Polly Frost's Interview with Silvia Sanza
POLLY FROST: I'm a huge fan of Silvia Sanza's book "Alex Wants to Call It Love." It's funny, smart, perceptive, entertaining, daring -- just like Silvia. (Her book "Twice Real" is available here.)
I met Silvia a couple of years ago at a poetry reading. I immediately liked her and have been struck since at how generous she is towards other writers. It's all too unusual to meet artists or writers who are, God knows!
But Silvia is that rarity: a genuine bohemian, someone who was born to live the arts life, not someone who aspires to it, or who wants to use it just for a career. So it was a pleasure to read "Alex Wants to Call It Love" and love it.
Well, how could I not love a book that's deliciously raunchy and beautifully written? Here's a passage from "Alex Wants to Call It Love":
“Sex is important only when it's great. otherwise, it's an inconvenience. If it doesn't make you high as a mountain, why bother? if it's too tentative, who needs it? And with Alex sex had become something to do, like eating junk food. It passed the time, wiped up the excess passion, and hid the twisting and groaning emotions, it was as easy as shaking hands and that made it too easy. She was after untamed pounding.”
Seeing potential in her acting as well as her writing, I roped Silvia into performing in "The Fold," the movie I produced and co-wrote with my husband, Ray Sawhill, and the director Matt Lambert. We all loved her acting and what a good sport she was on a long day of shooting in February. (See Silvia in the trailer from “The Fold” at http://thefold.tv.)
INTERVIEW
POLLY: As a fan of your book Alex Wants to Call It Love, I'd like to ask if your new book is similar in tone?
SILVIA: Tone. I have to think about that word for a minute. Tone can mean quality, attitude, atmosphere, ambiance, mood. My new book is much the same in that it is contemporary New York characters but my characters, like me, are older -- their needs are singular, their experience speckled. Still struggling but with valiant strides.
POLLY: What's your writing process?
SILVIA: I am always writing bits and pieces. I sit on stoops, in parks, on curbs and listen to the sounds of the city. I sketch words. Scraps of paper are tossed into file folders and plucked out for inspiration. Characters often write themselves. The shirred yellow empire dress I see in a Soho window becomes the dress that catches the eye of a man walking down Prince Street looking for a lover. I write a first draft longhand on yellow legal pads with #2 pencils; a second draft goes on the computer. I like to write sitting down on the rug in my tiny living room. If I get distracted for too long a time by my own four walls, I escape to the Jefferson Market Library and sit at one of the round tables upstairs where I can defer the temptation to check my e-mail twenty times a day.
POLLY: How much does your own experience/circle of friends enter into your work?
SILVIA: Very much except I inject it all with a exceedingly healthy dose of fiction. I save everything: letters, postcards, notes, diaries from when I was 12 years old, shopping lists people leave in their baskets at D’Agostino’s. At family thanksgiving dinners I listen hard so I can write about the whole thing when I get home. I listen for the things that remain unsaid. I listen for what’s going on beneath the surface. I’ve always done that. Then I mix the characters up: one from Column A, one from Column B, two from Column C. A man from one of those family dinners gets matched with a woman (or man) from a completely different social occasion. Characters meld and blend and set and bond in that marvelous world of fiction. I let them tell me what comes next.
POLLY: What role does eroticism/sex play in your writing?
SILVIA: It would be impossible not to have sex in my writing. Sex is an emotion, painfully addictive, powerfully soothing, wildly absurd, blessedly hilarious and validly and vividly alive in everyone, even those who choose to deny it. I myself am driven by a bundle of sexual tension but sometimes pull back for my own safety. I use that part of me in my writing, too -- that calculated disentanglement allows me to create a new dimension of character . . . a new way to measure.
POLLY: What's the title of your new book?
SILVIA: My new novel is called Negative Space. It is an analogy between the bleak aftermath of 9/11 and the death of my husband who I adored. He was an environmental sculptor and often talked about “negative space”. I was bulldozed by the harsh loneliness of negative space after his death, then came the sweeping far-reaching negative space of 9/11 and the collapse of the twin towers, and then a nose-dive into the negative space of the internet in a grisly chase for love. Let’s say it starts out based on a true story and goes from there.
I met Silvia a couple of years ago at a poetry reading. I immediately liked her and have been struck since at how generous she is towards other writers. It's all too unusual to meet artists or writers who are, God knows!
But Silvia is that rarity: a genuine bohemian, someone who was born to live the arts life, not someone who aspires to it, or who wants to use it just for a career. So it was a pleasure to read "Alex Wants to Call It Love" and love it.
