Lynda and Stevie visit Madame Marie
By Bill Kelly
Lynda Van Devanter and her boyfriend, “JJ,” walked out of the Dunes nightclub a little after 8 in the morning, squinting from the garish sun as it rose over Margate. They were each sporting fresh blue t-shirts that read, “Bay Shores,” on the front and on the back, “Dunes ’til Dawn,” with the image of a rising sun. They had won them in a dance contest earlier that night.
It was following a Rock ‘n’ Roll Turns Ten party celebrating the decade that had passed since Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ‘n’ roll song to reach No.1 on the Billboard charts.
They were with fellow nursing students Barbara and Gigi, walking across the vast, now empty parking lot to Lynda’s black ’62 Chevy Nova convertible with its top down. They all piled in and Lynda drove across the Ocean Drive bridge to Ocean City, having to make the first significant decision of the day – should they go back to their rooming house or hit the beach?
The beach won in a hands-down, unanimous decision. Though JJ didn’t vote, he would go with whatever the girls decided.
John Joseph Smith was a local boy from nearby Tuckahoe in Upper Township and attended Ocean City High School before enlisting in the Army. He had just returned from a year-long deployment in Vietnam, JJ was on leave until Labor Day when he had to report to his unit at Fort Dix.
Lynda parked on the street a half block from the Boardwalk. Carrying their blankets and beach chairs, they walked across the boards and past the hippies gathering at Shriver’s Pavilion. Taking their shoes off, they walked through the cool, soft sand that would soon be hot from the sun. Setting their blankets down in their preferred spot next to the huge, black granite boulders of the jetty, they surveyed the scene around them and the hundred or so people already on the beach they could recognize, some of them from the Anchorage, Tony Mart’s, Bay Shores and Dunes the night before.
It wasn’t long before Chris and Katie, the mayor’s daughters, came by and set up in their spot nearby. They all had met there on the beach on Memorial Day and became fast friends. Lynda regaled the sisters with stories of what occurred the previous night – seven-for-a-dollar beers at the Anchorage, the Hawks and Bill Haley and His Comets at Tony Mart’s, The Jodimars at Steele’s, Tito Mambo and the Messiahs of Soul, the unscheduled appearance of Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs at Bay Shores and the dance contest at the Dunes. The sisters were annoyed they missed it all.
The unwritten but respected beach rule was to keep radios off in the morning so people could sleep, and after a little catnap, JJ woke up, and picked up a medical textbook, began quizzing the girls as they had graduated from Mercy Hospital nursing school in Baltimore, they were preparing for their state board exams.
Stephanie Nicks joined them as she wasn’t due to work as a waitress at Watson’s until lunchtime. She lived for the summer with her grandmother and brought along her acoustic guitar. Because her little cousins couldn’t pronounce Stephanie, they called her Stevie, and the nickname caught on.
Among those who came by to say hello to the girls were the lifeguards when they came on duty: Jim Croce, one of the hippies with his guitar who knew JJ from when he was in the Army Reserves at Fort Dix, and Silvio, a young Italian law student kicking a soccer ball around on the beach.
Jim sat down on the blanket and told JJ he was writing a song about their drill sergeant at Fort Dix – Big Bad Leroy Brown. JJ laughed and said he had to go back to Dix and report for duty on Labor Day, and wasn’t looking forward to it.
A Visit with Madame Marie
For the girls at the shore there were only two kinds of days – sunny beach days and cloudy not a beach day. So it was this one cloudy not a beach day when Lynda and Stephanie, Chris and Katie, JJ and Jim stayed on routine and sat on their beach towels and blankets anyway. But after an hour or so, while JJ and the sisters dozed off on their blankets, Lynda and Stephanie decided to take a walk on the boards.
Their first stop was at Del’s Grill and they talked with young Joe as he made them a miss-steak cheesesteak with the works which they split in half and ate as they walked down the Boardwalk. After the last crusty bite, they ducked into an arcade instant photo booth and took four one-inch-square, black-and-white head shots, giggling and laughing along the way.
With their pockets still lush with tips, they walked a little farther, but both stopped in their tracks almost at the same time in front of Madame Marie’s, the gypsy fortune teller, who must have had the smallest boardwalk frontage at maybe 4 feet across and two small rooms deep.
They knew Madame Marie from passing her and saying hello a half dozen times a day, but this was the first time they were going to plunk some money down to have their fortunes told by “The Mistress of Destiny.”
