Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud: The Dream Away Lodge

THE DREAM AWAY LODGE TO REOPEN ON THE WINGS OF MAMA FRASCA’S LEGACY

By Dan McCarthy

Photos By David Edgecomb

Historical Photos By Ken Regan/Camera 5

From the pages of our May/June 2023 Issue.

You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t looking for it.

It has been the definition of a tucked-away, Berkshires-born roadside restaurant and bar. But, if you grabbed a map and drew a line from October Mountain Lake to the north and Basin Pond or the Appalachian Trail to the south, and connected them up the merciless delta of three minimally maintained mountain farm roads to the east, you arrive at a property that operated blissfully for 70 years as a Becket establishment beloved by locals and travelers alike until it closed in September 2020.

With the highly anticipated rebirth of the Dream Away Lodge this April under new ownership, defining what makes it so damn special comes down to a simple question: Is it the people, or is it the place?

For ages, many would cite Mama Frasca, the matriarchal owner and soul of the establishment, as a defining appeal. “Mama would entertain whoever was there by singing and playing. We grew very fond of each other,” says nearby hilltown neighbor and Dream Away fan Arlo Guthrie. That fondness led Guthrie to recruit friends and newcomers to experience it for themselves. “We would take whoever was up here to the Dream Away,” he adds.

Milton Berle and Janis Joplin were other celebs of the day who fancied the place. Liberace was so much a fan of Mama, he would reportedly play the piano with her in the dining room during visits. (A portrait of Mama still hangs on the wall over the piano in the dining room). But it’s the connection to Bob Dylan that lives on in the minds of the public.

“We get a lot of musicians that just play for tips here and nowhere else,” says Daniel Osman. Sprightly with a weathered Broadway-actor handsome sheen, the long-time owner of the Dream Away has been the torch-bearer for the spirit of Mama since purchasing the establishment in 1997. “They want to play the room Bob played in.”

With the highly anticipated rebirth of the Dream Away Lodge this April under new ownership, defining what makes it so damn special comes down to a simple question: Is it the people, or is it the place?

For ages, many would cite Mama Frasca, the matriarchal owner and soul of the establishment, as a defining appeal. “Mama would entertain whoever was there by singing and playing. We grew very fond of each other,” says nearby hilltown neighbor and Dream Away fan Arlo Guthrie. That fondness led Guthrie to recruit friends and newcomers to experience it for themselves. “We would take whoever was up here to the Dream Away,” he adds.

Milton Berle and Janis Joplin were other celebs of the day who fancied the place. Liberace was so much a fan of Mama, he would reportedly play the piano with her in the dining room during visits. (A portrait of Mama still hangs on the wall over the piano in the dining room). But it’s the connection to Bob Dylan that lives on in the minds of the public.

“We get a lot of musicians that just play for tips here and nowhere else,” says Daniel Osman. Sprightly with a weathered Broadway-actor handsome sheen, the long-time owner of the Dream Away has been the torch-bearer for the spirit of Mama since purchasing the establishment in 1997. “They want to play the room Bob played in.”

The new ownership, under the name of The Dreamaway Lodge, LLC, is a family affair with husband-and-wife teams Scott and Sheryl Victor Levy, and Andy McDowell and Courtney Hayne at the helm. Scott and Sheryl, two Brooklynites hailing from the film and television industry, are de facto executive directors of the lodge in its new co-ownership team and structure. (For longevity sake, Osman is staying on as a consultant and continues to live on the premises.). The Levys are no stranger to the Berkshires. Scott has owned a house in Becket for 20 years; the Dream Away has been in their lives for nearly as long. For the Levys, as has been the case for many others, the Dream Away was a sort of rite of passage into the heart of the Berkshires.

“Even in 2004, you had to know someone who would introduce you to the Dream Away, who felt you were ‘worthy’ of knowing about how special it is and bringing you here,” says Scott, sitting in the dining room one chilly late-winter afternoon with his partners, their kids, and Osman’s two dogs in close range. Chairs were stacked in some areas; in other sections, they were set up as if standing by for patrons to walk through the door. The thin layer of dust on the nearby piano debunked that assumption.

“If you got invited to a party or a night there, you were interesting enough to be part of the Dream Away,” Scott continued. “Daniel was always here, and part of coming here was seeing him. You never knew what to expect—from meeting strangers who became close friends after a night at the fire pits out back, to a memorable dinner, to seeing a band you’d never heard of that became a favorite, to just leaving with a ‘wow’ experience. We’re intent on preserving that and bringing it to a new generation of visitors.”

For more than 25 years, Osman was the sole owner of the property. Now the living institutional memory of the Dream Away, he is quick to explain that it was about the people as much as the place itself: the place, with its secluded, natural-world immersion bereft of good wifi or well-kept roads; the people, who maintained the sprawling grounds and gardens and gave it a heartbeat; the place, as it looks at the height of summer or the turn of fall; the people, who met their future spouses over local farm-to-table dishes in the dining room; the place, from the funky adult campground vibe to the original fieldstone fireplace; and the place again, with its wood-paneled walls and flooring and original structure that dates back to 1790.

And then there’s Dylan, who put the place and the people on the map.

“Once Dylan’s been in your house, you get the crazy super-fans who want to sit where he did, which was right over there,” Osman says, pointing to a corner of the restaurant. In 1975, Dylan and Joan Baez had passed through during the Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour. Dylan had reached out to Guthrie to join them, and Guthrie—noting that if they were looking for a location that would yield something interesting for an art film, they could do no better than the Becket bar—had the Revue meet him at the Dream Away. (A scene from Dylan’s four-hour arthouse movie, Renaldo and Clara, was filmed in the dining room. The film was released in 1978; the rest is history.)