Well, how could I not love a book that's deliciously raunchy and beautifully written? Here's a passage from "Alex Wants to Call It Love":
“Sex is important only when it's great. otherwise, it's an inconvenience. If it doesn't make you high as a mountain, why bother? if it's too tentative, who needs it? And with Alex sex had become something to do, like eating junk food. It passed the time, wiped up the excess passion, and hid the twisting and groaning emotions, it was as easy as shaking hands and that made it too easy. She was after untamed pounding.”
Seeing potential in her acting as well as her writing, I roped Silvia into performing in "The Fold," the movie I produced and co-wrote with my husband, Ray Sawhill, and the director Matt Lambert. We all loved her acting and what a good sport she was on a long day of shooting in February. (See Silvia in the trailer from “The Fold” at http://thefold.tv.)
INTERVIEW
POLLY: As a fan of your book Alex Wants to Call It Love, I'd like to ask if your new book is similar in tone?
SILVIA: Tone. I have to think about that word for a minute. Tone can mean quality, attitude, atmosphere, ambiance, mood. My new book is much the same in that it is contemporary New York characters but my characters, like me, are older -- their needs are singular, their experience speckled. Still struggling but with valiant strides.
POLLY: What's your writing process?
SILVIA: I am always writing bits and pieces. I sit on stoops, in parks, on curbs and listen to the sounds of the city. I sketch words. Scraps of paper are tossed into file folders and plucked out for inspiration. Characters often write themselves. The shirred yellow empire dress I see in a Soho window becomes the dress that catches the eye of a man walking down Prince Street looking for a lover. I write a first draft longhand on yellow legal pads with #2 pencils; a second draft goes on the computer. I like to write sitting down on the rug in my tiny living room. If I get distracted for too long a time by my own four walls, I escape to the Jefferson Market Library and sit at one of the round tables upstairs where I can defer the temptation to check my e-mail twenty times a day.
POLLY: How much does your own experience/circle of friends enter into your work?
SILVIA: Very much except I inject it all with a exceedingly healthy dose of fiction. I save everything: letters, postcards, notes, diaries from when I was 12 years old, shopping lists people leave in their baskets at D’Agostino’s. At family thanksgiving dinners I listen hard so I can write about the whole thing when I get home. I listen for the things that remain unsaid. I listen for what’s going on beneath the surface. I’ve always done that. Then I mix the characters up: one from Column A, one from Column B, two from Column C. A man from one of those family dinners gets matched with a woman (or man) from a completely different social occasion. Characters meld and blend and set and bond in that marvelous world of fiction. I let them tell me what comes next.
POLLY: What role does eroticism/sex play in your writing?
SILVIA: It would be impossible not to have sex in my writing. Sex is an emotion, painfully addictive, powerfully soothing, wildly absurd, blessedly hilarious and validly and vividly alive in everyone, even those who choose to deny it. I myself am driven by a bundle of sexual tension but sometimes pull back for my own safety. I use that part of me in my writing, too -- that calculated disentanglement allows me to create a new dimension of character . . . a new way to measure.
POLLY: What's the title of your new book?
SILVIA: My new novel is called Negative Space. It is an analogy between the bleak aftermath of 9/11 and the death of my husband who I adored. He was an environmental sculptor and often talked about “negative space”. I was bulldozed by the harsh loneliness of negative space after his death, then came the sweeping far-reaching negative space of 9/11 and the collapse of the twin towers, and then a nose-dive into the negative space of the internet in a grisly chase for love. Let’s say it starts out based on a true story and goes from there.
Silvia's Interview
with Suzannah Troy, Activist
November 9, 2011
The first thing you notice about Suzannah Troy is that she is never without a smile. But in her heart there is a roar, the rumble of someone who demands justice. She talks in capital letters and she talks a mile a minute. I hang on to every word. She scares me with her brilliance and nonstop energy. I have watched and listened to her often during our tireless struggle for a new hospital at the site of St. Vincent’s which closed on April 30, 2010.
Where do you want to be in five years, I ask her? “In a hippie commune,” she giggles, “out in the country.”
I have a hard time picturing Suzannah out in the country. Her grandfather was born on Ludlow Street on the lower east side. Her parents lived in New York City and, in Suzannah’s words, moved “across the border” to New Jersey for her birth. When she was six weeks old her father was awarded a Fulbright in Economics and they moved to England for a year at the end of which they returned to New Jersey. When she was 11 her father was awarded a second Fulbright and the family returned to England for one more year. From the age of 21 to the present she has lived in New York City. Even with those short time-outs in other places, to me she is All New York. She is the beat of New York, the conscience of New York, the patron saint of all that is wrong with New York, and the lover of all that is wonderfully right about New York.
