This is the final installment of a series on the Inwood Coffeehouse in Wheaton (or Greater Silver Spring if you like), MD which is where I'll be tonight with the Ocean Quartette performing a seasonal concert. Show time is 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5. Location is 10921 Inwood Avenue, Wheaton, MD. See Part I and Part II



This past Spring, I performed at Inwood for the first time, in a duo with cellist Fred Lieder.
The week after the show, I decided to interview organizers Steven and Lesley Choy for my blog. Lesley's mom Annette (pictured) was there for dinner. As my cassette recorder rolled and Lesley began her story, the Choys' two birds, who had been squawking in their cages throughout dinner, suddenly fell silent.


Lesley was born and raised in New York City. She thrived on the city's vibrant culture and energy, and was devastated when her father's job forced the family to move to Maryland.

Lesley: I missed everything. Suburban Maryland was a wasteland. New York was just extremely textured. That was the only way I could describe it to people. They thought I was crazy. I said 'There's no texture here. In New York, there was a texture to everything. Every face had a texture'

Shortly after the move to Maryland, Lesley (pictured) fell into a profound depression. While it had been building for quite awhile, she recalled that there had been a catalyzing trauma:

Lesley: When I was 16 it really got bad. I remember what precipitated it. I was walking through the halls and I saw a poster of this beautiful German shepherd dog. It was an anti-animal cruelty poster, and it said, "This beautiful dog died of a scientist-induced heart attack." I went into the journalism class and sat under the desk. I sat there every day, under the desk, for weeks on end, as classes went in and out. I didn't attend any of my own classes. I was blindsided by depression.

This was during the 1970s, and like many school systems, Montgomery County had begun to explore alternative approaches to education. Lesley's school, John F. Kennedy High School in Wheaton, was an alternative school that encouraged experimentation and individual choice as well as more informal interactions between students and teachers. The close bonds between teachers and students at the school may have saved Lesley's life. Her English teacher had started to worry about Lesley, and one day he showed up at her front door.

Lesley: He came over to the house and told me I was going to fail English. He mandated that I write out all 20,000 compositions that I hadn't written. So that got me out of it, because I didn't want to let him down. I wrote all 20,000 compositions, and he graded all of them, and jokingly pointed out how unfair it was that I could spend fifteen minutes per composition and earn a B when the rest of the class took a whole semester.

Lesley and Annette recalled that when he first came to the door, he hadn't told them the real reason why he was there.

Lesley: He came under the pretense that he was cold and he needed to borrow some socks.


Annette: And we gave him the socks!

Once Lesley had weathered this crisis, she threw herself into acting in productions by the school's extensive theater department, which put on what she described as "gorgeous, full-blown student productions." Among the roles she played were Ophelia in Hamlet and the Duchess of York in Richard III.

Lesley: I love high school drama. We had three teachers doing drama; one who specialized in musical productions, one who did Southern drama, and one who did Shakespeare, Mr. Teunis. The kids had ample opportunity to direct, to perform, write and direct and produce our own productions. My friends and I would do existentialist theater and theater of the absurd. I directed Endgame.

Around this time, Lesley met Steven Choy (pictured-on guitar in group photo), a local musician performing in a pickup band of revolving musicians sometimes appearing under the name The Internationals. Steven, who also grew up in the DC area, had been practicing the guitar at his parents' dry cleaning plant. One of the Choys' customers was a guitar player who happened to be in the Navy. Steven's mom offered to clean his uniforms in exchange for guitar lessons, and Steven eventually became proficient enough to do paying gigs. At the time they met, Lesley had been dating another band member, but as she spent more time with the musicians she developed a friendship with Steven that ultimately led to their marriage, two children, and an ongoing creative partnership.


After she graduated she became one of the first members of the brand new Folger Shakespeare Group and the Shakespeare Theatre.

