Rachel Teresa Jade Crosby, a writer, artist, free spirit, and former Provincetown resident and music shopkeeper, died in her sleep on May 1, 2025 at her South Dennis home following knee-replacement surgery. She was 78.
“She brought warmth, insight, and authenticity to all she did,” said her niece, Grace Insogna.
Rachel was born in Schenectady, N.Y. to Doris Crosby, a portrait artist and an advocate for the disabled at the New York State Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation, and John Celani, a World War II veteran who worked for the New York Dept. of Mental Hygiene and Dept. of Environmental Conservation.
By middle school, Rachel had developed a passion for writing, but she went on to study economics and religion at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
In her 20s, she “went to Woodstock and got distracted by the cultural upheaval of those times,” she wrote in an online profile for the Rising Tide Writers collective. She was “obsessed with seeking answers” to spiritual questions, she wrote, and became a Buddhist. In 1974, she and her girlfriend at the time crossed the country in her 1963 VW bus on which she had painted a candy-colored mountainscape.
“She would say, ‘I was a first-class hippie,’ ” said her friend Barbara Leedom. “But she still was.”
Rachel first landed in Provincetown in the 1970s, where she worked as a cook around town and, for a time, lived on an old fishing boat that she had fixed up herself. “I think the ocean called to her,” said her sister, Candace. Rachel enjoyed quiet days of writing and creating art with markers or acrylic paints, sometimes mixing in objects like seashells. She meditated every morning, practiced yoga, and became a vegetarian.
In 1993, she took a job in the town assessor’s office and later worked as a grant writer and data analyst at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School. She was also a part of the Insight Meditation Circle of Cape Cod, a board member of Cape Cod Pride, and active in the Rising Tide group, for which she created a website that she had recently planned to update.
Rachel eventually self-published a two-part fantasy novel, Nature’s Kiss, and a collection of poems and essays, for which she created whimsical cover art. She was nearly finished with a second novel, Carla’s Tale, based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, at the time of her death.
Rachel also had a passion for music. She played the drums and, in the early ’90s, opened the Provincetown shop Calliope in the Pilgrim House alleyway, selling everything from secondhand instruments and amp stands to women-crafted drums and a range of world-music CDs.
“That was her baby,” Candace said of the store. It’s where now-retired dentist Gerry Kinahan, a bassist and guitarist, first met Rachel when he went in to buy guitar strings. He later bought his first bass from her, and Rachel suggested they jam together, which they began doing regularly in 1994 in the attic above Kinahan’s office in North Truro.
“She was awesome,” said Kinahan, adding that they wrote songs together and played covers at parties — sometimes with a third musician, forming an ad-hoc group he liked to call “Gerry and the Lesbians.” He agreed that Rachel was a hippie. “And she kept it all the way to the end, which is very rare,” Kinahan said. “She did her Buddhist thing, she painted, she wrote books. She was one of a kind.”
Calliope eventually moved into a space across Commercial Street from the Crown & Anchor. “Her store was really cool; she sold djembes and congas made by women,” said bass player Sue Goldberg, who bought a drum from Rachel and wound up working in the shop for about a year. “She had an array of different kinds of music, and she introduced me to a lot of artists I didn’t know.”
Rachel had also lived in Harwich for a time. “In any place she lived,” said Candace, “she became part of the pulse of it.” She added, “She was my everything.”
In addition to her sister, Candace Celani, of Greenwich, N.Y., Rachel is survived by her nephews, Theo Celani and wife Shannon Celani, Nick Vooris and partner Mary Orminski, and Dan Vooris, all of Middle Falls, N.Y.; her nieces, Alaina Vooris and spouse Dave O’Brien of Ballston Spa, N.Y. and Grace Insogna and spouse Ali Talan of Baltimore, Md.; and her grand-nieces and grand-nephews Ella, Charlotte, Kali, Keeley, Bowen, and Remi.
She also leaves her girlfriend, Ann Sullivan of Arlington, and many longtime friends and spiritual companions including Flo Ann Femling, Eric Ekstrom, Sandy Fay, Gerry Kinahan, Barbara Leedom, and Janet Jansson.
“She was amazingly artistic and prolific,” said Barbara. “And she was very supportive of everybody else’s writing.” The writers collective met recently to honor Rachel, with everyone bringing an object that symbolized their friend. One person brought a playing card, said Barbara, “and we all said, ‘That’s Rachel. She was a wild card.’ ”
Plans for a memorial celebration have not yet been announced.
