Restful Rainbow

Two quiet letters, three initials, and the young playwright about to change Broadway forever.

Tonight we travel to Greenwich Village in 1957 to meet Lorraine Hansberry (1930 to 1965), who was finishing A Raisin in the Sun in a book-lined apartment on Bleecker Street when she wrote to The Ladder, the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, to say she was glad as heck it existed. Two years later her play became the first by a Black woman produced on Broadway. The part of her life she wrote about in private stayed closed in a box of papers until 2013.

Along the way: a lamp above Bleecker Street, a play read aloud after dinner, a little plant on a windowsill reaching for the light, a curtain rising on opening night, a house above the Croton River, and five bronze chairs by Lake Michigan where anyone can sit a while.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

A vase of white flowers, a painter known only as Gluck, and the florist who arranged them. A 1930s London love story.

Tonight we travel to Hampstead and Mayfair to meet Gluck (1895 to 1978), the painter who wanted "no prefix, suffix, or quotes," and Constance Spry (1886 to 1960), the florist who filled Bond Street windows with hedgerow leaves and later arranged flowers for a coronation. Their love lasted from 1932 to 1936 and left behind some of the loveliest flower paintings of the century, in frames designed to melt into the wall.

Along the way: a new studio under the north light, white lilies renewed for months while the paint dried, a gallery painted white from floor to ceiling, a geranium tucked behind an ear in Hammamet, and a pink rose that still carries her name.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Sandpaintings were made to be swept away. One Diné singer found a way to weave them into wool, so they would last.

Tonight we travel to Diné country in northwestern New Mexico to meet Hastiin Klah (1867 to 1937), a nádleeh weaver and healer who mastered at least eight ceremonies, wove the first full sandpainting tapestry in 1919, and, with Mary Cabot Wheelwright, founded the museum in Santa Fe now known as the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

Along the way: an upright loom in the shade of a brush arbor, a winter hogan with its door facing east, a line of blue sand pouring from a singer's fingers, the Pacific rolling in at Santa Barbara, and a house on a hill blessed by his family in November 1937. Time, at last, to see beauty.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd

Restful Rainbow earns a commission when you use this link or code, at no extra cost to you.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Long before Stonewall, there was a little town on the sand where people could step off the ferry and be themselves.

Tonight we travel to Cherry Grove on Fire Island, often called America's first gay and lesbian town. From the black cherry trees of 1868 to the 1938 hurricane that cleared the way, from the Cherry Grove Follies of 1948 staged in a carriage house floated across the bay, to Audrey Hartmann's walk down the beach in 1953, the jury acquittals that ended the police raids in 1968, and the first Invasion of the Pines on July 4, 1976.

Along the way: a ferry crossing the Great South Bay at dusk, gray boardwalks under holly trees, women by candlelight behind a cottage window, a curtain hung on a clothesline, and a water taxi full of sequins. Revolutionary, in a really quiet way.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

For decades, Halloween was the one night a year queer people could walk out the door as themselves.

Tonight we travel through many Halloweens, from Alfred Finnie's 25-cent drag ball in a Chicago tavern basement in 1935, to Finnie's Ball at the Pershing Ballroom with crowds on the sidewalk, to José Sarria at San Francisco's Black Cat handing out "I am a boy" tags, the Halloween buses rolling from bar to bar, and the party's move from Polk Street to Castro Street in 1979.

Along the way: balloons in a Bronzeville basement, gowns stepping down from a streetcar, a cardboard tag shaped like a black cat, a tour bus full of sequins in the fog, and a variety store window full of masks. Pride before Pride.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

In 1859, a young woman who had never been to school began writing love letters. Her sweetheart kept every one.

Tonight we travel to Hartford, Connecticut, in the years around the Civil War, to meet Addie Brown, a self-taught domestic worker, and Rebecca Primus, a schoolteacher who went south in 1865 to teach freedpeople in Royal Oak, Maryland, and built a schoolhouse the community named for her.

Along the way: a kitchen table at the end of a long workday, a parlor full of thread and books on Wadsworth Street, the evening steamboat gliding down the Connecticut River, a little schoolhouse on the Eastern Shore where the marsh turns silver at dusk, and a box of letters kept safe for more than a century. No kisses is like yours.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

In 1987, a few hundred people in an old New York schoolhouse decided they would not be silent.

Tonight we travel to New York City in the spring of 1987 to meet ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power: the Monday night meetings on West 13th Street, the black poster with the pink triangle that read Silence = Death, and the soft-spoken chemist from Queens who taught a movement to read the science.

Along the way: an old brick schoolhouse with its lights on late, a long table of flyers warm from the copier, a grey morning on Wall Street with church bells over the traffic, a pink neon triangle glowing in a Broadway window, and a lamp over a kitchen table, late at night. Turn anger, fear, grief into action. And action, at last, into rest.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. This episode names the AIDS crisis plainly but briefly, and spends its time with the people who answered it.

Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.

Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Two artists in love fought an army with tissue paper, and signed each note "the soldier with no name."

Tonight we travel to the island of Jersey to meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: partners for forty-five years, makers of some of the most startling photographs of the twentieth century, and a two-person resistance during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.

Along the way: a granite house above a wide, pale bay, a Paris studio full of masks and mirrors, a cat walked on a lead through an old churchyard, the soft tap of a typewriter on a rainy evening, a square of paper slipped into a coat pocket, and a length of thread carrying three words through a prison wall. Good night. Courage. Love.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.

Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

They cut her hair and dressed her as a man. Her chief told the agent to leave. Her answer never changed.

Tonight we travel to the northern plains to meet Osh-Tisch of the Crow Nation: a badé, neither man nor woman in Crow tradition, the finest lodge-maker of her generation, a healer, and a warrior who earned her name at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876.

Along the way: the cool, honey-colored light inside the largest buffalo-hide lodge the Crow ever raised, wild roses along a creek in June, a war party riding home singing, a mirror held in a photographer's studio, a green canvas tipi tied with blue ribbons, a chief who would not look away, and an elder in a calico dress telling a general, "That is my road."

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.

Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

In 1867 one man stood before 500 German jurists and said it out loud. He was shouted down. He was also heard.

Tonight we travel to Germany and Italy to meet Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: a judge who lost his career for loving men, a thinker who decided on his own that he was born this way, and the first person known to stand up in public, under his own name, and ask the law to leave love alone.

Along the way: larks over the flat green fields of East Frisia, a new word with starlight in it, brown paper parcels of forbidden booklets, hundreds of letters from men who thought they were the only one, a bright August morning at the Odeon in Munich, the soft rain of silkworms in a Stuttgart room, and a stone town in the Italian mountains where an old man sends a little Latin journal called Larks around the world.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.