CAPULETS AND MONTAGUES

I was engaged at 16.

A child madly in love, and so was my Romeo.  His smile broke through the thickest of storm clouds and his eyes sparkled diamonds of happiness.  We were in love at first sight, over the front counter at the Yacht Club where the Montagues held court.  But I was a Capulet.

The Montagues did not want us together, for reasons I did not fully understand at the time. I assumed it had something to do with being a Capulet, which was a very troubled family.  They succeeded in luring him away with a long hiatus in Europe, at exactly the time that I had moved to NYC, to my tiny apartment on East 5th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.  I would awake each day to see the drag queen across the street in a long pink chiffon robe, having her morning coffee and cigarette.  He would awake in Corfu.  I was changing, and think my inability to speak up for myself was part of the sacrifice I made to become an artist in NYC.  He never did understand my changes, even though they were mainly superficial ones.  Pink hair does not a stranger make.

So the trip to Europe was the expected straw.  There was never an official break up... a returning of a ring, or a broken promise.  He just slipped away.

One day I realized he was no longer there and felt that I had died.

I recently spoke with a member of the Montegues who told me that our demise was part of a long and drawn out plan on the part of his parents.  It had been plotted, and carried out, with the unspoken threat of disinheritance.  

I was engaged at 16... and by 18 was without Montegues, or Capulets for that matter.

Film still from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. 

CLAUDIA

It was Claudia's birthday a couple of days ago.

I'm not exactly sure when we met, but my first recollection was in the 1980s, when Marcus Leatherdale was shooting me for his "Hidden Identities" page in Details magazine.  I knew his roommate was Claudia - she was well known amongst our friends - but we had never met.  

At some point after the shoot, from a back bedroom, Claudia emerged.  Raven hair, in a black silk robe, cigarette in hand, not really looking toward the studio, but not looking away either.  Just a magnificent ghost in a doorway down the hall.

Years later we became friends.  She roomed with my friend Christina in an east 14th street apartment.  I remember visiting one day and her boyfriend at the time was practicing doing tattoos on an orange.  She and Christina vacated that apartment some time afterwards when there had been a fire in the building and everything smelled of smoke.  Christina returned a leather coat to me that I had leant her - the smell of burning wood never left it.  Eventually it went off to the Salvation Army for someone else to give it a try.  

One day we all lost Claudia to the ether.  For many years she was MIA - Marcus moved to India, but he would visit NYC from time to time and we would always inquire of each other if there was any news of Claudia.  One day I saw her on the subway.  She didn't recognize me.  She didn't see me.  She didn't see anyone.  My heart broke.

Years passed.

One evening I went to one of Marcus' openings at a gallery in Chelsea.  And there she was.  All I could see was my friend, so I ran to her and her arms opened up like a heart.  We held each other for a long time.  Claudia was back.  Over the next few years, she got herself clean, got a job, got a home, got into college to finish her degree in creative writing, graduated from a masters program, married our dear friend Amos, and today is in Paris for her birthday.  

It leaves me speechless at times.  Until she calls me for coffee.  And then we never have enough time for all the talk collected up between visits.  Now when I miss my friend Claudia, it isn't because she is missing - - it's because she is busy living.

WITH SHORT CONCERN AND LONG ON QUESTIONS

This is my third or fourth blog, as I'm quick to abandon them and then regret the loss of something well written in my memory.  But then with short concern I imagine that it only felt well written after a hot cocoa with cointreau.

So with sober laptop and more sober recollections, I have managed to surface a few thoughts worth typing out... the unfortunate thing for you lot, is that I may well abandon this one too.  Crossing fingers and streets to hope I might stick around for a while... I might finally be old enough to have the patience of time.

FOLDED UP NOTE FROM A LOST POCKET

 

It was just a folded up note, left in the pocket of an untouched Union soldier's jacket, left in a trunk in an attic and forgotten.  A disintegrating piece of paper that said my great great uncle was in the company of these men, sent to fight a great war that might never have happened if time hadn't caught up to new ideas of how democracy should work.

Lives are sometimes sacrificed for new ideas. This is history... 

My family came here in the early days, not so much for the religious freedom but for the opportunity to live on their own terms and take advantage of the freedoms available to become successful merchants and leaders of men.  It might have been vanity that drove them - or greed and selfishness - but nevertheless it is the desire to go over the hill and create something entirely new.

So here is a list of men from many walks of life and backgrounds, all whom signed up for the chance to fight and find the strength and bravery in them that only a war can provide.  

Why today do we discount all that this list once stood for?  I could have left it in the pocket of the jacket long lost to a corner, but I didn't.  I folded it gingerly and put it back together as carefully as possible not to disturb a molecule of the paper, so that I could read it, touch it, and remember.

HELEN AND CHARLES

I've been thinking a lot about Helen and Charles lately.

She was the psychiatrist who lived next door and spent her weekends in Connecticut in a family home that had been there forever.  The older aunt who hadn't had children and who had divorced her husband decades earlier.  She would speak of her lovers with a quiet Kate Hepburn voice, softened by her light golden brown hair and the blush of a youngster.  She would spend hours in Central Park listening to a musician who always performed in the same place. I believe that though there were generations between them, that she flirted with him in a way that only an aging woman can get away with. She loved music and would play the classics in her apartment but never loud enough for us to hear. She worried about it constantly.  We told her that loud would be fine if she played Chopin or Beethoven's seventh.

She was a Mayflower baby and descended from the MacLeod clan.  We had plenty to talk about.

Charles was publisher of jewish books whose office was down the hall from our KolDesign HQ.  He would visit often, usually with a slightly off color joke, sometimes way too off color. He would sit in the office and tell us stories about his life, and just as Helen would do, he would flirt with me in that way an aging man could without repercussion.  He once brought by a photo of his father as a young man.  We always thought he had to have been quite the looker as a young man, but this photo of his father in his uniform from the Great War was astonishing.  Charles was a chip off the old block.  He wanted me to design some of his book covers, but time caught up too quickly, and soon he was gone.  We thought he must have missed his grown children to spend so much time visiting us.  It was confirmed when his son came by to visit several weeks later.  He knew who we were.

Helen and Charles were both my friends.  Both died of cancer in their 70s, and they never knew each other.

In my mind, they are far away having a conversation slightly off color and laughing about it.  I can still see Helen blush.

GEO-LOCATION

 

I take a lot of pictures.

My days in front of a camera were numbered.  Now I carry it with me, an iPhone at the very least, and record all that inspires me, excites me, makes me want to remember.  Photos are my emotional geo-locator.  I can see where I've been - where I'm going - who you are - who I am.  It's an extension of my eyes.

My friend Susan always said I was blind as a bat.

There were few cameras around when I was growing up.  Or rather, not much film.  My camera collection is large.  The first Polaroid land camera... several SLR film and digital cameras... a 1938 Leica... a bunch of brownie cameras pre-1964... various Holgas and instant cameras from the 70s... my trusty Nikons D90 and D7000... a pinhole camera which my friend John gave me for my birthday in the mid 2000s.  They attach themselves to me like lint.  I let them.

I used to drive my husband crazy until he picked up a camera to carry the torch.  We sometimes plan trips just to see things we want to remember.  Too many to post.  I'm a terra-byte abuser.

I have a lot of friends from over the years.  I barely see them these days.   Might be time to start shooting portraits.

[Not a portrait.  But it's Stephen King's house in Maine.  Maybe a portrait...]