From serious to funny, seven local women take the stage to describe their ‘Aha’ moment, and how they got there.

Island Women who spoke, from left: Maureen Farr, Missy Greene, Heather Dunham, LIz Leuthner, Director Debbie Weil, Diana Lane, Julianne Harris, and Jadyn LaDeau. Photo credit Opera House/River DiLieto.

Jan. 28, 2026

By John Epstein

People began bustling into Stonington’s Opera House just after 6 p.m. on Jan. 22, well ahead of the start of the evening’s 7 p.m. performance. Many took their seats right away, while others lingered in the lobby with a beverage to hear the popular American song book band, Along for the Ride.

The overflow crowd that turned out on a cold, clear winter’s night came for the eighth staging of what has become a local tradition: Island Women Speak, a now annual show that features seven women who each stand alone on stage to deliver very personal narratives about their lives on Deer Isle.

“It’s become the Opera House’s most popular event,” said Opera House artistic director Kathryn Markey. Indeed, by showtime all 250 seats in the house were filled, while hundreds more watched a live stream of the event from their homes.

Markey introduced the show’s director, Debbie Weil, who conceived of the format in 2018 and has directed all of them since. (See related story on Weil’s process).

This year’s theme was My Aha Moment. A summary of each is below. The Rising Tide is also making available the full text of each performance, in each woman’s own words.

Affirming an identity, no apologies necessary

Jadyn LaDeau grew up on Deer Isle. With wry understated humor, LaDeau, 27, an artist who works in oils and gouache and teaches art, recounted a trip with her parents to the Mount Washington Hotel for New Year’s in 2020. It was her Christmas present, but her father was uncomfortable. “The hotel was for, well, fancy people,” LaDeau said.

Her mother didn’t care. “She understood where we came from, and felt no urge to try to be something else,” LaDeau said. However, her dad fretted about “looking like a bunch of hicks.”

But he got over it while roaming with his daughter up and down the stairs of the grand hotel investigating charming details and hidden spaces. “Wandering for the thrill of it,” she said. It was a side of him LaDeau hadn’t seen before

And then LaDeau, exploring the hotel alone, had her “aha moment.” She struck up a conversation about the advantages of acrylic paint with the house artist, who was painting and selling his work in the lobby. When he asked her what she did, rather than saying “doing art stuff,” her usual self-deprecating response, LaDeau simply said with confidence, “I’m an artist.” Her answer was accepted without question.

Revelatory moments of unconditional love

Liz Leuthner, who has been teaching yoga at her studio in Deer Isle Village for several years, described how fate played quite a trick on her when she was awakened by severe abdominal pain last Halloween morning, “which happened to be my 60th birthday.”

With comic timing, she told the audience how, in the moments before Memorial Ambulance arrived, she dutifully made her bed, trimmed her toe nails, and set some mouse traps.

Then Leuthner became serious. Stepping into the ambulance that morning was not just relief; it was an instance where she “listened to [her] heart and “allow[ed] others in.”

Describing her journey from alcoholism to recovery, Leuthner acknowledged having been placed in ambulances many times before when kind people found her unconscious in public places.

Ultimately acknowledging she needed help, Leuthner entered a 12-step rehab program, where she had her “aha moment” when two young men–residents cleaning the cafeteria after lunch–took a moment to make her a turkey sandwich. She described the profoundly ordinary act as her “first experience with unconditional love” delivered by two people who had just met her but innately knew her plight.

She described experiencing other moments of unconditional love shown by ordinary acts, including that of the husband of her hospital roommate who bewildered Leuthner’s then boyfriend with the gift of a flashlight. The husband explained to him that the flashlight could be used in bedroom darkness so as not to awaken Leuthner during her convalescence.

Leuthner said she couldn’t contain her tears by that simple act. Many who cheered when she left the stage couldn’t contain theirs.

It was meant to be

Striding onto the stage with strength and pride, Diana Lane, 37, born and raised on Deer Isle, described a life she sees as determined by providence.

Lane recounted how her marriage to Nathaniel Lane, a lobsterman, just had to be. They were both supposed to be born on the same day. Nathaniel was premature, but he came home near the time Diana was born, and “two little babies were dedicated to the Lord at the Sunshine Advent Christian Church,” she said.

Diana then describes a love story. At five, she raced her best friend down to the Lily Pond to see who would marry Nathaniel. Later she teased him and he excluded her from boy stuff, but by high school they were friends. Diana went “off island” to study music in college. Nathaniel stayed to pursue lobster fishing.

While enjoying college, Diana missed her life on Deer Isle and wondered “[w]hy the boys at college fall so short of the boy back home?” Then came that “aha moment.” She realized she was an island woman who loved an island man. But she cried herself to sleep thinking that love would be impossible.

Then she told a happy audience how her “aha moment” came true–how she and Nathaniel courted and have been married 10 years, living on the island with two daughters.

***The annual monologues from Island women has “become the Opera House’s most popular event,” said Opera House artistic director Kathryn Markey. Photo by John Epstein.***

The seeds of happiness

Julianne Harris, 36, swooped onto the stage with her tale on a cell phone screen in the palm of her hand. Harris described the resurrection of her spirit after calling off a wedding and then moving to Deer Isle.

