pines culture is really intergenerational. It's one of the only places where people in their 80s and people in their 20s can party in the same place and really get time to meet each other. So partying on Fire Island is important. The club is our church. It's our cultural center, but it's also our spiritual center. It's also a place of a lot of catharsis. Like I said, that community had been through a lot of trauma. Trauma of coming out. Trauma of getting through the AIDS crisis and all that survivor guilt. There was a lot to work out on the dance floor.

[15:07] Guy Smith: Storytelling is also a very big part of Fire Island culture. Storytelling around dinner and storytelling with music on the dance floor. There's a narrative to both of those things. There's a theatrical arc to it. That's the way the DJs really saw things. The DJs like Michael Fearman and Warren, they would plan their sets out song by song. They were not reading the room. They were not looking at the crowd to find out if they were responding. They were telling the crowd what to be interested in and what to respond to. They were leaders as DJs. They were telling their story.

[15:46] Guy Smith: Pretty soon, I moved out of Searage and started taking a share with older people in sharehouses. There was a lot of storytelling, a lot of storytelling. I asked Robbie Leslie what DJing looked like before laptops and USB sticks, when DJs lugged heavy bags of records, sometimes up for flight walk-ups in Manhattan.

[16:11] Robbie Leslie: Of course, in the vinyl era, we're talking about other DJs coming in from Manhattan. They would carry their records out with them, usually on the train. Sometimes they'd have a car service. I would usually take four to six bags of records, a bag would be about a hundred records, out to the beach, on the train. I would say maybe full, it would be about 40 pounds each bag. So that's how the DJs brought them out and then they'd drag them back into the city because they had other gigs to do in town. And I have to add that when I got my first apartment in New York City, I lived on a fourth floor walk-up. So when I'd have to take my records home from the club, I had to carry all those bags up for flights. There was no elevator. It was murder. But of course, you know, you're in your 20s, you're loving what you're doing and you're jacked up and loving every minute.

[17:06] Robbie Leslie: Also, I want to point out, and this is very important, back in 1987, to buy a British import was 10 bucks. That was one song. One song. Now, if you want a wave file, which is the highest quality, anywhere between $149, $249, if you want a high quality file, to maybe $349. That's a big difference. I used to spend six, seven thousand dollars a year on vinyl. That's expensive. That's an expensive hobby to learn.

[17:43] Guy Smith: So we talked about how you didn't like playing for the lesbians, but which lesbian bars did you play in Manhattan?

[17:51] Robbie Leslie: I know I played Henrietta Hudson's a couple times. I ended up playing the Clit Club a couple of times, and that was really fun. Those girls were it was funny because I used to joke with a friend, same girls at Henrietta Hudson's, but you get them in the Clit Club and all of a sudden everything changes.

[18:10] Guy Smith: What changed?

[18:11] Robbie Leslie: Just their energy. They were looser, freer, a little more open. But the Clit Club was grungy and it just kind of, I think, lended itself to people loosening up.

[18:33] Guy Smith: Before the one-two punch of the pavilion and the saint transforming gay nightlife, Saturday nights belonged to Cherry Grove. Why? A passionate and emotional DJ, Roy Fode. Roy was a troubled soul but a creative genius. Roy's reputation soon took him from Cherry Grove to clubs like Studio 54 and Paradise Garage.

[18:56] Robbie Leslie: At the Ice Palace, Roy Fode was the draw. I mean, the club was great. Everybody loved it. But Roy was just such a talent and everybody wanted to dance to Roy's music. So he pulled them in from the Pines. And I tell you, I had Saturday nights off when I was a DJ in the Sandpiper because the Pines were so slow that they didn't even need full staff. So I had Saturday nights off. Now picture a DJ or any kind of summer employee having Saturday nights off every week. So I got to either go to the Ice Palace or go into the city and dance myself.