She was born July 15th, a cancer, ruled by the moon. Her dad is 87, a retired economics professor and WW2 veteran, to whom Suzannah is devoted. She is a licensed massage therapist and after 9/11 she did massage on rescue workers, the military, and members of the FDNY and NYPD who spent long days on their feet. She makes some money from Google Ad Sense via her blogs and YouTubes. Suzannah laughs and says “Google pays me and has also censored me.“ A month and a half before Mike Bloomberg’s third term, her YouTube channel of approximately 340 videos was removed for 28 hours. Google later apologized and said it was a technical glitch but Suzannah feels it was done on purpose because Bloomberg’s people knew it was a close election and wanted to silence voices in opposition. Her supporters loudly demanded the return of her YouTube channel. The audience always seems to win because Suzannah is never “off the air” very long.
What kind of art do you do, I ask? “Everything . . . everything is my art. My goal is to make you think and feel. That is my job as an artist.” She paints with words. She coins fabulous phrases like “subzero trickle down” and hails Christine Quinn “Mike Bloomberg’s ‘mini me’”. She calls herself an emotional pyromaniac who burns every bridge. Her blog and YouTube videos are notorious and she has a vast and dedicated following. She’s one of those people who “everybody knows her name.” Her iphone is an essential part of her art. Her focus is corruption. She has many causes, but her fundamental fury is that the people of New York City come last and greed comes first. In her own words, “Our leaders have high priced public relation machines but they are destroying our neighborhoods with greed and stupidity including corrupt real estate deals to mortgage meltdown and Wall Street implosion — common thread greed and stupidity have really hurt this country.”
She paints tough words but she also paints with paint, real paint. Most famous is “Mayor Bloomberg, King of New York, Is Democracy For Sale?”, the portrait she did of Mayor Bloomberg for whom she regretfully admits voting for his first two terms. On election night 2009 she was working on the painting to finish it in concert with the election results and made a YouTube documenting the event. The portrait started out lush and sensual, the paint thick, icing on a cake. She was delighted to watch the media being forced to go “off script” and have to report the truth, finally, that Bloomberg might not win. At that point of course it was too close to call. As the final results trickled in, Suzannah’s painting went the Dorian Grey route — the canvas took on his sins so to speak and the painting answers the question the political poster asks: Democracy is for Sale. Here’s a link to her blog devoted to voting for no third term for Mike Bloomberg. It features the YouTube video about the painting. http://mayorbloombergkingofnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/suzannah-b-troys-bloomberg-no-third.html
She gave the painting to Clayton Patterson, an artist and activist, who gave it a permanent home at his Outlaw Art Museum at 161 Essex Street.
Suzannah’s next project is Christine Quinn’s portrait and political poster with the themeVote for Christine Quinn if you want Mike Bloomberg for a fourth term.
I ask what cause is dearest to her heart and she thinks hard, calls herself an emotional nudist, and says that above all she wants a hospital at the former site of St. Vincent’s. After that, she wants hospitals in Staten Island and Queens, places doomed with losing facilities. She curses what she calls “mega dorms” in New York’s east village: NYU, New York Law, School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, and The New School all have dorms there, an environment that caters to kids – banks, Starbucks, Duane Reade, which Suzannah feels actually hurt the community. No more, please, she says – give us hospitals. A recurring theme on her blog is that Bloomberg has the largest white collar crimes ever in New York City government history.
How did her fiery activism begin, I asked her; what fueled this intensity? It began during Bloomberg’s second term, likening her awakening to coming alive after a coma. In 2005 New York University announced their plans for a 26 story dormitory building on the site of St. Ann’s Church at120 East 12th Street. In 2006 plans were filed and construction began. Only the front façade from 1847 was preserved. Suzannah says that façade is like an albatross around NYU’s neck. She proceeded to take on NYU and the United States Postal Service who owned and illegally sold the air rights over St. Ann’s to NYU. To sell these rights legally, they had to contact the State of New York which they never did. Suzannah says that thanks to iphone she can document her activism and the nuisance and harassment that can come with the territory of being an activist. Her iphone makes her feel safe. It is an amazing tool. She also has lots of legal justice on her side. Suzannah has the greatest admiration for Norman Siegel, the famed civil rights attorney that helped her get her YouTube channel returned to her.
She sits in my dining room, iphone always in her hands, staying ahead of the game. She squirts words like “motherfucker” as she scans the news. Her sources are many and she often passes along information to journalists with investigative reporting backgrounds. She works on the side of morality and has her own beefy set of principles. People say she should be given an award for being a citizen journalist.
She admits she’s not having much fun lately, taking life too seriously. She spent this morning in front of the Rudin sales office for the luxury condos, shouting for passers-by to pay attention to the still raging fight for a new hospital, telling anyone who will listen that Rudin has ignored the community’s need for a full service hospital, paid pennies on the dollar for this prime real estate, and now stands to sell luxury condos which will have a fair market value of more than a billion dollars.
She has big plans, she tells me, for the “second part of her life” that have to do with healing. But she’s keeping them secret for now.
Suzannah’s blog can be found at http://suzannahbtroy.blogspot.com/2011/11/howard-rubenstein-rudins-pr-dont-have.html
Where do you want to be in five years, I ask her? “In a hippie commune,” she giggles, “out in the country.”
I have a hard time picturing Suzannah out in the country. Her grandfather was born on Ludlow Street on the lower east side. Her parents lived in New York City and, in Suzannah’s words, moved “across the border” to New Jersey for her birth. When she was six weeks old her father was awarded a Fulbright in Economics and they moved to England for a year at the end of which they returned to New Jersey. When she was 11 her father was awarded a second Fulbright and the family returned to England for one more year. From the age of 21 to the present she has lived in New York City. Even with those short time-outs in other places, to me she is All New York. She is the beat of New York, the conscience of New York, the patron saint of all that is wrong with New York, and the lover of all that is wonderfully right about New York.
She was born July 15th, a cancer, ruled by the moon. Her dad is 87, a retired economics professor and WW2 veteran, to whom Suzannah is devoted. She is a licensed massage therapist and after 9/11 she did massage on rescue workers, the military, and members of the FDNY and NYPD who spent long days on their feet. She makes some money from Google Ad Sense via her blogs and YouTubes. Suzannah laughs and says “Google pays me and has also censored me.“ A month and a half before Mike Bloomberg’s third term, her YouTube channel of approximately 340 videos was removed for 28 hours. Google later apologized and said it was a technical glitch but Suzannah feels it was done on purpose because Bloomberg’s people knew it was a close election and wanted to silence voices in opposition. Her supporters loudly demanded the return of her YouTube channel. The audience always seems to win because Suzannah is never “off the air” very long.
What kind of art do you do, I ask? “Everything . . . everything is my art. My goal is to make you think and feel. That is my job as an artist.” She paints with words. She coins fabulous phrases like “subzero trickle down” and hails Christine Quinn “Mike Bloomberg’s ‘mini me’”. She calls herself an emotional pyromaniac who burns every bridge. Her blog and YouTube videos are notorious and she has a vast and dedicated following. She’s one of those people who “everybody knows her name.” Her iphone is an essential part of her art. Her focus is corruption. She has many causes, but her fundamental fury is that the people of New York City come last and greed comes first. In her own words, “Our leaders have high priced public relation machines but they are destroying our neighborhoods with greed and stupidity including corrupt real estate deals to mortgage meltdown and Wall Street implosion — common thread greed and stupidity have really hurt this country.”
She paints tough words but she also paints with paint, real paint. Most famous is “Mayor Bloomberg, King of New York, Is Democracy For Sale?”, the portrait she did of Mayor Bloomberg for whom she regretfully admits voting for his first two terms. On election night 2009 she was working on the painting to finish it in concert with the election results and made a YouTube documenting the event. The portrait started out lush and sensual, the paint thick, icing on a cake. She was delighted to watch the media being forced to go “off script” and have to report the truth, finally, that Bloomberg might not win. At that point of course it was too close to call. As the final results trickled in, Suzannah’s painting went the Dorian Grey route — the canvas took on his sins so to speak and the painting answers the question the political poster asks: Democracy is for Sale. Here’s a link to her blog devoted to voting for no third term for Mike Bloomberg. It features the YouTube video about the painting. http://mayorbloombergkingofnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/suzannah-b-troys-bloomberg-no-third.html
She gave the painting to Clayton Patterson, an artist and activist, who gave it a permanent home at his Outlaw Art Museum at 161 Essex Street.
Suzannah’s next project is Christine Quinn’s portrait and political poster with the themeVote for Christine Quinn if you want Mike Bloomberg for a fourth term.
I ask what cause is dearest to her heart and she thinks hard, calls herself an emotional nudist, and says that above all she wants a hospital at the former site of St. Vincent’s. After that, she wants hospitals in Staten Island and Queens, places doomed with losing facilities. She curses what she calls “mega dorms” in New York’s east village: NYU, New York Law, School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, and The New School all have dorms there, an environment that caters to kids – banks, Starbucks, Duane Reade, which Suzannah feels actually hurt the community. No more, please, she says – give us hospitals. A recurring theme on her blog is that Bloomberg has the largest white collar crimes ever in New York City government history.
How did her fiery activism begin, I asked her; what fueled this intensity? It began during Bloomberg’s second term, likening her awakening to coming alive after a coma. In 2005 New York University announced their plans for a 26 story dormitory building on the site of St. Ann’s Church at120 East 12th Street. In 2006 plans were filed and construction began. Only the front façade from 1847 was preserved. Suzannah says that façade is like an albatross around NYU’s neck. She proceeded to take on NYU and the United States Postal Service who owned and illegally sold the air rights over St. Ann’s to NYU. To sell these rights legally, they had to contact the State of New York which they never did. Suzannah says that thanks to iphone she can document her activism and the nuisance and harassment that can come with the territory of being an activist. Her iphone makes her feel safe. It is an amazing tool. She also has lots of legal justice on her side. Suzannah has the greatest admiration for Norman Siegel, the famed civil rights attorney that helped her get her YouTube channel returned to her.
She sits in my dining room, iphone always in her hands, staying ahead of the game. She squirts words like “motherfucker” as she scans the news. Her sources are many and she often passes along information to journalists with investigative reporting backgrounds. She works on the side of morality and has her own beefy set of principles. People say she should be given an award for being a citizen journalist.
She admits she’s not having much fun lately, taking life too seriously. She spent this morning in front of the Rudin sales office for the luxury condos, shouting for passers-by to pay attention to the still raging fight for a new hospital, telling anyone who will listen that Rudin has ignored the community’s need for a full service hospital, paid pennies on the dollar for this prime real estate, and now stands to sell luxury condos which will have a fair market value of more than a billion dollars.
She has big plans, she tells me, for the “second part of her life” that have to do with healing. But she’s keeping them secret for now.
Suzannah’s blog can be found at http://suzannahbtroy.blogspot.com/2011/11/howard-rubenstein-rudins-pr-dont-have.html
Silvia's Interview
with Christine Cody, Photographer
December 13, 2011
When I look at Christine Cody, I think “luminous.” Her skin, her eyes, her face, her manner: resplendent. When I look at her photography, I can’t take my eyes away.
Here I must borrow from the press release for Christine’s New York City solo show:
“The works of Christine Cody speak with an eloquent ambiguity. Her imagery tends to blend fashion with dark fantasy and a flare of 50’s elegance. Confrontational lyricism plays with the viewer – a dialogue that feeds off an interplay of values (literal and figurative). Her approach is like a storyteller, relating myths, secrets, and humor. Cody tends to confront her demons rather than evade them, often resulting in sultry, intimate visualizations. And it is this open course of phobias that we find both admirable and appealing.”
Christine was born and grew up in Los Angeles. She was raised Catholic but remembers having many questions in Catholic school: “why the apple? Why the flood?”; the answer she got – “just because” – disturbed and discouraged her but didn’t stop her probing. Finally she was asked to leave catechism class. She left the states to attend the Kunst Academy in Salzburg and later the University of Stirling in Scotland and received her BFA degree from the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena which she calls “the best art school in the world.”
Her parents were divorced when she was twelve and she was shuttled around to a series of homes, one of which was with a family who let her have cocaine. Her father married three times during her adolescence, marriages that brought with them stepchildren and stepmothers who treated her with indifference. She was told she had to buy her own clothes and baby sit to make money. She has two biological siblings, a brother and a sister, who have never been emotionally available. Her mother, an alcoholic except for the final fifteen years of her life, died of stomach cancer in 1989; Christine cared for her until the end. Her father died in 2000.
She moved from Los Angeles to Portland where her life and her livelihood was photography. She modeled and says she knows how to get what she wants from a model because she’s been on both sides of the camera. She was finally enjoying the perfect life and things couldn’t have been better.
One night she went to a party in Portland and had three glasses of wine. She had driven to the party but wanted to play it safe so she decided to leave her car there and walk the short distance home, only three main streets. It was on Burnside that she was struck by a hit and run driver and knocked over the Burnside Bridge and onto the freeway where three trucks ran over her. They called her father in Los Angeles and she was put into a teaching hospital; they considered her dead. She spent eight months in a coma and a total of one year in the hospital. She remembers laying there in her bed, powerless, unable to do anything but listen to the drone of the breathing machine.
As the healing progressed and she became hopeful about regaining her health, she started thinking about a trip to New York City. In 1995 her cousin Quita, an editor at New York Magazine, sent her to the Robin Rice Gallery in Greenwich Village; the Gallery was so impressed by her portfolio they offered her a solo exhibit. She realized she had to live in New York City and made the move permanent twelve years ago.
She has done commercial work for the advertising firms of Wieden & Kennedy, Lowe, Factory Design, and Sterling/Stepping Design. Her clients include Verve Records, Nike, Eddie Bauer, Starbucks, and Bolle Sunglasses. In addition to having an exhibit of her work tour Japan, her photographs have been exhibited in Los Angeles at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery and in Portland, Oregon, at the SK Josefsburg Studio. Her work has appeared in Communication Arts magazine and Soma. She continues to be represented by the Robin Rice Gallery and the stock photography agency Getty Images; her photographs have sold worldwide and have appeared on book covers, CD’s, and billboards. She considers Greg Gorman one of her early mentors. The world of photography like so much of the creative arts has evolved. Photographers are rarely hired these days because advertisers go right to stock. The most important thing she has learned is that making it in the art world is 90/10: 90 percent business and 10 percent creativity. She doesn’t believe in five year plans and chooses to live day to day.
Her father was a child actor in Mickey Rooney movies and had a role in David Copperfield and she grew up loving black and white movies and playing dress-up. Every photograph Christine takes is partnered to a narrative that she formulates. First she will find a location and then the fable begins to evolve. She gives her work provocative and lyrical titles like “haven’t died a winter yet”, “storm damage”, “shy apologies and polite regrets” and “it was almost you.” Most people in her photographs from her Portland days were chance encounters — a woman who worked in a vintage clothing shop, a young girl she managed to come across. When in New York, her gallery suggested that it was time she started using real models.
Years ago her father offered her thirty thousand dollars toward an apartment; she took only $15,000 and used it to work with graphic designer Jerry Ketel for a promo; she gives me a copy, a beautiful black and white collection of her work. She laments that the world has gone digital and remains firm in her decision to shoot only film. She has two cameras, a 4×5 which she proudly pulls out to show me, snug in its sleek black case, and a 2 ¼” Hasselblad. She loves to get her hands in the chemicals and does all her own printing. “When I hear the lens open and close or I begin to see the print emerge from the tray, that’s when I know who I am; that is when I am complete.” She has wanted to be a photographer since she was twelve years old.
Christine says “What I attempt in my work is an exploration of the numerous characters within myself. Through the vehicle of found people I seek a calmness which I myself lack at this point in time. My photography is a channeling of the pain and heartache that would otherwise be overwhelming for me. The most imperative point of my work is the ability to express complete unbridled passion without having to make any explanations for my emotional intensity.”
When I ask who has made the biggest impact on her life she has a list: “Eartha Kitt, Patsy Cline, Charlie Chaplin, Confucius, Gandhi, Fritz Lang, and Elvis Costello.” And who would you most like to meet? “If it is meant to be, the person I would most like to meet is my life partner.” What do you like best about yourself? “That I don’t feel sorry for myself.” Occasionally, she adds, she does get besieged during a particularly hard-hitting period and then she’s able to just say “f” it.
If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be? “My own home.” Her greatest fear is homelessness, and her stress comes from worrying about what’s coming next – an anxiety visibly rooted in childhood as well as the reality of living in a city where landlords can be ruthless if they don’t want you there. Her favorite ways to spend time are cooking, cleaning, and working out, pursuits that are therapeutic and calm her. She is a Capricorn and a loner, dislikes liars and self-pitying people, but gets along well with others because she is careful with the quality of people she chooses as friends. If she was god, she would stop overpopulation and use energy to better the environment. Breakfast every morning is a smoothie blended from frozen berries, water, and soy protein.
For now she has no muse, no trigger, no one to inspire her, no one to rouse her to enthusiasm. Micheal, her boyfriend of a year and a half, died in September of this year. They met one day when she bought an air conditioner and was hauling it in a shopping cart down 14th Street; he followed her down the street, offered to help her get it home, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Micheal was Polish, 32 years old, a foreman on a construction site. Christine says she always knew he had a strong artistic side because his apartment was colorful and intriguingly put together. They had a rocky relationship and had already broken up once because of his drinking. He would start the morning with a shot of vodka and tell her “A gentleman never drinks before two o’clock but I’m not always a gentleman.” One night he was acting strangely and she knew something was very wrong. She called 911 and when the paramedics got to the apartment, Micheal was out cold on the bed: “he’s just drunk; let him sleep it off.” She, however, was so highly agitated that they handcuffed her and took her to Bellevue Hospital. By the time she got back to the apartment, ten hours later, his condition had worsened. Every time she said she was going to call 911, he kept insisting no. She could see that things were rapidly getting worse and made the call. Four EMT responders came and worked on him in shifts for one hour. They finally declared him dead. “I try to live my life without regret,” she says, “but I wish I had done things differently. The first time I called 911 and they kept insisting he was just drunk I should have told them he had been having heart problems. And the second time I should have called much sooner no matter what he said. The technicians who came didn’t have paddles and maybe being in the hospital would have saved him.”
