Peaks Island

The

Umbrella Cover Museum on Peaks Island, Maine.

Hundreds of umbrella covers.

Run by founder, director, curator Nancy Three Hoffmans.

like underground spaces in downtown Portland.

We got to go out to Battery Steel in Peaks Island, which is like one of the sonic wonders of the world, I think.

We got to do some stuff using a studio, but as a sort of indoor space.

And yeah, you just get this, it just sounds like people talking, which seems like, well, what's special about that? But there's such a, I think a lot of material I listened to there's like a sense of like artifice or a sense of like, this is being acted, which works for certain pieces, but especially this particular story I'm working on is about a family.

I don't know.

Up in Peaks Island, Maine, on the coast of Casco Bay on this little island.

And all of a sudden, it's like 9 o'clock at night, and I'm watching the ferry come closer, and And this family comes up and says, we love your podcast and we love you and Dave.

You guys are the best.

We actually got into Portland, turned the rental car in, and got a lift over to the ferry area where they have ferries.

And we took a ferry out to a place called Peaks Island.

The bay of Maine, I believe it's called Casco or Casca.

I forget the name already.

It is nicknamed the Calendar Bay because there's 365 islands off of it, or so I am told.

I got a tour from like a legit tour guide on a golf cart when I first got there.

So if he was wrong, Lord help me, is this going to further the misinformation? But we got on this Peaks Island.

900 people live on this island full time.

And at this particular time in history, when the socioeconomic stratification is so severe that 72% of the United States are living paycheck to paycheck, it's even more important to band together in small groups so that we support one another through these extremely difficult times.

Today, our guest is Heather Lee, who's coming to us today from Denver, but she's soon moving to Peaks Island, Maine, which I just found out about.

And guess what, folks? Peaks Island, Maine has 900 people.

So Heather is going to be living in community today.

How long will it take her before she knows every one of those 900 people by face and many of them by name? Welcome to Mind, Body, Health and Politics, Heather.

If anybody wants to move near Boulder, Colorado, reach out.

But sometime in the next few months, you know, probably by the end of October at the latest or beginning of October.

OK, so the plan is to sell the house in Boulder, buy a house in Peaks Island and get there as soon as you can.

So I was pretty chuffed about that, and I thought, "Wow, I must really have something here." So the collection meanwhile kept growing and growing, and I had to put it in my living room, on my porch, you know, so I was kind of outgrowing the space in my house.

And eventually I was able to rent a space on the main street of Peaks Island.

So I give tours of the Umbrella Cover Museum.

There are exhibits that are all organized.

The Art in Umbrella Covers exhibit, which has famous paintings like The Girl with a Pearl Earring or The Kiss by Gustav Klimt on umbrella covers.

There are a lot of really good umbrella cover stories.

One of my favorites is that a young woman from Peaks Island, Eleanor, was living in Germany, and she found a black umbrella cover on the side of the road next to the Berlin Wall.

And she wrote a great story about how it was a gray, grisly day by this symbol of communism and of repression.