The Shopkeeper Whose Sign Was 'Open'

Roger Limoges, another Saturday-Sunday clerk, recalled that after he was mugged a few weeks ago in broad daylight, a stranger asked if he could help. " 'Yes,' I said, 'go get the little Thai woman across the street.' Out she comes with her orange parasol, in her Thai high style."

Jeffrey Johnson, artistic director of Ganymede Arts, which focuses on the GLBT experience, is in her debt on two fronts. She hired him when he was between gigs and she gave generously to his company.

"She was really the first person to come on board to say I believe in you guys, I have the means to really help you and I'll open my arms to you," Johnson said. "We became extremely close and she ended up becoming our board president. Every move she made she opened a door for us."

She was, says Johnson, something of a frustrated artist. "She wanted to be an artist when she was a little girl," he says. "Her grandmother was an artist. But her parents wouldn't let her. That is what kind of inspired her to enjoy art."

On Wednesday night, a stream of customers and friends came to pay their respects to Jonathan Chudnoff and their son, Nissim, 25. A computer science major, he is a senior at New Mexico Tech who graduates next spring.

Oh the irony of a notoriously low-tech woman spawning a computer whiz son.

At Go Mama Go!, there are no inventory spreadsheets, no cash register, no computer. Receipts are handwritten. Paper money goes into an old tackle box, coins into metal bowls.

"She would never do a computer or BlackBerry. Just having a fax machine was a high technological advance," her husband said.

Between phone calls and muted chats with visitors, he recapped her life. Born into a wealthy Bangkok family, educated at the best schools, she was 17 when she left for the States in the 1960s.

She earned an undergraduate degree in Renaissance English literature from the University of Washington and a master's in journalism and political science from the University of Wisconsin. The couple married in 1974, and ultimately settled in Silver Spring.

By the time she was running Go Mama Go! (the family mantra that propelled her to open the shop), she worked such long hours that she rented the flat above Home Rule and slept there rather than drive to Maryland. (Later she moved to another nearby apartment.) And her husband, a real estate lawyer, came down on weekends to work with her.

Although Noi's father left her a good deal of property when he died, all she wanted was a blue and white Ming dynasty bowl and lid that belonged to her artist grandmother. It is where her ashes will rest after her cremation today.

On 14th Street, amid the grief-stricken exchanges of her friends and notices about the celebration of her life planned for the Source Theatre tomorrow, a condolence book rested on the counter of Go Mama Go!

Limoges penned the first entry:

" 'Hi, Dear' will never sound the same."