Guthrie, Dylan, Baez, Alan Ginsburg, and bassist Rob Stoner spent an evening of music and merriment with Mama and the Dream Away the evening of November 5, 1975. The next day, Dylan and the Revue played their show in Springfield with Mama Frasca invited as a special guest. Osman mentions a bootleg recording of that show he has personally listened to, and recalls Baez dedicating their rendition of Dylan’s “Mama You’ve Been On My Mind” to “a very special person sitting in the second row” and gave Mama, seated there before her folk-rock friends, a thrilling shoutout.

Now that the place is returning to life with the new ownership team, sans Mama Frasca but with Osman offering guidance, questions quickly rise to the surface: Will the garden and backyard shack with the vintage wood-burning sauna remain the same? Will the burger still be on the menu? Will it be easier to get a drink on a Saturday at the six-seater bar?

The answer is a loose “yes.” Scott Levy says they are basically tidying up the space and reopening it exactly as it was before and plan to keep it that way through the first season. So that all the funky eclectic décor and art and photography curated over the years by Osman will be just as it was before. And that’s just fine for Osman.

“I wouldn’t have spent years with this place if I didn’t think it deserved to be saved, so I’m really glad someone else saw that it was worth saving from here on,” he says. “Covid took a lot of people and businesses down in this area and shut our doors. When I put it on the market, I just turned 65. You don’t want to be 65 when rebuilding a business from scratch, so I knew if the Dream Away had any future, it would need a new generation of caretakers to move it forward.”

The fact that Osman will maintain a presence—and an influence—on the new life of the Dream Away is reassuring to locals, especially Guthrie.

“For me, that’s a godsend,” says Guthrie during a recent interview. “Daniel really kept the spirit of the place alive. He didn’t change it from when Mama Frasca owned it. He kept the same pictures, the same silverware, the same everything.”

In order to appreciate the future of the Dream Away, it’s worth peeking into past.

Tales of the early days include a Prohibition-era brothel and speakeasy in the 1920s under the ownership of a World War I colonel before Maria “Mama” Frasca bought it and officially renamed it the Dream Away Lodge in 1947. Moving to Becket from New York City, she and husband Vincenzo Frasca ran it as a lodging house for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Theater performers. The Dream Away Lodge officially became a restaurant and small bar for locals in 1949.

Mama Frasca, an Albanian-born New Yorker, used area farms to produce the menu and would sing Mediterranean songs with her daughters to the sounds of guitars and mandolins for patrons at night. The 1950s and ’60s created the lodge’s reputation for parties and what-happens-at-the- Dream Away-only-happens-at-the-Dream Away pathos. By the early 1980s, the lodge served one five-course meal, with Mama being known to proclaim, “If you like it you pay…if you don’t it’s on me.”

By the 1990s, one of Mama Frasca’s daughters had by then assumed ownership of the Dream Away, and they eventually sold it to Osman, who was at the time seeking a new chapter after a career in theater and stage. Osman says he swapped the stage for the Lodge during his stewardship, losing none of his flair for performance. “For 25 years I was the star of a show every night…off off off Broadway!” says Osman with a laugh.

News rang out last year of plans to renovate the property and make it an adult glamping site, which got support from some as well as plenty of vocal opposition, including from local resident Rosemarie Bongiovanni, a granddaughter of Mama Frasca herself. Thankfully, that never came to fruition and the potential buyers walked away. The Levys aren’t in the business of changing the face of something they love, and love is a driving force of the project for these new stewards.

“I’m pretty attached to this place, and these guys have great respect for the thing that it is, which is beautiful to me,” says Osman. “They’re saving it because I saved it as a legacy.”

And so rings the tenor of the Dream Aways spirit as the lodge’s legacy returns to life with the new team behind it. Music filling the rooms amid the banter and bawdy vibes will proudly return with the Dreamway’s reopening. Mike and Ruthy of regional folk-rock group The Mammals played the closing nights of the lodge. The Dream Away will bring them back on opening night as a signal that what is old is new again; what goes around comes around.

“Scott and I celebrated his 35th birthday here, and our friends were engaged at the ‘Bob Dylan’ table. We celebrated my father-in-law’s birthday at a table in the corner,” says Sheryl Levy. “This place has the moments of our lives woven into it. It’s very special to us.”

Because of those memories, the team say they will open with a menu familiar to what the lodge previously brandished, and will even bring back fan favorites. Think the Dream Away’s house burger, their famed blue cheese and iceberg wedge salad, and a black pepper tofu dish, as they begin to refine and overhaul the rest of the operation.

The team maintains that the history and the energy of the space will remain, as it did under Osman after purchasing the property from the Frasca family, and that it will remain for a new generation of patrons what it was—and is—for them. Namely, it is a place to make new memories, create new friendships, and continue on with new life as a retreat and a local tavern unlike any other in the region. The deep history of the space also will be honored and told in stories to patrons curious about the origins of such a quirky, old, and beloved bar and lodge with an X-factor that Scott says comes down to the whimsical nature of the experiences at the lodge.

“There’s an inability to explain to other people what it is about this space if they haven’t had a night here,” says Scott. “There’s a magic that happens, and the only way to understand it is to invite them to experience it. It has something that can never be rebuilt from the ground up. I want everyone to have that opportunity again.”

“I’m just happy that the Dream Away is reopening,” says Guthrie, “and if I’m around, I will be there.”