Every family has one story that sounds like it should begin, “You won’t believe this, but...”

Here’s mine.

Around 1960, when I was four years old, we lived at 2 Reeves Road in Woodbury, New Jersey. My father was the type who found peace in a Saturday spent stabbing the earth with a trowel. Somewhere in the course of planting shrubs in the backyard, he lost his wedding ring.

Not misplaced. Not “it’s around here somewhere.”

Gone.

The search began immediately. Soil was sifted. Fingers raked through dirt. The obvious places were checked, then checked again. Nothing. Vanished. Swallowed by the earth.

Eventually my parents did what everyone does when confronted with an object that has apparently entered another dimension.

They gave up.

Three years later we moved about a mile away to a new house at 4 Saint Regis Drive. Life went on. The missing ring became one of those family stories that occasionally resurfaced over dinner before sinking back beneath the conversation.

Then, eleven years after it disappeared, my father was once again in the back yard with a shovel in his hand.

One of the shrubs had died.

As he dug it out, something glinted in the dirt.

His wedding ring.

The same ring.

The same ring he had lost...a mile away and more than a decade earlier.

If I stopped the story right here, we’d have a riddle. Or a solid campfire mystery story: wedding rings with a homing instinct, some cosmic prank, the Gardening Gods flexing. Feel free to enjoy that version for a second.

Now here’s the real one, which is somehow even better.

The shrub my father was removing was one he had transplanted from our old house when we moved in 1963.

Back in 1960, mid-planting, the ring had slipped off his finger and disappeared. Straight into the root ball. It spent the next three years quietly waiting to hitch a ride to its new address, then another eight years waiting patiently underground until the shrub finally gave up the ghost.

Eleven years after it vanished, the ring emerged.

Turns out it was never lost.

It just moved when we did.

Houses come and go, but apparently some things move with us, whether we know it or not. If your next change of address involves Connecticut, I spend my less-hopscotching hours helping people buy and sell homes along the Connecticut Shoreline and throughout Greater New Haven.

If you’d like to explore Connecticut from a different perspective:

🏡 Connecticut Weekend Homes
📖 Connecticut Baedeker
💡 David Mayhew’s Real Estate Knowledge Base
🌲 Buy Your Second Home First

Still hopscotching...

David

Many years ago, I was an 18-year-old freshman living in NYU’s Weinstein Hall on University Place. Just a few blocks away, a 21-year-old magician named David Copperfield was becoming the hottest thing in New York, dazzling audiences in a club on West 8th Street. He was three years older than I was. Mathematics was still considered a reliable science.

Fast forward a couple of decades.

While I was Director of Marketing at McCarter Theatre, we presented David Copperfield. I was 40 years old. His official biography confidently informed the press that he was 37.

Wait...

When had he become three years younger than me?

Ladies and gentlemen, forget making the Statue of Liberty disappear. Making six years vanish from your birth certificate is the trick that deserves a standing ovation.

Curiosity got the better of me this morning, so I looked him up.

Wikipedia now lists David Copperfield as 69.

He’s catching up with me.

Apparently even the greatest illusionist eventually runs out of smoke, mirrors...and creative arithmetic.

Still hopscotching?

If today’s detour brought you here, there are plenty more in my real estate life.

Connecticut Baedeker explores the state’s hidden history, overlooked places, and oddball characters.

Connecticut Weekend Homes helps city dwellers find the perfect Connecticut escape.

MayhewToons is where my cartoon alter ego proves that real estate and complete nonsense can peacefully coexist.

Thanks for hopscotching with me. I’ll save you a square for the next adventure.

I’ve long been a devoted admirer of the Algonquin Round Table, that legendary decade-long gathering of New York writers who treated conversation as a full-contact sport. Starting in 1919, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and their fellow assassins could reduce an overinflated ego to confetti before the soup arrived.

A few classics, offered here as evidence and entertainment:

“If all the girls who attended the Yale Prom were laid end to end,
I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” — Dorothy Parker

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for
writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that
time I was too famous.” — Robert Benchley

“I saw the play at a disadvantage.
The curtain was up.” — George S. Kaufman

More Dorothy Parker, when asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence:

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

My all-time favorite – Alexander Woollcott once gave George S. Kaufman and his wife a fifth-anniversary present. It was free, exquisitely wrapped, and made entirely of splinters.

