|
|
Lisa Storie can’t define power, except to say it’s a feeling.
“It’s doing something that you love, and believing in it,” says the owner of Sitwell’s Coffeehouse in Clifton. “(It’s) building relationships with people based on what you love, making the most humane choices you possibly can.”
Storie, much like the interior of her caffeinated hub, has a meandering mind. It makes sense. She’s traveled all over, so she can’t help but have a wandering psyche.
Storie’s philosophical and humanitarian attitude is no accident. They were the driving forces that led her to foreign lands during a revolution.
It’s a classic, surreal romance: Girl travels abroad to study under “avant-garde theatre master.” Girl falls in love with foreign poet. Girl marries foreign poet. Rebellious foreign poet refuses to flee his country for personal political convictions. Girl moves to neighboring country to take care of rebellious foreign poet’s love child.
It would all be unbelievable if it weren’t true.
Storie met her ex-husband in Poland, where she spent five years enjoying life in a Socialist Democracy, working in coffeehouses and getting swept up in the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity movement of the early 1980s. When conditions grew too extreme and she could no longer obtain medicine for her daughter, she fled to Germany, where she spent the next three years.
Storie, originally from Hyde Park, returned to the area to visit her parents in 1987. And although she’s been in Cincinnati ever since, her Central/Eastern European experience is influential in her lifestyle today.
With its evolving artwork, hanging tapestries, eclectic soundtracks and half Clifton preppie/half skate punk clientele, Storie says Sitwell’s is fashioned after a coffeehouse in Poland.
Having grown tired of working for other people, she got a loan to open up her own coffeehouse — European style. This year she celebrated the coffeehouse’s eighth year on Ludlow Avenue, where the working environment is best defined as socialistic.
“Everyone’s responsible for (her) own part,” Storie says.
That philosophy is cyclical and a direct result of her experience, which also contributes to her personal power.
What a concept: Self-reliance and personal responsibility. Good to the last drop.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2002.