By Erin Watkinson
West Kennebunk Resident
Let me tell you a little about my family and me. We live in West Kennebunk. I am a custom picture framer. My business offers fine, museum quality products, skilled workmanship and impeccable customer service. My husband is an advertising account executive who travels the country meeting with and advising his very wealthy and successful clients. We have a 3-year-old son with a chipper disposition and age appropriate manners. We eat very healthy and have no health problems. We recycle everything that we can (and have for the last 12 years) from our home and my business right down to the little plastic loops for price tags… and the price tags themselves. We have good friends and are friendly with our neighbors and we enjoy helping people whenever we can. My business supported Kennebunk/Kennebunkport Little League four years in a row. We’ve participated in Kennebunk Parks and Recreation since my son has been old enough. We attend local storytimes and events at the Kennebunk Free Library. We donate to local organizations and causes as often as we can. We shop and bank locally and pay taxes on our 3.25 acres of land and modest home, which we keep neat as a pin, inside and out. We drive a Volvo station wagon.
Sounds like for some, we fit the mold for what they’d consider “ideal” Kennebunk residents. And they’re right. We are ideal but we don’t necessarily fit into a mold. I’ll continue. My husband was a rock radio disc jockey in Hartford for years. He still wears “Rush” and “Lynyrd Skynryd” t-shirts and drums on the weekends. My angelic son has a black mini-drum kit in his room with orange flames. He likes to paint on his face with his Crayola watercolors and pretend he’s the fifth member of KISS with performances of “Rock and Roll All Night” on his makeshift stage.
I play guitar. My guitar heroes are Stevie Ray Vaughan and Randy Rhoads, the deceased guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne and co-founder of “Quiet Riot”. The last two songs I played on my guitar before writing this letter were “Orion” by Metallica and “Karma Police” by Radiohead. Playing is what I do to relax. Some play golf. Some read. Some paint. Some knit. I rock. I would love to start a band but my family and business are my priorities and I just don’t have the time. I asked a close musician friend of mine, whose face is pierced like a pin-cushion (and is engaged to a stunningly beautiful and stylish professional woman who attends Catholic Mass every Sunday) how many songs one would need to know to play gigs with a band. He said the number would be around 30.
I don’t have time to perfect 30 songs at this point in my life so an open-mic would be the perfect creative, recreational outlet for me. I was about to take advantage of that opportunity at Stefano’s Wednesday open-mic night. I emailed the guy who organized it. He said that open-mic was “on hold for now.” I’ll admit I don’t know the whole story but I later was told that a neighbor had complained about the celebration of life that they considered “noise” and, in the blink of an eye through a town meeting, Stefano’s is no longer allowed to provide live music for its patrons. Patrons who, for the most part, are friendly, everyday, hardworking, tax-paying people like my husband and me.
I am so irritated by this decision. How many years has Stefano’s been a part of Kennebunk’s downtown economy? Isn’t a downtown nightlife a part of this inevitable growth everyone is always talking about? A developer bought the nearly 200 mostly rurally zoned acres behind our house. They wanted to put 180 seasonal campers on it. They said it was in the name of growth. We fought it tooth and nail because it was grossly inconsistent with the zoning. We were called NIMBYs and accused of being anti-growth and anti-affordable housing, which we are not. The developer eventually came back to the planning board with a proposal, which we’ll never be okay with but we felt that the new proposal was going to be as good as it was going to get considering our experience with the developer and planning board. It seems to be something we can live with. Even so, we voted no against the required contract zoning and hoped for the best without getting involved with the public fight from which we were exhausted. I suppose you could say we “begrudgingly compromised.” The contract zone was voted through in the name of growth. (Future misuse of the contract zone is actually our biggest concern but I digress…)
From my point of view, if one lives on or near Main Street of any growing town, one needs to come to terms with the fact there’s the possibility of a new nightlife to accompany said growth. Residents of a commercial zone, designated for growth, must accept change especially since we had to do so in a rural zone that was actually protected from dense development, which is going to happen anyway because it was for the sake of growth.
We fully expected there to be homes behind us one day but not as many as there will be. I am a taxpayer and I’ve had to make a compromise in the name of growth that I’ll have to live with everyday, forever. Surely, residents of the Main Street area can deal with a few hours of “noise” a few times a week… all in the name of growth, of course.
I encourage all concerned residents of Kennebunk and neighboring communities as well to stop by Stefano’s this week and sign the petition to get the live music back. Many of us drive by at least once a week. It will take less than a minute. There’s a clipboard at the bar as soon as you walk through the door.