“I have been looking around for an appropriate wooden gift and am pleased
to present you with Elsie Ferguson’s performance in her new play.”

Wisecracks are supposed to have a short shelf life. They get a laugh, they’re repeated for a while, and eventually they disappear.

This one took a century to reach a farm stand in East Lyme, Connecticut.

Anyone who knows me can attest that I know everything about some of the most obscure actors and 20^th century theater history, which makes it all the more humbling that I knew nothing of poor Elsie.

Naturally, curiosity got the better of me, and that’s when the rabbit hole opened, as rabbit holes do.

I had no idea that researching her would eventually lead me to a farm stand in East Lyme, Connecticut.

Elsie Ferguson had been one of Broadway’s great beauties, a major stage star, and later one of the queens of silent films. During her lifetime she was famous enough that audiences flocked to see her and critics took careful aim at her. Today, unless you’re a theater historian or a silent-film enthusiast, she’s slipped almost entirely out of public memory.

Through dogged research (a/k/a Google) I learned that after she retired from the stage, Elsie Ferguson settled on an estate called White Gate Farm in East Lyme, Connecticut. She lived there quietly for years and is buried a few miles away in Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme.

That proverbial second shoe dropped.

In 1986, I became Director of Marketing at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. One of the very first major events I attended was a fundraising gala, thick with boldface names, honoring the actress Colleen Dewhurst.

The location? White Gate Farm, East Lyme, Connecticut. The owner of the farm: one of Long Wharf Theatre’s founders, Ruth Lord. That’s Ruth Du Pont Lord.

Over the next three decades I attended Christmas parties there, intimate dinners, fundraising events, and countless gatherings hosted by Ruth. A favorite memory: an intimate dinner for four. As we’re entering the dining room Ruth announces,

“I hope everyone likes tongue. We’re having tongue tonight.”

I may have quietly gagged. How, exactly, was I going to manage to eat something as vile as tongue? But my mother raised me right, and I knew I had to politely endure.

Much to my surprise, it was delicious.

After Ruth’s passing in 2014, White Gate Farm remained part of my orbit because her daughter Pauline established a farm stand there and continues to operate the residence as a B&B.

I stop by there for fresh vegetables to this day.

For years I wandered the grounds without the slightest inkling that I was walking through the final chapter of Elsie Ferguson’s life. The actress whom Alexander Woollcott had skewered with one immortal sentence had quietly retired to a place I came to know remarkably well.

History has a peculiar sense of humor. I love the serendipitous collisions between time and space.

The Algonquin wisecrack, tossed off over cocktails nearly a century ago, unexpectedly leads to a Connecticut farm where I buy fresh produce.

If Alexander Woollcott had known that his joke would still be traveling a hundred years later, eventually coming to rest beside bins of tomatoes and sweet corn in East Lyme, I like to think he’d have approved—and asked for a discount.

You, too, can walk in Elsie’s footsteps: White Gate Farm

History has a funny habit of hiding in plain sight. One day it’s an Algonquin wisecrack. The next it’s a quiet farm on the Connecticut shoreline...or perhaps the perfect place to call home.

When I’m not chasing theatrical rabbit holes, forgotten Connecticut stories and the occasional basket of tomatoes, I’m helping buyers and sellers discover their own corners of the Nutmeg State.

If you’d like to explore Connecticut from a different perspective:

🏡 Connecticut Weekend Homes
📖 Connecticut Baedeker
💡 David Mayhew’s Real Estate Knowledge Base
🌲 Buy Your Second Home First

Still hopscotching...

David

In 1973, at seventeen, I fell for two legends I was much too young to have met. They arrived at a movie theater in Woodbury, New Jersey, in the unglamorous form of a compilation film called Ten From Your Show of Shows. Ten sketches, plucked from a live 90-minute weekly comedy program that had gone off the air before I was born, starring the brilliant Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. I was smitten. I went back to watch these legends on celluloid so many times that week that the ticket taker probably assumed I worked there.

At eighteen I moved to New York City to study acting with a living legend: Stella Adler, who had taught Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Elaine Stritch, Warren Beatty and many other bold face names.

These legends turn out to have shared the same address during different decades. 130 West 56^th Street in Manhattan — better known, if you knew where to look, as the Stage Door of New York’s City Center Theater.