Raised in New Jersey, educated in Tennessee, with a varied working stint in Texas as marketing director, yoga teacher, and artist, Harris said she “[f]ollowed the playbook” to success and was the sort of girl “a mom wishes her son would date.”

Having decided she was about to marry Mr. Wrong, Harris bought a summer house in Stonington and moved there three years ago in March, of all months, she said.

She described tough nights. “There was no outrunning the deafening silence,” she said. But sorting through old boxes, she found an antidote to her loneliness: a box of sunflower seeds. “[R]emnants from the farm my ex-fiancée and I had run together, seeds from sunflowers we’d grown for our wedding,” Harris said.

Finding those seeds was Harris’s “aha moment.” She planted them indoors, nurtured them into the spring, and planted them. The sunflowers had grown spectacularly, to nourish “the birds, bees, and butterflies” and her.

Harris said she has now found happiness on the island with those sunflowers, her dog Biscuit, and her co-workers at 44 North.

Strength had always been there

Raised on Isle au Haut and now living on Deer Isle, Heather Dunham is an island woman twice over. Though 55, the life she described to a rapt audience could be said to touch upon three centuries.

The plumbing at the Isle au Haut house was definitely 19th century.“My grandfather believed plumbing was an unnecessary luxury,” Dunham said. She vividly described a challenging, but rewarding life, where water was hauled by bucket from an outdoor well.

On Isle au Haut, Dunham listened to the radio with her grandfather and played cribbage with old men when she was just eight. “When you grow up removed from larger communities, you belong to all generations,” she said.

Dunham also learned to raise chickens, sew, mend, quilt, knit, put up jams, and navigate a boat without electronics. She earned a living baking bread.

“I learned a posture toward life,” Dunham said, which included not quitting when something was hard. That was put to the test in 2024 when both her parents died and her husband left her after they had raised two daughters.

Dunham grieved and felt weakened. But then she noticed that she was “[s]till doing what needed to be done, even when I felt emptied out. That was her “aha moment!”

“I wasn’t becoming strong. I had been strong all along,” she said.

Dunham now shares her faith and wisdom as a minister at the Brooksville and Penobscot United Methodist Churches.

Knowing the right moment to change direction

From Portland, Maureen Farr, 75, moved to Deer Isle more than 30 years ago. She spoke proudly of a life filled with “aha moments” prompting her to take new directions.

Farr stayed in a marriage that “wasn’t all that,” yet realized she needed to get skills for the work world when her two children were old enough. Having taught herself graphic design, she found a job with a seasonal arts publication. Farr started her first day thinking she was “a know nothing” but quickly realized –“aha”—that she had more skills and “chutzpah” than the guy she replaced.

Her divorce and the folding of the arts paper brought Farr to Deer Isle in 1994 where she took a job laying out Commercial Fisheries News. She wanted to buy a house, but not on the island because her friends there would only go out to dinner “if we don’t leave the island.”

But after house-sitting on Little Deer Isle one winter, she, too, found herself averse to crossing over to the mainland. This was the “aha moment,” that led to her serendipitous purchase of the island house she has lived in for 31 years.

There were other “aha moments.” When the newspaper downsized her job, Farr pivoted to start her own publication, the Arts Guide, which is now in its 27th year.

When the next “aha moment” comes along, Farr said: “I’ll be ready for it.”

Bolts from the blue

With comical theatrics, the last performer, Missy Greene, 68, a Deer Isle pottery artist, told the audience how she came to choose her life work.

While climbing the stone stairs of a Swiss chateau with her sister and mother–the latter was visiting her daughters who were in a boarding school–an “aha moment” entered Greene’s mind unbidden. Just 14, she blurted out, “Ma, I am going to be a potter!” The girl was sure it was a message from her late father that had entered her head like a “bolt of lightning.”

Greene recounted how she single-mindedly pursued her dream amid no small amount of family chaos. The boarding school couldn’t accommodate her. Nor could a high school in Florida, where she had gone to live with her mother and step-father.

Back in the town of her childhood in Guilford, Connecticut, and living with a friend for her senior year of high school, Greene finally connected with her passion. “That school had a fully equipped art room with potter’s wheels,” she said.

Greene’s pursuit of her art was off and running, first in college, then at a pottery studio back in Guilford, and later in graduate school where she changed her focus to her successful decorative pots.

Despite her mother’s naysaying, Greene trusted her first “aha moment.” And there were others to follow, such as being captivated on a visit to Deer Isle by the light shining in the dark from the upstairs window of a classic house near Quaco Road and feeling the island would be part of her life. Or later thinking that the bearded blacksmith, who she met in 1988 while teaching at a craft center in Guilford, would like Maine. Her instincts were spot on again: he did like Maine, and they married and raised two boys at Yellow Birch Farm on Reach Road.

The performance over, the crowd rose to its feet and cheered loudly for several minutes. The women with their director, Weil, came out together, linked arms, and bowed.

“It was what my weary soul needed,” said one audience member who came from Camden with a friend to hear the performances.

“It’s so important for there to be a way for women to have their words heard, recognized and honored,” said Annie Porter of Brooklin.

To read transcripts of each woman’s performance click on any of the names below: