03.|. start -02

Seriously, who grows up to say “I want to be a doorman at a famous nightclub and stay up all night.”  It isn’t exactly something you consider when you’re young.  It isn’t like being a fireman.  And frankly, it’s a bit of a deadend job.  It can only really lead to something else in the public eye, so if you are at all an introvert, this can be greatly problematic.

Let’s discuss this ‘introvert’ thing.  Yes, we function perfectly well in the public eye.  For a time.  Then we need to get away to recharge.  Alone somewhere, where there are no people at all.  It’s like charging up your iPhone.  Even with a full charge, sometimes we can be awkward with people.  Sometimes saying the wrong thing, or something that is seemingly insensitive, which is just our nerves at work, as trying to come up with something clever isn’t really natural.  So I became extremely good at foot in the mouth disease.  I lost friends over it.  It’s the old saying that honesty is NOT always the best policy.  In fact, it can get you in a LOT of trouble.

There are certain words in life that we take for granted; words we use every day without the slightest notion as to why.  Like beautiful.  Why do we think one thing is more beautiful than another?  There are plenty of logical responses… balance in the human face, color combinations, and what about beauty in nature?  Why do we look at an empty beach on a blue day and say, “it’s so beautiful”.  What in us makes us discern that this is any more beautiful than something else?  What makes us capable of having taste, and what purpose does it serve us?  Same thing with love.  But. We have been discussing love for millennia.  I can’t think of when anybody ever said that there was a biological reason for discerning beauty.  And why do we all think that different things are?  And what about scale?  Why do we think one thing is better than another based on size?  Again, logical reasons abound.  A smaller artichoke is better because of its taste.  A taller man is better for basketball because he is closer to the hoop.  A wider plank on the floor is better if you want it to look historical.  We measure things to exact size and dimensions, which all makes sense in a world where we are constantly making things fit.  But for some things, it is purely aesthetic.  Why do we do that?

I have always had trouble sleeping at night.  I wander helplessly around the house, or read a book, or check my email.  I used to smoke during those times, now I vape on my tiny Juul.  Much more convenient in bad weather and winter as sometimes I would wander outside, waking myself up even further.  When we lived at 45 Wall Street, there was so much security on the block that I could wander out front in my bathrobe at 3am, and be completely safe.  Never did wear my bathrobe outside however…

I always attributed my insomnia to these questions. And of course, the size of the universe.  I would literally make my head explode.  The only thing that worked was to think about what to wear the next day.  I would always finally fall asleep before I had finished my mental inventory, and usually when I woke up with little of the outfit I had planned remained in my memory.  And partly because I would wake up after 4 hours, fully awake, wondering if I should go outside for that cigarette.  After I started flying, the outfit planning became a moot point.  I lived in a uniform.  And my sleep patterns changed daily, as one day I might report to the airport at 4:30am, and the next day not until 11am, and work until midnight.  So eventually I started to wake up every 3 hours.  Then every 2.  My life span was being shortened each day.  And still, the endless questions would sit on the front of my brain each night, along with the replay of everything I’d ever said to anybody that I regretted. Each opportunity I passed up because of my stubbornness.  That whole story about having integrity in following your dream and knowing exactly who you are and what you want, only works in very, very rare instances.  For most, it is recognizing when something good is staring you in the face, and having the flexibility to know that it is a lot better than the plan you had created sometime in the cradle.  

Anyway, my life story rambles across the page like a frightened rat, seeking a place of shelter with moments of levity.  Life does not occur without that… now back to that universe issue… 

Of course none of this was evident in the 1980s.  I had all the same thoughts, but little time for them when every moment of my life was filled up with… me.  Photoshoots, art openings, parties, TV appearances, interviews, dinners, and everyone beautiful and/or so very famous.  Or infamous.  Back then it was difficult at times to tell which was which.  The winds changed so often.  But I was in my 15 minutes, which at the times seemed to go on for several years, until it didn’t.  My own choice.  I did my time as a Paris Hilton before Paris Hilton was Paris Hilton, and then ran off, desperately afraid of the term, “has been”.  And yet, I had perpetuated it based on that stubborn side of me that was determined to be an exhibiting artist.

I had a gallerist boyfriend at one point who told me that if you were a painter, you would just paint.  As if the sky would open up and bestow me with paint and canvases, food and money.  This did not happen.  And at the time that I was selling the most paintings, I was also one stop from complete poverty.  I had no credit cards or outstanding loans, but likewise, no emergency cash.  I was vulnerable.  It was at that moment that someone I was dating told me that maybe I should become a graphic designer.  Perfect alignment for when the internet was becoming a retail tool and everyone needed website designers.

I stopped painting.  I had lost my vision.  And lost my body of work in 9/11.  All the same time.  So for the first time in my life, I was actually earning. A good salary, with room to grow.  But I was also too old for my experience to make sense in this new world of online life.  The designers I managed at R/GA, the best digital design agency [now, in the world] in a word, hated me.  I got everything wrong.  For me, it was a wonderful year where the world seemed so fresh, the lounge music that was popular at the time was cool, the home and product design was forward thinking and fantastic.  It was the turn of the millennia.  But my happiness was short lived as I slowly discovered that even my personality of smart edges was no longer applicable.  And I was booted out of there so harshly that I wasn’t even allowed back in the building.  This was my first real experience with finding that I was not who I thought I was.  My first experience with realizing that I could be a real asshole.

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02.|.start - 01

I was born into the fantasy of the 1950s family.  A boy, a girl, a cat named Cleopatra.  Or maybe the cat came later… no one ever told me where she came from.  But in the early days we were city dwellers, my mother coming from Forest Hills and my father born in Oyster Bay and raised in Roslyn.  She told me several times that she married my father for his name, not realizing that she meant exactly what you think, and not that it was a pretty name as I thought in my childish mind.  It was in such a muddle of confusion that I was raised, never really knowing what things that were said meant, and never being told anything much about the past.

It was only my grandmother, Frances Schermerhorn who would entertain me with stories about her life when she was my age, so that I could imagine another time and place.  No one else would indulge my endless questions.  

I have always been fascinated by people’s stories, and the more detail the better.  However, very few are any good at telling them.  Frances was.  She would tell me about her days on the farm, what it was like for her and all her sisters to pile into a cart of hay pulled by a horse to go into town for a day or to Sunday church.  Of picking flowers in vast fields and strawberries for desserts.  Whenever we were visiting for the holidays, there would be homemade pies and a cake, and vegetables prepared so wonderfully that I would inhale them for dinner.  In the basement of their home, there would be shelves of jams and chutneys, and anything you could pickle.  Amongst them always were the crab apples she picked from her trees out back in the yard.  And down the hill from the house was a second lot of land that my grandfather had purchased for her to cultivate.  It was filled with rose bushes that my grandfather had planted for their anniversary one year.  Her years on the farm were evident in her beautiful gardens, all growing wild by the time I was alive, as my grandmother had gotten ill and spent most of her time in bed, or reclining on the red living room couch for most family events, Lawrence Welk and the King Family Singers holiday specials.

I would sit with her all day to watch her soap operas.  When I grew bored with television, there were always several Readers’ Digest in the bathroom to peruse, or the Sears Catalog which I would study in great depth when it was time to pick out our Christmas Gifts.

My first pair of black suede boots were from that Sears Catalog.  I felt very adult in them, and as close to the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as I could possibly get.

There was a time around 1965 when for no reason that I could fathom, we actually moved to Dallas Texas.  I looked forward to the change, as change always meant that I could reinvent myself.  Even at the age of 5.  However, it meant leaving 1st grade in New York, and my role as the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, which I willed to my best friend Kathy.  We made our good byes, and oddly, my first lessons in life really didn’t begin until we moved there.

Dallas was a wounded soul in the 60s.  President Kennedy had been shot there, followed by the Civil Rights riots, and of course a massive amount of it’s citizens had gone off to fight in Vietnam, and not by choice.  It seemed to be both broken and growing simultaneously, tall and short, rich and poor, truth is, I didn’t understand it at all.  But the street we lived on was filled with kids, all my own age, and the homes were all completely different as if they had been built as tiny Hollywood stage sets, each one designed by theme.  One friend up the block was named Michael, a freckle faced skinny kid who had an infectious laugh and didn’t mind playing with us girls.  He was particularly fond of my Creepy Crawlers set where we spent hours making rubber spiders with something called Plastigoop.  One day we were playing on his front lawn when a car drove up and stopped in front of his house.  He froze cold and stared at the car, deaf as I questioned what this intrusion to our game was.  As the car door opened and a man in a freshly pressed uniform got out, and Michael bolted to the car with outstretched arms as his father lifted him up into the air, holding him as close as he possibly could.  I stared, jaw dropped at this spectacle of surprise as they walked into the house, Michael’s feet barely touching the ground.  I stood invisible for several minutes.  Yes, of course this was his father home from the war.  I bounced a ball on the sidewalk, staying in place for quite a while before meandering home, making scooping shapes across the pavement with a soft branch until I arrived.  For some reason it was both defined and confusing.  I had stood there invisible and forgotten, but for such a very good reason.  I think I was envious.  Envious of the moment, the affection; the great hug, and the freedom to show such affection without embarrassment.  For some reason, too much affection at home was, embarrassing.  Or did I remember this wrongly?  Was it I that admonished affection instead?  Either way, there seemed very little of it in comparison to my friend’s life up the block, but I also didn’t court it.  If you aren’t raised with it, how would you know whether it was good or bad?  By what barometer can anybody judge the things you weren’t taught to understand?

I digress.  Again.

A year or two later when we were back in New York, my family had moved to Riverside Drive, and then up to Rye for the rest of my school years.  It was while living there that Robert Kennedy was shot, we landed on the moon, and the principal of our school brought his son into every class one day to introduce him to his students.  He was handsome in his dress uniform, and the two hooks, one for each hand, that peeked out from his sleeves.

This was a time when reality was not hidden away, only to be seen by adults.  We weren’t lied to, or treated like children.  We were given the chance to understand things at an early age, so that there was time to absorb and learn from it. 

Earliest memories.  Blue gray.  I was sitting in a car seat, surrounded by blue vinyl.  Car interior or car seat, who knows.  My parents must have been just outside the car, as I was inside alone.  Out the window I saw a row of apartment buildings, brick, and a courtyard with a large boulder in it.  It must have been cold out, as I think I was wearing a ski jacket.  A very tiny one, as I could not have been more than 2 or 3.

2nd earliest memory.  Out in the backyard, a babbling brook.  I liked to watch it at night, and listen to all the sounds it made.  I could hear it from my crib inside.  Even then I was an insomniac.  And being so, I had figured out how to get out of my crib.  I would climb down and walk around the house, careful not to wake anyone up.  One night I went to the bathroom to get a glass of water.  I stood in front of the sink.  It was too tall for me.  I went back to bed.

3rd earliest memory.  I was a little older.  4 or 5.  We had moved out of NYC and into a new house on Dearborn Avenue in Rye.  It was Christmas morning at about 4am.  Of course, I was wide awake.  I had asked Santa for a dollhouse every year.  My bedroom was off a hallway that looked down over the cathedral ceiling living room, where stood the Christmas tree.  I sat down on the floor with my legs stuck under the railings and over the side and held on to the railing as I creeped my head out into the room.  There under the tree was a tiny little suburban house, just big enough for a family of tiny dolls and all their furnishings.  I stayed there staring in wonder until I could hear my parents stirring and slipped back into my room and under the covers of my bed so they would never know that I had seen this treasure already in the light of the moon.

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01.|. 1978.01

A Hasidic man in long grey beard and longer prayer beads, was hunched over a notebook of numbers in long penciled columns.  It was a late day flight to JFK from Chicago, a flight which is dark with sleeping passengers in various stages of rest and restlessness, none with the overhead light on but this one man so intent on completing a task at hand.  Without any knowledge to what this work was, I identified far more with him and his mission than I did with the others on the plane.  He was completely absorbed in his world in the particular way that obsesses those who have an understanding of the perfect abstraction of tiny forms.  Of language.  Of pattern.

I’ve started to write.  Like so many from my NYC tribe, we all have stories to tell, some chronological, some of a single moment intensely memorable, others of a relationship unknown to the general public.  Mine… mine does not want to behave.  It does not want to run in a single line, or focus.  The writing is it’s own being, and I am clearly just a pair of hands to put it down in words.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Syracuse, NY.  It’s cold outside, and I have hours of silence ahead of me.  I have an esophageal anomaly that causes me to be unable to swallow anything that is thicker than water without terrible heartburn or choking.  It’s quite simply, too small.  So everything I eat causes me pain.  I’ve always had insomnia, but now I can only sleep for 1-2 hours at a time, and that is with the highest dosage of melatonin and 2 over the counter sleeping pills.  Sometimes, I luck out.  Sometimes I will sleep for up to 6 hours, but only when I’ve gone through 2 or 3 hour long sleep cycles.  So all that time lost in the wee hours and between eating is spent thinking.  Thinking.  Thinking.  My brain is writing the story.  But it is like my broken sleep, my broken eating.  It only comes in chunks and spurts, unconnected, broken English.

So how do you write down a life in starts and stops?  

By starting.  Stopping.  And starting again.  Possibly the closest pattern to actual life.  There is no perfect continuum.  

In 1978, I was in my second year at SVA in NYC.  I would spend hours alone in the school library, writing in thinly lined white notebooks, utilizing every pore of the paper so that no space was spared.  I copied the words of artists before me… contemporary ones mostly so I could commit them to memory.  It was a time when I was the Hasidic man in his long grey beard, absorbed in an understanding of the perfect abstraction of tiny forms.  Of language.  Of pattern.

I desired no friends outside the few I trusted, I sought no attention for myself, as I had never received any.  I had no concept of being pretty, and certainly not of being desired, as that had always had bad results.  I was only interested in being as smart as I could be, long before I was smart at all.  I had been given no examples of exactly who that person would be.  Or who I might become.  

The other part of me wanted terribly to be admired.  But there was nothing about me that was particularly memorable or special.  I had been raised by someone who was sure that she and her entire family were all incredibly special and gifted people, and yet none of them had ever done anything that was even slightly memorable or unique.  

But to me, having no idea of the road you were taking was akin to death, so I forged ahead with the idea that I might take the same route as Helen Frankenthaler.  She seemed to be a perfectly suited example of an artist who also curated other artists; someone suited to the task of seeing and understanding, without necessarily being the one viewed.  But I am way ahead of myself… I should give you a little context first.

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TUMBLEWEED

[Introduction to a story in process] 

It was in those dark days, that the bright light ascendant came in the form of the young, the creative, and the disenfranchised.  

From 1975-1981, the bright pretty things came to the city on buses, planes, cars, trains, and some on bicycles.  Some came with cash, and some with nothing more than warnings from their families of the rapists, the garbage strikes, and the pickpockets.  I believe this is where the warnings from mothers about being sold into slavery came from.  But they came and settled in the lower Manhattan environs of Soho, Tribeca, the East and West Villages.  Some went to the Upper West Side, and some to Chelsea, but come they arrived in such numbers that certain blocks of the city seemed freakishly overpopulated with the fresh faces of hope.  They moved into former tenements, storefronts and empty commercial lofts where 4 or more would share the space and the one barely functional bathroom, if it had one at all.  They built their worlds, did their art, and all met each other on the stoops of their buildings, the fleetingly rented spaces for  galleries, and the nightclubs.  These were our frat houses, our social clubs, our living rooms.

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MY UNEXPECTED HOUSE GUEST

Or, what to do when you have Covid, again, but this time it kicks your ass and stays for way too long.

It was January 2, 2020 the first time Covid made it's presence known.  Of course we didn't know what it was then, and I was virtually asymptomatic of all the supposed symptoms, so I never gave it a name.  In July of 2020 when I was hospitalized in Atlanta GA for food poisoning, they asked me if I had had it.  They told me that my lung xray showed that both lungs were covered in a white lace pattern that was particular to Covid.  Alas, it finally had a name [that weird January illness] even though it had been far too long for me to test positive for either the virus, or the antibodies.  So even though I lost my taste and a couple of other things I had hardly paid any attention to, the fact that I had never had a classic case of it meant that in my mind, it was history.

So when I tested positive on April 23rd with full blown symptoms, it seemed almost impossible given my "history", not to mention the pin cushion my arm had become with each new vaccination and booster shot.

It's now been 2 weeks.  After 5 days my temperature had gone up to 103 degrees, and then dropped again without 24 hours.  I thought I was out of the woods.  I had caught up on "Gentleman Jack", watched the final episodes of "Ozark", caught up on "Outlander" and watched several other streaming series from beginning to end.  It made sense.  It hurt my eyes too much to read, and standing up for longer than necessary showed me just how screwball my bedroom looked when I was too dizzy to remain upright.  Eventually the entertainment ran out, and my head ceased to feel like a concrete block perched on a toothpick.  So just as I thought I might have enough strength to go out for a short walk around the block, I was advised that it was time to go to the hospital to check on my heavy lungs to see if there was a blood clot.  Oh fun.

I'm back in bed again.  But this time, I'm back to my favorite form of entertainment, YouTube University.  I have so far followed a hiker through the Scottish mountains to Ullapool, watched several shows on how to plant an apple orchard, watched a young woman in southeast asia restore an entire house left to her by her grandfather - doing all the building herself, and two men build an A frame house in the woods while shooting footage of the various wildlife that hovered around during the build, written notes on growing potage gardens, saved videos on how to make fabric dyes from fruit and vegetables from your garden, dying wool from sheep and how to spin it into yarn... are you sensing a pattern here?

When I was in my early teens, I had a dream of building myself a house in the woods using all indigenous materials, right down to throwing pots and dishware from clay found in the local streams, looming fabric from locally grown fibers, and of course, growing all my own food.  I was one part hippy, one part survivalist, but unaware that I was either.  Within nanoseconds of graduating from high school, I found myself back in NYC, living in the east village and going to School of Visual Arts at the exact moment punk ruled the lower east side, soho lofts were filled with very young artists, and the city became the island of misfit toys.  Myself included.  All dreams of building homes from locally felled trees went by the wayside in lieu of homemade outfits from Canal Plastics, and staying out all night.

So here I am, in my Covid haze, reminded of the full circle that life creates and how desperately I want out.  I wonder if sitting here day after day trying to find any energy I can has left my brain to simmer on the things I want most and least have, and if so, is this something we are all doing?  Is it Covid or is it the state of change that Covid has created?  

Or is it just getting older.  

A N D Y W A R H O L

 I finished watching the Andy Warhol Diaries the other day, and then started to notice a lot of interesting questions from younger people, or those who weren't there. So I am going to try to describe it here [to the best of my ability].

Back then, keep in mind there were a LOT of young people in lower Manhattan. And everyone pretty much knew of everyone else at the very least. Within the larger scene, there were smaller circles, that all crossed over with other ones. Think of high school, but without the bullying. And everyone did something. In fact, everyone did many things. Musicians were also painters, and painters were writers, and writers were DJs, and so on. You were always known more publicly for whatever was your major activity, but amongst friends, there were always a myriad of other things you did. And opportunities were plentiful, so just showing up at a party one night and running into a friend, might lead to writing an article, or DJing at a club for a special night, or being in a music video. You get the idea. If you were broke, all you had to do was show up, and chances are somebody needed you to do something that would pay the next month's rent.

OK, the famous. Andy is always the best example. Everyone met Andy Warhol. Some people were acquainted, some had friendships, but everyone had a story. This was the same for so many of the rich and famous who spent their time in the downtown clubs as that was the height of cool back then. You went for the energy, for the scene, to be seen there...to experience the unique, the new. [This was before being "unique" became a buzz term for simply being "trendy". We loathed the word "trendy", because downtown was about invention, not following the latest.] So the rich and famous came out to play, and we were all chuffed to show them who we were.

It was also a numbers game. There were so many of us, and everyone was connected to everyone else, who were ultimately connected to somebody who could give you a leg up in your chosen art. Therefore the number of our circles who became famous was a large amount of people. Many of whom know each other, and many of whom are still friends with many of us, who might have already had our 15 minutes years earlier.

So for those of you who are too young to know, or were not part of the scene, I hope this makes some sense. It made sense to us, a long time agol

g r o w n

[I wrote this a long time ago... not sure when.  But found it in my drafts folder and thought it was an interesting take on how we become who we are - an odd opinion, so I wonder what I was thinking about at the time.]

By the age of 9, I was a scientist, an engineer, a naturalist, a dancer, a woodworker, a painter, an astronomer, a gardener, a biologist, a writer and a singer.  I began as all children do, with a myriad of interests diverse, curiosities varied.  But as we grow we are asked, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Our parents, having also given no choice but to pick something at an early age, were given to certain occupations according to their skills, and the interests of their own parents.  Guided by familiarity, and family connections where they exist.  So the interests and curiosities are focused into funnels by which we all study, directed in a straight line toward a goal.  A goal that will earn us a living, point us in a direction of success, give us a place in the world.

Some of us as hard as we try, find that no matter how focused we try to be, remain a scientist, an engineer, a naturalist, a dancer.  How irresponsible of us in a world that wants to categorize you so they know where you belong in the order of things.  So the diversity we once held so close, becomes a hobby, or completely invisible.