Three days a week for four years, I walked through that stage door, rode an elevator run by a uniformed attendant who knew everyone in the building, and got off on the third floor. The Stella Adler Studio consisted of two offices, one unremarkable classroom, and a large rehearsal studio with a stage — its floorboards already scuffed into a permanent record of every actor who’d crossed them before me.

There was never enough room for scene work and quiet study on that one floor, so students colonized the hallways of other floors instead. My spot was the sixth floor: cross-legged on the floor, back against a closet door, a few feet from the sixth floor’s then-tenant, the administrative offices of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. I sat there for four years without once wondering what was in that closet.

Back to Caesar, Coca, and Your Show of Shows. I learned from newspaper coverage of the compilation film’s release that some of the writers were among my personal heroes: Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner. Reiner later mined those years for the writers’ room on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and his own character, Alan Brady, borrowed a fair amount of his temperament from Sid Caesar himself. I picked up more of the mythology from the 1992 film My Favorite Year and from Neil Simon’s 1993 Broadway play Laughter on the 23^rd Floor, his own reminiscence of life in Caesar’s writers’ room.

Fast-forward to the year 2000. The front page of The New York Times carried the headline: “Mother Lode of TV Comedy Is Found in a Forgotten Closet.” A new tenant was moving into the sixth floor of 130 West 56^th Street, the space was being renovated, and there it was — that same locked closet, the one I’d used as a backrest for four years, finally getting opened. The article noted the difficulty of the job with a certain dry understatement: there was no key, the lock was frozen solid, and it took an hour just to pull the hinges.

Link to November 14, 2000 article

When the door finally gave, someone flipped a switch, and a forty-year-old bare bulb — apparently as stubborn as the lock — flickered on to illuminate the equivalent of 47 boxloads of long-lost scripts and memorabilia from Your Show of Shows.

As it turns out, that sixth floor had belonged, back in the 1950s, to Max Liebman, the producer of Your Show of Shows and a legend in his own right. That closet was his closet. And the office space later occupied by Alvin Ailey — the one I’d been sitting outside of, cross-legged, for four years — had been the writers’ room. The writers’ room. I had been using comedy’s holy of holies as a place to run lines.

I recently tracked down a 1992 New York Times essay by Lucille Kallen, the only woman on the original writing staff. She remembered a sixth floor room roughly fourteen by twenty feet, one small window that was always shut, usually occupied by six men chain-smoking cigars — and Lucille, resolutely smoke-free.

Link to November 29, 1992 essay by Lucille Kallen

A few weeks ago I was back in New York and crossed to the far side of West 56^th Street just to look up at the building. Three large windows mark the third floor, where Stella taught us. Above them, off to the right, one small, almost apologetic window on the sixth floor.

I know exactly what happened behind the third-floor windows from 1974 to 1978 — I was there for it. What happened behind that sixth-floor window in the 1950s I can only picture: Carl Reiner wrestling a half-formed idea into shape, Mel Brooks trying to out-joke yesterday’s joke, Woody Allen nursing some fresh anxiety into material, Lucille Kallen jumping onto a couch because it was the only way to get six men to stop talking, Sid Caesar shouldering through the door with a new twist on a sketch nobody asked for but everyone needed.

There’s a line in that 2000 Times article I can’t shake. At the end of a hallway, it says, was “a stairway leading down to Studio 6,” where Your Show of Shows once rehearsed. This is where memory starts to whisper things it can’t quite prove. The room where Stella taught us was never really a classroom — it was a full rehearsal studio, with a stage that by the mid-1970s already looked chewed on by decades of performers. Was it Studio 6? It was the only rehearsal studio in that part of the building. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

Stella never once glanced upward and told us that television comedy had been invented a few floors above our heads. She had no idea. She had more profound things on her mind than a rumor about comedy real estate. Today, a plaque by the front entrance says it for her.

A building I’ve known for 52 years just became new again — impossibly, wonderfully new — because it turns out I spent four years sitting with my back against comedy history and never once thought to knock.

Treat yourself to these YouTube videos from “Your Show of Shows.” Remember, this was live television:

Link to “From Here to Obscurity” - A send-up of “From Here to Eternity”
Link to “This is Your Story” - my personal favorite Sid Caesar sketch, a send-up of “This is Your Life.”

Other places to find me…

History has a funny habit of hiding in plain sight. So do great houses. If Connecticut is your next adventure, I’d be delighted to show you around. And if you’re simply in the mood for more unexpected stories, overlooked places, and delightful detours, here are a few more stops along the way:

• ConnecticutWeekendHomes.com
• ConnecticutBaedeker.com
• BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.net
• The Further Adventures of David Mayhew

Still hopscotching. Just in different directions.