[19:32] Guy Smith: So Roy's death was, I guess, the catalyst that really turned the earth on its axis. He was the draw. Without that, people didn't really feel compelled to go to the Ice Palace and they couldn't find another substitute or another DJ that had that drawing power. Roy Fode allegedly died of an overdose in 1982, right after his 33rd birthday, and just one year after AIDS entered mainstream awareness. And when somebody criticized his music, he was crestfallen. He was devastated. He took it so personally because he put all his heart and soul into his performances, his music. He tried, as I understand it, he had tried to take his life a few times prior. And so this, I think, was a manifestation of his depression. And this one time, of course, he succeeded.

[20:23] Guy Smith: Roy's ashes were spread on the beach between the Pines and Cherry Grove. Ron Martin has been in the Pines since the early 70s.

[20:32] Ron Martin: There were always house parties through the 70s in Fire Island. But all of the music in the houses, we all had reel-to-reel tape decks. You'd have like a three-hour tape that would play continuously that some DJ had made for you. And in 1978, we said, why don't we have a live DJ? A friend of ours named Howard Merritt was one of the top DJs back then. And we wanted Howard to play live, but you couldn't play live in the houses then because the turntable, with people dancing on those houses, the way they were constructed on the stilts, the houses would move and the turntables wouldn't stay steady and they would skip. So in order to do that, we built a DJ platform separate from our main house off of the back deck so that the turntables could stay stationary. And that was like revolutionary because people said, oh my God, nobody has ever, this is the first time a DJ has actually played live in a house.

[21:38] Guy Smith: What was the moment when you popped at the pavilion?

[21:47] Ron Martin: I popped at the pavilion in 1992 at a party called Drums of Passion. And I remember that so well. It was in August and it was the Saturday before the GMHC morning party. And the reason why I remember it so well was because, one, it was before the GMHC morning party, that was in August. And it was that performance that all of a sudden I had a name. They used to call me the cute boy in the booth. Well, after that performance, I was Susan Moribito. And so it was a really great performance for that time in my career. I'm curious to listen to it because I don't know what I'd even think of it at this point. But I remember walking to the morning party or walking down Fire Island Boulevard and people saying, oh my God, Susan Moribito, you were great last night. And I got a lot of that. Talk is everything. Once that buzz starts happening, that's it. That's what kind of catapults you. They catapult you. Back then they did because there was no social media.

[23:08] Ron Martin: A little known piece of Fire Island history is the Islanders Club, a private bus service that would pick up passengers all across Manhattan and brought them to Sayville. It offered an alternative to the Long Island Railroad, which was overcrowded, sweltering and perpetually late. And then once you arrived in Sayville, you were often followed by taunts and ridicule simply for being gay. I worked those buses, and it was there that I first met Cherry Grove legend Pansy, the original ringleader of the Fourth of July invasion of the Pines. Going back to like the 70s, when I first started going out there, there was an organization called the Islanders Club, which were the buses that ran between the city and Sayville to the ferry docks both ways. And that was the buses were the alternative to the Long Island Railroad. And the buses were great fun because they were like parties because there was a bartender in a bar and people serving drinks. You had drinks.

[24:59] Judson Morrow: I never stayed in the quote bus house, but those buses were filled with people from both communities. And so I got to know all of the people from Cherry Grove who were riding the buses. And so throughout the 70s and into the 80s, I knew a large percentage of the people living in Cherry Grove. I mean you mentioned Pansy earlier. I first met Pansy because we worked the buses together. He, Tom Hanson, Pansy would work the bus that left the ferry docks at 10 o'clock on Sunday night. And it was funny because whenever I would introduce the crew, I would always introduce Tom as Pansy. And he told me years later, he said, you know, during all those years, you were the only bus captain who would ever introduce me as Pansy. And I said, well, I just thought it was kind of fun because that's how people in Cherry Grove knew you. So we've known each other for more than 50 years. And it all goes back to working those buses.