Lesley: But we weren't doing Shakespeare. The first show was a rock musical called Dionysus Wants You: A New Rock Musical. It was lousy. I've never seen anything so horrendous in my life. It was a horrible show. I was playing Semele, who gives birth to her son onstage. I was playing opposite Ernest Thompson, as Zeus, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for On Golden Pond.

Although she was landing professional acting gigs as a member of this new company, Lesley discovered that she had a problem:

Lesley: I realized that I don't really like actors. Ultimately, what got me out of it was witnessing a homicide. I was on the way to a rehearsal at St. Mark's Church on Capitol Hill, and somebody stole my purse. I thought he was holding mace, but it was actually a gun. A bystander saw what happened and interceded, and got himself killed. This also happened to be my very first day of college studying drama at Catholic University.

The police advised me that it was probably gang-related, and that there were probably witnesses, and that I should probably absent myself. And there was no sympathy from the producer or the director, or my colleagues or anything. The director said that if I didn't show up to rehearsal and attend every performance, he'd have me blacklisted from every theater in Washington. So, I decided at that point that I really don't like these people at all. So I quit. For good.

I stayed at Catholic for three years, and then I realized that they were really catering to the Equity actors and the graduate students. From sheer pushing I began to direct some graduate student productions while I was still an undergraduate. Nobody who was an undergraduate was going anywhere. It was strictly about show biz, so if you were an undergraduate you got to do the grunt work that equity actors weren't allowed to do. But because of my Folger experience, I was considered the cat's meow. It was, 'Oh my God, she's an undergraduate who had been an extra in Julius Caesar.'

After three years, Lesley transferred to the University of Maryland, and landed a major role on the main stage her first day of school. While studying drama, she took teacher certification courses, which would ultimately lead to her work with disabled people in the Montgomery County School System. But inwardly she had already felt a pull in this direction. One of her drama classes had been a course called Creative Dramatics. It was through this class that Lesley came to the understanding that, for some people, the drive to create is actually an urgent need, and that even if a person is severely disabled, that need still needs to be met. Lesley was gradually discovering that she had a gift - and a calling - to help disabled people meet their artistic needs.

Lesley: In Creative Dramatics class, we were given the assignment to create an activity for a population. I devised a method for allowing paralyzed children to create and perform in a theater production. In this hypothetical production, the performers were children who still had enough range of motion to move their eyes. By moving their eyes from one object to another, they could create stories using the progression from one object to another create character, setting and plot. It occurred to me that while people who were completely paralyzed couldn't speak and couldn't walk, they still had ideas and could still create. When you are in an institution, only your basic bodily needs are seen to. Having only those needs acknowledged and addressed adds insult to injury, and if you are an artist and have no way to engage your artistic side, that can be a great loss.



Lesley went on to teach disabled children in the Montgomery County Public Schools for several years, taking a break after becoming a mother. She continued to work with disabled individuals even after leaving the public school system. In 1995 she was commissioned by Washington Very Special Arts to write an opera. Her piece, called Perfection: A Space Opera in One Act, included performers with physical and mental disabilities as well as nondisabled professional musicians.

For Lesley, one of her chief aims is to provide opportunities for disabled artists to share their work with the public and also to collaborate with other artists who are not disabled.

Lesley: One of my themes is to be totally inclusive. So, pretty much, if someone auditions for one of my productions in an amateur capacity, not for a leading role necessarily, but in an amateur capacity, I will have a part for them. Period.


One such inclusive musical production the Choys helped to launch took place in November 2001 at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre in Rockville, MD.

Steven: At the time that we produced the show the whole country was in mourning, and this was their way of expressing themselves to get relief. It was a big show. We spent months rehearsing the show. We did "America the Beautiful," and helped them pick out other songs. The featured act was a zydeco band. Our friend Peter who's a professional singer came in and sang a duet from a Broadway musical with one of the disabled women.

It was this experience that ultimately led to their involvement with Inwood Coffeehouse. Meg Marshall, who was one of the show's organizers, was also an administrator at Inwood House, an apartment complex in Silver Spring for people with disabilities.

