Since 1976 a meeting devoted to recent research on cataclysmic variables ("CV workshop") has been held annually somewhere in North America. Many of the meetings have been held - following a custom older than anyone reading this book - in locations with well-known recreational potential (e. g. Santa Cruz, CA; Boulder, CO). We thought hard about this custom while contemplating the possibility of organi zing a meeting in Massachusetts in the middle of winter. Nobody wants their meeting to go down in history as the smallest and dullest, and it ~ surely be the coldest. But on occasion, meeting organizers have defied custom and scheduled meetings for less~than-trendy places, and gotten away with it (Ur*bana, IL and Rochester, NY must be reckoned as examples of this). Encouraged by the spatial and temporal proximity of the American Astronomical Society meeting (Boston, January 9-12), we thought we might get away with it again, and so came to organize a meeting for January 12-15, 1983, in Cambridge, MA. There was another reason for a meeting at this time and place, we loftily proclaimed in early mailings. No one doubts that the CV's are closely related to the low-mass X-ray binaries ("LMXB' s"), in which the accreting star is usually, or perhaps always, more compact than a white dwarf. Many of the general characteristics of LMXB's sound pretty familiar to any student of CV's: orbital periods in the range 0.