Many years ago, I found myself in the back seat of a car heading from Manhattan to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

My traveling companions were my friend Sharon and Academy Award winner Maureen Stapleton.

Yes, that Maureen Stapleton.

The driver, Josh, also a friend, was Maureen’s ex-husband’s son from his subsequent marriage. Got it?

The trip began around 7:30 in the morning. Sharon cheerfully announced:

“I have bagels!”

Without missing a beat, Maureen replied:

“I have wine!”

And she did.

At her feet sat a bottle of inexpensive jug wine. Not an elegant bottle. Not something selected by a sommelier. Not the sort of thing one imagines an Oscar-winning actress sipping while discussing her latest triumph.

Just wine.

Breakfast wine, apparently.

A year earlier, Maureen had won the Academy Award for her performance in Reds. At that moment she was one of the most celebrated actresses in America. Yet there she was, wearing a tattered muumuu and heading north on the Taconic Parkway in a tiny car.

We stopped a couple of times at service stations along the way.

As I watched her disappear into one particularly grim restroom, I remember saying to Sharon:

These attendants have no idea that the older woman in the tattered muumuu using their filthy bathroom is a famous Oscar winner.

It remains one of the sharpest reminders I’ve ever had that celebrity is largely a trick of context.

Place someone on a movie screen and they become larger than life.

Place the same person at a gas station off the Taconic and they become another traveler looking for a restroom.

Years later, another Maureen memory completed the picture.

I accompanied her to a star-studded event in Manhattan. The ballroom was packed with actors, writers, broadcasters, and assorted famous people. As we entered, Maureen looked around the room with wide-eyed amazement.

“There are so many famous people here!” She started pointing out the BOLD FACE NAMES.

I laughed.

“Mo,” I said, “you’re one of them.”

She shot me a glance that suggested I had completely misunderstood the situation.

I wasn’t witnessing modesty.

I was witnessing disbelief.

Maureen Stapleton never seemed entirely convinced by fame. She understood acting. She understood theater. She understood friendship. Fame struck her as something that happened to other people.

The destination the morning of the drive up the Taconic Parkway was Stockbridge Mass., where Sharon and I were doing marketing/PR work for the Berkshire Theatre Festival. Maureen’s daughter worked there, and Maureen spent time in the area during the summers. For many years the Festival put me up in a tiny fourth-floor room at the Red Lion Inn. Tiny doesn’t quite capture it. Room 434 was so small that years later, when I revisited the inn, I discovered it had been converted into a storage room.

My old accommodations had literally become a closet.

Which somehow feels right.

Memory works that way.

The grand events fade. The awards blur together. The important speeches disappear.

What survives are the odd details.

A bottle of cheap wine.

A tattered muumuu.

A service station restroom.

An Academy Award winner pointing excitedly at famous people.

And a fleeting glimpse of a person who never quite believed the mythology built around her.

The older I get, the more I think those moments are the real story.

Everything else is publicity.

David Mayhew

Maureen’s Oscar Acceptance Speech

If you’ve never seen Maureen’s legendary acceptance speech at the 1982 Oscars click here. It’s worth a look.

Other places to find me…

Life can’t be all wedding hearses, Broadway legends and questionable life choices. Sometimes people need a house. That’s my day job. If you’re buying, selling or just dreaming about a weekend place in Connecticut, here are a few places to continue the conversation:

• ConnecticutWeekendHomes.com
• ConnecticutBaedeker.com
• BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.net
• The Further Adventures of David Mayhew

Different websites. Same tour guide.

Every family has a few stories that improve with age.

This is not one of them.

This story was already perfect.

During World War I, the young man who would become my grandfather, Percy, was serving overseas with the U.S. military. Before leaving for war, he had become engaged to a young woman named Carolyn. At some point during the conflict he received orders that he was being sent back to the United States through New York City and then onward to duty at the Mexican border.

The details are lost to time, but one thing was clear: he would have exactly one day in New York.

Percy got word to Carolyn that he wanted to marry her during that brief stopover.

He never said it directly, but the reason was obvious. If something happened to him, he wanted his fiancée to become his widow. It was a practical act of love, the sort of thing people did when the future felt uncertain.