Lesley: At the end of that show people were saying that they wanted to do more performances like that in the future. Ultimately Meg (pictured, left, with volunteer) invited me to come work with her at Inwood, and she got together the funds to make the coffeehouse happen on a regular basis. By coming up with the funding, Meg Marshall turned what could have remained a pipe dream into a reality. This was the first time Steven and I had ever had a backer. Before, we were expected to bring in money and finance the show through the proceeds alone. Meg found financing for the coffeehouse; I'm not sure how!

Steven : At first we didn't have any idea how to proceed. The first one was very freeform. It was around Christmastime, so we knew we were doing Christmas music, which made choosing material easy. And we also did some of (locally based singer songwriter) Eileen Joyner's music. Eileen stayed with us, actually, for the whole first season, and then she moved out of the area.

Lesley: Initially there was minimal resident participation; we did a couple of group songs.

Steve: The drummer at the first show was an Inwood resident who has continued to play at the Coffeehouse on a regular basis. Since he started playing at the coffeehouse, he's become a different person. He's been so happy.

Eventually Lesley had the idea to bring in performers from the outside.

Lesley: I don't like isolation. I don't like barriers. There are so many barriers. Even within communities, they set up barriers. There are so many misconceptions about people with any disability. One misconception is that they are monolithic, that everybody's exactly the same, and that all disabilities are the same disability. There's no understanding. The only way to change this is to have dialogue and contact. So, that's why...this was my dream. I've had lots of time to think about it. We bring people together.

We are going for good art, and it is good art. You can achieve it with anyone. People have different levels of accomplishment. You know, they aren't at a professional level, but still, there are different levels of accomplishment that are beautiful and artistically accessible.


LM: This is what really struck me. In the folk world, it's about inclusiveness, but it's a cheap kind of inclusiveness where you can have no talent and have put no effort into this, or have no sense of what an audience might want to hear, but still be allowed to perform on stage. I was contrasting what I experienced at Inwood with all these times I've seen people on stage who aren't disabled, but who seem to have no musical sensibility. At Inwood you can feel the creative struggle going on with your group. You may have someone who can't see or can't walk, but you still make them do the work.

Lesley: Steven and I are really clear that we don't accept second rate, and by first rate, I mean we are glad to work with you provided you work, and that you're committed to art, and you defer to our judgment as artistic directors.

Steven: We've had members drop out because they didn't want to go along with this. They didn't want to put any effort in. They just wanted to show up and do whatever they felt like doing.

Lesley: We're interested in bringing people who otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to fulfill their artistic needs...to give them that opportunity. But we're not pushovers, and we're musicians. We really abhor shoddy performances.

Steven: They aren't at the same technical level as you.

Lesley: But we expect them to put in as much heart as you would put in, and as much effort as you would put in, and to also, again, be flexible enough to defer to our direction.

LM what kinds of things do you come up against?

Lesley: We fight, especially with people who are writing their own original things. Some of it is just bad. And you have to come up with a way to be gentle and stand back, and offer criticism. Sometimes people storm off and say "I'm never coming back." I pretty much say, "Oh that's unfortunate." They always come back and apologize.

LM: I guess you have to know how much you can demand.

Lesley: Exactly--without going overboard. It's been an ongoing effort for me to explain to one of the performers that he doesn't really know how to play the guitar. We focus on showing him how to hold the guitar and how to move like someone who is playing the electric guitar, but I don't want to foster a delusion or fool him or flatter him since he's actually playing air guitar with the band backing him. That would be really horrible.

We have all our performers pick their own music. With one singer, we talk about what key she wants to sing in, and if necessary Steve transposes it to her key. And then, when it's all set, he comes up with an arrangement. Steve makes her go through it about fifteen times, and he'll focus on problem measures. She has problems with rhythm. But hey, she can sing high G, so I'm not complaining.











posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 8:55 AM | Perma Link
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