ALBA Provincetown is about a special place. I first came to Provincetown many years ago on a day trip over from Newport. How I loved Newport and staying at The Chalet at Castle Hill or Oceancliff, Barbara Hutton's Newport home which is next door to Hammersmith Farms. I remember one glorious night I took my Mom to a jazz concert at the Newport Casino, America's oldest lawn tennis club. The weather was perfection. We had dinner there and walked over to the stadium afterwards. She in Basile and me in Missoni. We sat behind Dina Merrill, Marjorie Merriweather Post's daughter.
I went over to Ptown on a Saturday in July and it was packed. You couldn't move 2 feet without running into someone. Not one for huge crowds I absolutely hated it and left. For some odd reason I later returned to the place I labeled the "place of endless t shirt shops" and found it a bit more agreeable.
For some reason I kept returning, kind of like a piece of toilet paper that is stuck to your shoe. One October I was there and stayed at the Cape Breakwater Inn. That property is now the Harbor Hotel having been split up a year or so ago. I was there during Bear Weekend. What did I know of bears? LOL I went to the A House and some other place. I was bored to tears. It was a blizzard of men absent of color, all clones of one another. I was about to leave when this Native American fellow came over and struck up a conversation. The moon was full that night. I could see it clearly through the window of his apartment on the east end. The next morning, the sun was as bright as I had ever seen it. I watched a lone woman play with her dog on the beach. Hmmm, this place might not be so bad after all.
And so began my inauspicious "thing" with Provincetown.
