Leni Sorensen doesn’t typically worry about fitting in, except for once: At 13, she changed her name from Len to Leni to sound more like the Bettys and Judys of her generation. Photo: Elli Williams
A cultivated life
From folk singer to farm girl, Leni Sorensen is still living on her own terms
Leni Sorensen isn’t really a curmudgeon. “It’s an act,” she tells me as we sit at the kitchen table of her White Hall home. Still, she adds, “I’ll never be one of those blue-haired grandmas. I just won’t.”
At 72, Sorensen doesn’t make many apologies, not for her foul mouth or her critical eye toward everything from “-isms” (veganism, yogism) to current pop culture icons. That was clear the first time we met too, when I tagged along with a freelancer who was writing a story about her kitchen last June. During both visits, the teacher and historian spoke of her relationship to cooking and gardening, but it was her sense of self that piqued my interest.
The daughter of an interracial couple, Sorensen grew up in Southern California and didn’t look like most of her peers (both because of her skin color and her height, having already reached 5’8″ by the time she was 12), nor did she sound like them, thanks mostly to her constant, feverish reading habits.
At 1,200 words a minute, she could consume a lot of literature, and did so without prompting. Her mom was a Rosie at Lockheed and was often absent, leaving Sorensen to her own devices, which usually meant long afternoons in the library.
“I felt smugly superior to my peers because they were unread,” she said.
Unable to find her place, at 16, Sorensen left home and became a singer, first at a coffeehouse in San Diego, then later with The Womenfolk, an all-female American folk band. For the next three years, The Womenfolk produced five albums, appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and had a hit single, “Little Boxes,” the theme song for the Showtime series “Weeds,” which Sorensen admits she’s never seen. In fact, she doesn’t watch much TV.
“It’s either too tense or too sophomoric,” she said. There’s that critical eye again.
Back at the dining room table, I turn the conversation to pop culture.
“Joan Rivers is funny, but physically appalling,” Sorensen says. She lists a few beautiful women—Cicely Tyson, Joanne Woodward, Lena Horne—but notes that, because she didn’t grow up around a lot of women who evaluated appearance, she was fortunate not to have to think about it. (To this day, she never wears makeup.) She preferred brainier pursuits.
“George Carlin is my hero. He says what I’m thinking; I just do it from the wife-woman perspective.”
Sorensen is a mother of four—three boys and a girl—but don’t ask her their ages. “Once they’re over 20, I don’t care,” she said. Most have stayed close to home, marrying and starting families of their own, growing businesses, and keeping up with what’s happening at the homestead. On my visit, Sorensen’s daughter Winter had just come over to check on her seedlings, which Sorensen is keeping under a heat lamp until after the first frost.
When she was 42, Sorensen decided to return to academia, and enrolled at Mary Baldwin College. It had been 26 years since she’d been in school, but by 2005, she would earn her master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.
Sorensen continues to embrace her perpetual sense of independence. She jokes that she and her husband, Kip, to whom she’s been married for 40 years, “live alone together” at their modest one-story, Indigo House, which Kip built and where Sorensen grows all manner of herb, vegetable, and fruit gardens, as well as raises livestock.
And she’s constantly working to build her business—essentially, sharing what she knows about cooking, gardening, and cultural history, which she did for many years as a historian at Williamsburg and Monticello—whereby she can go about what she’s already doing (planting in the garden, baking bread, gathering eggs from the chicken coop) but add in a few students without disruption.
“Ask me a question and I’ll download everything I know about it,” she said. And she’ll share without reserve, her colorful language making its way into each honest discussion.
“Just shut up and listen. It doesn’t mean you can’t change your opinion. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole fucking life.”—C.W.