Susan Sorrentino

Susan Sorrentino of Little Compton, R.I. passed away in the gentle embrace of her beloved family on 4 January 2019.  Susie was born in Providence, R.I. the eldest daughter of Hope A. and Stanley L. Sorrentino.  She enjoyed an enchanted childhood in rural Cumberland R.I. where she made the first of her lifelong friends and then moved with her family to Providence for her high school years.  Susie was a Florence Wheeler Scholar graduate of the Lincoln School in Providence, where she sang for four years as a member of the very select choral group, the Lambrequins, with whom she competed with great success at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Wales in 1969.  Susie was a graduate of McGill University.  

Susie learned from her mother at an early age to sew and knit and thus was born her passion for fabric and clothing which animated her life.  She traveled widely in Europe to develop a collection of unique and beautiful antique fabrics for her company Somethingsthirties through which she worked with textile designers in many of the major fashion houses in New York.  Susie’s home at Schoolhouse #4 in Little Compton was elegantly appointed with a stunning interplay of textiles and her gardens bloomed with her exquisite sensitivity to color and texture.

Above all else, Susie loved the special beauty of Sakonnet and especially Tappen’s Beach onto whose warm and gentle sands she first tiptoed to the foaming edge of curling waves as a very young girl. Her life was ever after governed by the tug of the moon on Tappen’s waters, the late afternoon shimmer of sun on the Sakonnet Light, the seasonal pleasures of the first green in her garden, native corn and pumpkin ice cream and unceasingly, the nurture of her many friendships and the lives she enriched with her caress and easy smile. 

Susie leaves her husband Dr. John A. Lewis of Little Compton and her beloved step-sons Micah Payson-Lewis and Daniel Payson-Lewis of New York and Los Angeles, her sisters Pamela A. Sorrentino of New Portland, Maine, and Polly J. Sorrentino Cardea and her husband Thomas of Rehoboth, Mass. and her brothers Vincent Sorrentino II and his wife Liza, of Cornville, Maine and Peter A. Sorrentino of East Providence R.I.   Susie leaves four nieces and nephews.

Funeral arrangements are private. Memorial gifts in Susie’s name can be made to the Brownell Library in Little Compton, R.I.  Arrangements with Bellows Funeral Chapel, 160 River Road, Lincoln.

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