[26:04] Judson Morrow: I worked at the Blue Whale and the Madison Guest House in summer 2011. Did you make a lot of money? Oh, I banked that summer. Yeah, I was able to come back from Fire Island and pay my rent in New York through the rest of the year. Yeah. So I came back in September and I paid September, October, November, December, my rent. Then I didn't have to rush back into work. I took a month off from the time I got back in September to the time I started in October, knowing that my rent had been paid.

[26:41] Jay Jurden: Stand-up comedian Jay Jurden is also back at the Ice Palace. Together, Jay and fellow stand-up Gianmarco Seressi perform at the Ice Palace in Speedos. When I go to Fire Island, I'm just excited to go to the Pines as I am to go to Cherry Grove. When I go to Cherry Grove for events, you know who I see? I see Wanda Sykes. I see Anna Gosteyer. I see Rachel Drash. I see all these wonderful women there as well. And so many of these gay boys want the girls to be in their houses. It helps everyone because guess what? If you want to share a house, a lot of these girls have good jobs too. So why not? Why not have someone who can be a mother hen and make sure you boys, I don't know, get to where you need to be?

Why not have some wonderfully detailed lesbian there to test your drugs? Why not? I think that there's a place for comedy to be very location-specific and silly. And so when there's an event like this, I don't know if I've performed in my underwear before in New York City, but I don't know if I would do a Speedo show in New York City. But to do a Speedo show kind of at the beach, it's fun. I would want it to be a long-running annual thing. I want to get more famous comedians on it. When we were there, so we'd see Anna Gosteyer after our show. We saw Wanda Sykes and Rachel Drash there supporting Anna Gosteyer. Wanda Sykes has a house there. She said, Jay, what are you doing here? Because I've performed and worked with Wanda for the past year and some change.

I've noticed since I met her in, I want to say, 2019. She said, what are you doing here? I said, oh, we're doing it. We did a show last night. She said, oh, I would have come. I said, Wanda, I would ask you to perform. We're supposed to be with a cane. I would have been like, you want to get up here? So hopefully we can get a Wanda Sykes on the show. Hopefully we can have more comedians. If Joel's in town, I'd love for that to happen. If Mateo has time. There's so many people who I would love to perform with on Fire Island for a show because for so long, so many drag queens have made that a stop. So many women who are cabaret singers and people with amazing theater resumes have made it a stop. I want to make sure that queer comedians get to perform there for a crowd that loves them, but is also part of the community. And I would love for that to be a long-running thing. That's my dream.

[29:01] Nikki LaFountain: Finally, we turn to Nikki LaFountain, who's a third generation Fire Islander. Nikki has been here since she was a literal infant baby. Her grandparents lived in Sayville in the 1930s and 40s. When the Pines was starting to develop as a straight community, they saw it as an opportunity just to eke out a living. Her family eventually bought the Sippin' Twirl building in 1958 for $3,000. Tell me everything about your childhood in the Pines.

[29:37] Nikki LaFountain: So when my earliest memories of the ferries, I mean, you have to remember, I was literally brought to my house on Snapper Walk, the house that I still live in today, when I was three days old. It was the only home I had until I was six years old. My dad had a boat, so we would bring his boat back and forth, but we would always ride the ferry because we ended up going to school in Sayville. So we would take the ferry on Sunday afternoon. We would leave the Pines, go to our house in Sayville, stay in Sayville to go to school. And then Friday afternoon, we would catch that 3.30 ferry and take it back to the Pines for the weekend. The ferries were wooden. The early ferries, the Monitor, the Empress, the Duchess, those were the older wooden ferries.

And I'll never forget when Ken Stein said, I'm building a new ferry. I'm getting this big, beautiful, new ferry boat. I was, gosh, how old was I? Maybe 10 or 11. And I remember we were excited because my dad and my sister and I were invited to take the ferry from where they were picking it up, which I believe was in Manhattan, and sail it out to Fire Island through the ocean and through the inlet. And it was really, really rough. And I remember just water was going over the boat. But it was a big deal. It was a huge deal that we were getting this huge passenger ferry that was metal and it could take more people. And now there's how many of them now? They just, for Halloween, I don't know if you saw, they just burned the Monitor. They do this big boat burning as part of their holiday Halloween celebration. And they finally just got rid of the last wooden ferry.

