ginger soup

On a crisp afternoon amidst bustling students on their ways to and from the libraries near the University of Texas campus, I met with Austin’s self-proclaimed “next big thing” Wiccit Cote. Standing with long, curly brown hair reaching the middle of his back, wearing a bright orange faux-leather jacket, low-slung, widely flared jeans and rainbow sunglasses, Wiccit is not a student. He is a musician, weirdo, and resident of Marjorie Daw, located on Rio Grande near MLK, a co-op he founded.

Wiccit, originally from Montclair, New Jersey, made the move to Austin about two years ago, and immediately found that the “weird” city was a great place to start his jingle empire. However, following some set backs concerning his living arrangements, Wiccit had to put his aspirations on the back burner for a while.

“I had the floor fall out from beneath me,” said Wiccit of his dream place. “I had this free-standing place so I could play rock and roll, because you know, that’s my whole deal. But I spread myself out as thin as I could go making jingles in advance.”

When he lost his apartment, Wiccit had to look for options that were both affordable and in which he could play his music.

“I was broke and my closest friends over at Royal Co-Op took me in,” Wiccit said.

Co-operative living was an idea that Wiccit had not previously considered for himself, despite having spent a great deal of time in various co-ops around West Campus near the University of Texas where his friends lived. However, once he experienced co-op living for himself, he was surprised to find how natural it felt to him.

“Co-operative living is like a social animal of it’s own,” Wiccit said, “And you just have to experience it to see how useful and how natural it is. It is a fine line between ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and ‘fences make good neighbors.’”

Over the past summer, Wiccit started his own co-op with some friends he was staying with at House of Commons, another co-op located in west campus. After finding a house previously occupied by a fraternity, Marjorie Daw was founded.

“It was really precarious how out of all the options that were left for us to live in, the only available one was the most unlikely,” said Wiccit on finding the house. “If [the house] was run as a co-operative, that was the only way we were going to all get a roof over our heads.”

The group scrounged up what little money they had to get a foot hold on the house, and then they set to work investing time in filling the rest of the house and saving up the rest of the money they needed.

Starting a co-op, as you can imagine, is a long process. Wiccit needed everything from roommates, furniture, even food. However, in the short amount of time that Marjorie Daw has existed, Wiccit has been able to obtain all of these needs.

Now the only remaining occupant of the co-op out of the original founding group, Wiccit is the charismatic and warm leader of the co-op. His experience with living in other co-ops and his dreams of running a sustainable home are what has gotten the ball rolling for Marjorie Daw. Currently, there are a handful of people living under the roof, but Wiccit is hopeful they will have more roommates in the near future.

He has also set into motion the groundwork for creating a house that is “living off the grid, within the city,” according to Wiccit. They have a couple areas in the backyard designated for composting in order to make the house more environmentally friendly. He even created a system that he calls “food circuit pickup,” in which residents go around the city to various restaurants and dumpsters they know will have quality free food for them to utilize.

“Americans today throw out just as much food today as they consume,” Wiccit said. “It is not like we’re picking up boxes of moldy peaches, it is more like boxes with two moldy peaches and the rest are fine.” Wiccit claims they often have an overabundance of food at times, especially produce, from all the food they’re able to pick up for free.

After getting Marjorie Daw set up and running, Wiccit has had time to devote to music again. A documentary being produced by some fiends of Wiccit’s is in the works that is about co-operative living, and Wiccit was given the opportunity to write the score for the film. Wiccit hopes this film will raise awareness of co-ops and how they can be beneficial.

“When I moved to Austin, I had no fucking clue what a co-op was, and the rest of the country doesn’t either,” Wiccit said. “But as resources are becoming more limited and things are becoming more expensive it really is reasonable to consider the alternative to the conventional way of thinking your life should be. This documentary is spreading word on co-ops.”

Wiccit is excited about being able to devote his attentions again to his first love.

“I set up this co-op and all of my time and efforts have gone into providing lasting stability, which is great because it is allowing me to focus on what’s really important to me: music.”