On her table is a beautiful photo of a sleeping Micheal and her cat, Boogala, who has been with her since she volunteered at the Jewish home 12 years ago. She smiles and says “they loved each other.”
Her buoyancy is astonishing; with the evils and ills of her childhood and the adversity she has suffered much of her life, she is an unstinting caregiver; she works as a nanny and devotes her time to taking care of others. She loves spending time with animals and has volunteered in animal causes. Her first volunteering experience was in a senior center in the tenderloin in San Francisco; then in a Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles; and finally with Alzheimer’s patients in New York City “until Schlomo got a crush on me.”
Is there one thing you feel you absolutely must do every single day? “Express gratitude,” she tells me, “but I don’t manage to do it every day.”
Christine’s work can be found through a search for her name on Getty Images.com; under Past Exhibitions on the Robin Rice website at www.robinricegallery.com; and on her own website at www.christinecody50.com.
Here I must borrow from the press release for Christine’s New York City solo show:
“The works of Christine Cody speak with an eloquent ambiguity. Her imagery tends to blend fashion with dark fantasy and a flare of 50’s elegance. Confrontational lyricism plays with the viewer – a dialogue that feeds off an interplay of values (literal and figurative). Her approach is like a storyteller, relating myths, secrets, and humor. Cody tends to confront her demons rather than evade them, often resulting in sultry, intimate visualizations. And it is this open course of phobias that we find both admirable and appealing.”
Christine was born and grew up in Los Angeles. She was raised Catholic but remembers having many questions in Catholic school: “why the apple? Why the flood?”; the answer she got – “just because” – disturbed and discouraged her but didn’t stop her probing. Finally she was asked to leave catechism class. She left the states to attend the Kunst Academy in Salzburg and later the University of Stirling in Scotland and received her BFA degree from the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena which she calls “the best art school in the world.”
Her parents were divorced when she was twelve and she was shuttled around to a series of homes, one of which was with a family who let her have cocaine. Her father married three times during her adolescence, marriages that brought with them stepchildren and stepmothers who treated her with indifference. She was told she had to buy her own clothes and baby sit to make money. She has two biological siblings, a brother and a sister, who have never been emotionally available. Her mother, an alcoholic except for the final fifteen years of her life, died of stomach cancer in 1989; Christine cared for her until the end. Her father died in 2000.
She moved from Los Angeles to Portland where her life and her livelihood was photography. She modeled and says she knows how to get what she wants from a model because she’s been on both sides of the camera. She was finally enjoying the perfect life and things couldn’t have been better.
One night she went to a party in Portland and had three glasses of wine. She had driven to the party but wanted to play it safe so she decided to leave her car there and walk the short distance home, only three main streets. It was on Burnside that she was struck by a hit and run driver and knocked over the Burnside Bridge and onto the freeway where three trucks ran over her. They called her father in Los Angeles and she was put into a teaching hospital; they considered her dead. She spent eight months in a coma and a total of one year in the hospital. She remembers laying there in her bed, powerless, unable to do anything but listen to the drone of the breathing machine.
As the healing progressed and she became hopeful about regaining her health, she started thinking about a trip to New York City. In 1995 her cousin Quita, an editor at New York Magazine, sent her to the Robin Rice Gallery in Greenwich Village; the Gallery was so impressed by her portfolio they offered her a solo exhibit. She realized she had to live in New York City and made the move permanent twelve years ago.
She has done commercial work for the advertising firms of Wieden & Kennedy, Lowe, Factory Design, and Sterling/Stepping Design. Her clients include Verve Records, Nike, Eddie Bauer, Starbucks, and Bolle Sunglasses. In addition to having an exhibit of her work tour Japan, her photographs have been exhibited in Los Angeles at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery and in Portland, Oregon, at the SK Josefsburg Studio. Her work has appeared in Communication Arts magazine and Soma. She continues to be represented by the Robin Rice Gallery and the stock photography agency Getty Images; her photographs have sold worldwide and have appeared on book covers, CD’s, and billboards. She considers Greg Gorman one of her early mentors. The world of photography like so much of the creative arts has evolved. Photographers are rarely hired these days because advertisers go right to stock. The most important thing she has learned is that making it in the art world is 90/10: 90 percent business and 10 percent creativity. She doesn’t believe in five year plans and chooses to live day to day.
