The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason

Author:Matt Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5401-1
Publisher: Free Press

CHAPTER 5 Boundaries: Disco Nuns, the Death of the Record Industry, and Our Open-Source Future

Sister Alicia Donohoe moving the crowd in the party room, Christmas 1947.

Not many nuns kick-start revolutions, and almost none have done so by DJing at children's birthday parties. But Sister Alicia Donohoe was never out to change the world—she was just trying to make sure the kids were having a good time.

Alicia grew up in 1930s Boston, in the suburb of Dorchester, the daughter of Anna and John Donohoe—a child of the Great Depression. “It was a dead town,” she remembers. For the Donohoe family, a family of pianists, music would save the day during these hard times. “My parents played classical and my sister played popular music,” she told me. “My parents would be playing and I'd be singing along and turning the pages, and they'd do duets. All our friends would come over, too. We were surrounded by music.”

John Donohoe liked sharing music with strangers, using his piano to bring many of the unemployed people in the neighborhood together and give them something to smile about. “We had a very nice baby grand piano in the bay window,” Sister Alicia told me. “When my father would sit there at the piano during the day, he'd push the draperies back and open the windows. People who liked music would be standing outside listening and my father would invite them all in. He was not an inhibited man by any means,” she says with a chuckle. “We never knew who was gonna be in the house!”

Music inspired her, but by age six she had already decided she wanted to take care of children, “to see if we can make them as happy as we are at home,” she remembers telling her mother. “I always wanted to be a Daughter of Charity (the order of nuns she was to join). I knew a lot of Sisters, because I had two aunts who were Sisters.” And so it was that at age twenty-one, Alicia became a nun, and soon found herself at St. Joseph's Home, an interfaith home for orphans and troubled children placed into care from birth to age six. And it's there the revolution began.

The year was 1944. The world was at war. Scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were hard at work developing the most destructive force known to mankind. But at St. Joseph's in Utica, New York, Sister Alicia was getting another experiment under way—a social experiment so powerful it is still repeated all around the world every night of the week.

St. Joseph's embraced children from all cultures, religions, and backgrounds. It was a transient place: kids came and went all the time; some were there for a month or two, others for years. When Sister Alicia arrived, the young rascals at St. Joseph's were an unruly little mob—she remembers one day having to stop them beating a very overweight nun with sticks and brooms. “I had no control,” she told me, “I'd be running after them, then they'd be running after me.

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