Madame Marie was sitting where she was usually found, in the rocking chair knitting and smiling at every face that goes by. Other boardwalk barkers and hawkers were always talking and had a dozen lines they used to get you to stop and spin a wheel, take a shot or come in for a good time. Not Madame Marie. She just sat there and smiled until someone stopped to read the sign, smell the incense and wonder, if only for a moment, what it was all about.
Marie’s eyes lit up as she realized the girls were coming in for the full-tilt monty, so she put the knitting down and pulled back a curtain to get behind a small table with two chairs in front of it. Following her behind the curtain, the girls had to adjust their eyes to the darkness, lit only by a single candle that was off to the side.
“Since I see you girls every day and you reward me with such beautiful smiles, I will give your fortune for half price: two for one,” Marie said in broken English, with a snatch of brogue, as Marie was of a family of Irish gypsies called Tinkers in the old country because of the clang of the pans on the side of their colorful wood wagons.
“First we will look into the ball to see your future destinies together, and then we will use the cards to explore each of your futures in life,” Marie said softly. Taking a silk scarf off the crystal ball in the middle of the table, Marie instructed the girls to each place a hand on the side of the ball and pick it up together, which they did, and followed Marie’s instructions to shake it gently.
The ball was suddenly filled with a cloud of multi-colored dust and sugar sand that slowly descended as the girls put the ball back on its round wood stand. The settling sand and dust particles formed a pattern, an apparently random one that only Madame Marie could read. “The ball reflects the near future of all of us while the cards tell us what lies in the future for each of us,” she said.
Looking intently into the ball Marie put her hands to her head and smiled.
“Your association is new,” said Marie, “but it will be long and eventful, as there is magic in the air and a monumental experience will bring you close together. You will travel and have many great adventures before you will separate for a long time, many years, but you will remain friends forever.”
“Friends forever,” she repeated.
“And that monumental event will happen soon,” she cautioned, before turning to the stack of cards on the table.
After having Stephanie shuffle the cards, Marie placed them on the table in front of her. Looking at Stephanie, she turned over the top card and drew a joker.
Marie looked at the card and then looked Stephanie in the eyes, laughed, smiled and said, “You get to keep the joker, and use it whenever you like, but,” she paused for a moment, “it only works once, so don’t squander it.” Then suddenly, grabbing one of Stephanie’s hands, she turned it over and glanced at it before saying, “and don’t use it for fame or fortune because they are already yours.”
Lynda declined to shuffle the cards saying, “I like the way Stevie shuffled them,” and looked at Marie’s face flash in horror as she drew and glanced at the card before setting it down saying – “the Devil at the Gates of Hell!”
“You will meet the Devil and see Hell,” Marie said without emotion, “but you will be snatched from the Banshee’s jaws by an angel from the sky, a bird, a whirly bird, and save many lives and souls along the way that will redeem you for your sins, and you will be, as they say, you will be in Heaven before the Devil even knows you’re dead.”
With that, Marie blew out the candle and pulled back the curtain so the cloudy light of day could shine through and make them squint as they emerged back into the sights, sounds and smells of the Boardwalk carnival. They ran across the boards in their bare feet, went down the steps, laughing and ran along the breaking surf until they got to the Ninth Street jetty where they knew, on the other side, sisters Chris and Katie, JJ and Jim were waiting on their blankets to hear all about their adventure – their meeting Madame Marie, their fortunes and destinies – “Friends Forever,” they yelled over and over and slapped hands as they ran along in the wet sand and jumped over the wet, black rock jetty.
Later that afternoon, as the sun peaked out from behind the clouds and the beach began to fill up with kids, Jim commented on the city commissioners wanting to ban music on the beach and Boardwalk. “First they close the beaches at night so we can’t sleep there and now they want to ban music all together? What’s this world coming to?” he asked rhetorically, though no one responded.
Katie said their father was against the resolution – it was an infringement on free speech he argued, but the other commissioners were adamant.
Around 2 o’clock, while JJ and the sisters kicked the soccer ball around the water’s edge with Silvio, Lynda took a dip in the gentle breakers and then gave Jim and his guitar a ride across the causeway to Somers Point. He was asked to get dropped off at the Anchorage Tavern where he was to finish writing his song while Lynda went to work in the emergency room at Shore Memorial Hospital a few blocks away.
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Next Up- Episode 15 – A Slice In Time