[31:21] Nikki LaFountain: So it's funny when I watch people now coming out for like Thanksgiving and Christmas, I had every Christmas there. I had every Thanksgiving there. But you have to also remember, we were doing all of that in the Pines before there was internet, before there was Fios, you know, before there, it was wild. In the winter, there were six people in the Pines and four of them pretty much were part of my immediate family. It was wild existence. So I often look at my childhood in the Pines. And the first thing I think of is I just don't know how my mom did it, to be honest with you, because now I have, you know, I have two kids. And when they were babies, I can't imagine raising them with no help and no one around and nothing to do with them. My mom was in the Pines by herself. My dad was working. I mean, it's wild for me to think about.

[32:19] Nikki LaFountain: We had a truck, we had a Jeep that we could drive on the beach, we have a permit. So my mom would take multiple trips a week, you know, drive. At that point, you could drive to Smith Point Bridge, and then drive over the bridge and go to Mastic Shirley and do all of the things you would need to do as far as grocery shopping and banking and all of that sort of thing. Nikki's sister went to school in Ocean Beach, which was always fraught with whether she could actually get to school because of the elements. She had so many days when the bus couldn't make it down the beach because the tide was too high or the snow on the beach kept your tires from being able to grip. And my mom used to either drive, you know, her Jeep down the beach toward Ocean Beach and then meet the bus and the bus would take my sister and then, you know, come back.

Everything in my life worked around weather, the tides, because if the tide was too high, we couldn't leave. We were stuck on the beach. If the weather was too bad and the bay froze, we couldn't take the boat, we'd have to drive around. And I give my parents a lot of credit. It can be very scary. Again, back in that day, there would be days where we never saw another person, you know, and then the police, you know, Suffolk County police would maybe drive through one day, you know, just on monitoring patrol and they would stop by and have a cup of coffee with my mother or stop by and just say hello. And, you know, it was like exciting for us. It was like, oh my gosh, there's new people in the house, you know.

But then everything changed in the spring, right? In the spring, everything changed and all these people came flooding back to the community and it was like a party. And I was just like, there were people everywhere.

[34:03] Nikki LaFountain: She, my dad chose this life and she was on board. One of the reasons that was, we decided, yes, we need to go to real school. Partially was because of the fact that, like, I had no real social interaction with anyone other than my sister. Would you ever go to Cherry Grove? We would go to the Grove as kids with my parents to go to dinner. You know, we'd go to the Sea Shack, which was on the ocean before it burned down and the Copa that was there and the Monster. You know, we would go to dinner there. We would go there to maybe visit some people, but we never really hung out there until I was much older. But if I think about it, people used to say to me, oh, I live on Fire Island too. I'm down in Ocean Bay Park.

And I'd be like, that could be Thailand from the Pines. Like, it's just, you don't think of it as a little taxi ride away. It's so strange to me. Even the Grove and the Pines don't mix all the way I would think they would. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like they just, they mix, but there's just still something separate about every community has its own flavor and its own specific group of people, its own hierarchy within its community, right? You've got the leaders of the Grove who, you know, lead in the Grove, but then you've got the leaders in the Pines who lead in the Pines. And a lot of times they don't co-mingle. But I think it's kind of an interesting, interesting part of it that there are still to this day, myself included, you know, the generations of those families that this is our home and this is your home. And that's awesome. We're here together.

[35:56] Jess Rothschild: Thanks for listening to Finding Fire Island. Finding Fire Island is created, executive produced and narrated by Jess Rothschild, co-produced with the Pines Historical Society. Sound design by Caitlin White. Video editing by Evelyn Dar. Special thanks to the Pines Foundation and Sage USA.