Carolyn agreed.

There was only one problem.

She lived in Millville, New Jersey.

Today that doesn’t sound particularly daunting. You get in a car, grumble about traffic, and eventually arrive in Manhattan.

In 1918, it was a different matter.

Public transportation between Millville and New York was limited. The country was at war. Gasoline was rationed. Travel wasn’t simple.

Unless, that is, your vehicle happened to be considered essential to the war effort.

One category of vehicle received special treatment.

Hearses.

The local funeral director happened to be a family friend. Upon hearing the situation, he agreed to drive Carolyn to New York City.

And so my grandmother traveled to her wedding in a hearse.

Not a limousine.

Not a carriage.

Not a borrowed automobile decorated with ribbons.

A hearse.

I like to imagine the conversations along the way.

“Are you nervous about getting married?”

“A little.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I am currently sitting where a casket usually goes.”

The funeral director’s wife came along as well. Upon arrival in Manhattan, the quartet made their way to the Little Church Around the Corner. There, Percy and Carolyn were married in a quick ceremony.

The funeral director served as best man.

His wife served as matron of honor.

The newlyweds were grateful beyond words.

The funeral director and his wife were equally determined that the occasion should feel special. As a wedding gift, they paid for a hotel room where Percy and Carolyn could spend their first and only night together before he departed for military duty.

A sweet gesture.

Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a sharp turn toward farce.

Before dawn, Percy quietly left the hotel to rejoin his regiment.

Someone saw him.

A young soldier slipping out of a woman’s room in the early morning hours.

Questions were asked.

Conclusions were reached.

None of them flattering.

Before long, hotel staff appeared and confronted Carolyn, who had gone from newlywed bride to suspected prostitute in the span of a few hours.

Imagine trying to explain this.

“No, really. We were married yesterday.”

“Of course you were.”

“We came here in a hearse.”

At that point, I suspect her credibility actually decreased.

Fortunately, help was close at hand.

The funeral director and his wife vouched for her. More importantly, they possessed something difficult to argue with: a freshly signed and dated marriage certificate.

The charges, so to speak, were dropped.

My grandmother’s reputation was restored.

And then, accompanied by the same funeral director and his wife, she climbed back into the hearse and returned home to Millville.

The marriage endured for decades.

Percy survived the war.

The hearse returned to its normal duties.

And somewhere in family history sits a wedding story that begins with patriotism, detours through a funeral coach, pauses for an accusation of prostitution, and somehow still ends happily ever after.

Which is why I have long suspected that real life is a far more imaginative storyteller than any novelist.

No novelist would dare write a scene like this.

An editor would reject it as unrealistic.

David Mayhew

Elsewhere in the Mayhewverse…

Contrary to rumor, I don’t actually spend every day chasing forgotten stories and eccentric characters. Occasionally I put on respectable shoes and help people buy and sell homes. If you’re curious about Connecticut, weekend homes, or the strange intersection where real estate meets common sense, here are a few more rabbit holes:

• ConnecticutWeekendHomes.com
• ConnecticutBaedeker.com
• BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.net
• The Further Adventures of David Mayhew

Whether you’re looking for forgotten history or your next front porch, I’m glad you stopped by.

If you’ve arrived here expecting fire, brimstone, and eternal damnation, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

The title has very little to do with hell and everything to do with hopscotching.

I’ve spent much of my life following interesting detours. One question leads to another. A forgotten house leads to a long-dead songwriter. A chance meeting backstage becomes a story about someone famous who turned out to be wonderfully ordinary. A weekend drive along the Connecticut shoreline somehow ends in a centuries-old cemetery, an obscure museum, or a restaurant worth driving two hours to visit again.

Along the way I’ve had more than my share of unlikely adventures.

I’ve worked on Broadway and Off Broadway productions, wandered through museums and small towns, publicized theaters and festivals, spent decades in marketing and public relations, and eventually found myself in residential real estate, helping people discover places where they’ll create stories of their own.

Some posts will be about theater. Others about history, architecture, travel, Connecticut, family lore, or the wonderfully odd people I’ve met along the way. Occasionally I’ll wander into real estate, but this isn’t a real estate newsletter. It’s a curiosity newsletter.

If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I wonder whatever happened to...?” or “How did I not know that?” then you’ve found your people.

I don’t know exactly where this journey will lead.

That’s rather the point.

Welcome aboard.

David Mayhew