Her father was a child actor in Mickey Rooney movies and had a role in David Copperfield and she grew up loving black and white movies and playing dress-up. Every photograph Christine takes is partnered to a narrative that she formulates. First she will find a location and then the fable begins to evolve. She gives her work provocative and lyrical titles like “haven’t died a winter yet”, “storm damage”, “shy apologies and polite regrets” and “it was almost you.” Most people in her photographs from her Portland days were chance encounters — a woman who worked in a vintage clothing shop, a young girl she managed to come across. When in New York, her gallery suggested that it was time she started using real models.
Years ago her father offered her thirty thousand dollars toward an apartment; she took only $15,000 and used it to work with graphic designer Jerry Ketel for a promo; she gives me a copy, a beautiful black and white collection of her work. She laments that the world has gone digital and remains firm in her decision to shoot only film. She has two cameras, a 4×5 which she proudly pulls out to show me, snug in its sleek black case, and a 2 ¼” Hasselblad. She loves to get her hands in the chemicals and does all her own printing. “When I hear the lens open and close or I begin to see the print emerge from the tray, that’s when I know who I am; that is when I am complete.” She has wanted to be a photographer since she was twelve years old.
Christine says “What I attempt in my work is an exploration of the numerous characters within myself. Through the vehicle of found people I seek a calmness which I myself lack at this point in time. My photography is a channeling of the pain and heartache that would otherwise be overwhelming for me. The most imperative point of my work is the ability to express complete unbridled passion without having to make any explanations for my emotional intensity.”
When I ask who has made the biggest impact on her life she has a list: “Eartha Kitt, Patsy Cline, Charlie Chaplin, Confucius, Gandhi, Fritz Lang, and Elvis Costello.” And who would you most like to meet? “If it is meant to be, the person I would most like to meet is my life partner.” What do you like best about yourself? “That I don’t feel sorry for myself.” Occasionally, she adds, she does get besieged during a particularly hard-hitting period and then she’s able to just say “f” it.
If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be? “My own home.” Her greatest fear is homelessness, and her stress comes from worrying about what’s coming next – an anxiety visibly rooted in childhood as well as the reality of living in a city where landlords can be ruthless if they don’t want you there. Her favorite ways to spend time are cooking, cleaning, and working out, pursuits that are therapeutic and calm her. She is a Capricorn and a loner, dislikes liars and self-pitying people, but gets along well with others because she is careful with the quality of people she chooses as friends. If she was god, she would stop overpopulation and use energy to better the environment. Breakfast every morning is a smoothie blended from frozen berries, water, and soy protein.
For now she has no muse, no trigger, no one to inspire her, no one to rouse her to enthusiasm. Micheal, her boyfriend of a year and a half, died in September of this year. They met one day when she bought an air conditioner and was hauling it in a shopping cart down 14th Street; he followed her down the street, offered to help her get it home, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Micheal was Polish, 32 years old, a foreman on a construction site. Christine says she always knew he had a strong artistic side because his apartment was colorful and intriguingly put together. They had a rocky relationship and had already broken up once because of his drinking. He would start the morning with a shot of vodka and tell her “A gentleman never drinks before two o’clock but I’m not always a gentleman.” One night he was acting strangely and she knew something was very wrong. She called 911 and when the paramedics got to the apartment, Micheal was out cold on the bed: “he’s just drunk; let him sleep it off.” She, however, was so highly agitated that they handcuffed her and took her to Bellevue Hospital. By the time she got back to the apartment, ten hours later, his condition had worsened. Every time she said she was going to call 911, he kept insisting no. She could see that things were rapidly getting worse and made the call. Four EMT responders came and worked on him in shifts for one hour. They finally declared him dead. “I try to live my life without regret,” she says, “but I wish I had done things differently. The first time I called 911 and they kept insisting he was just drunk I should have told them he had been having heart problems. And the second time I should have called much sooner no matter what he said. The technicians who came didn’t have paddles and maybe being in the hospital would have saved him.”
On her table is a beautiful photo of a sleeping Micheal and her cat, Boogala, who has been with her since she volunteered at the Jewish home 12 years ago. She smiles and says “they loved each other.”
Her buoyancy is astonishing; with the evils and ills of her childhood and the adversity she has suffered much of her life, she is an unstinting caregiver; she works as a nanny and devotes her time to taking care of others. She loves spending time with animals and has volunteered in animal causes. Her first volunteering experience was in a senior center in the tenderloin in San Francisco; then in a Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles; and finally with Alzheimer’s patients in New York City “until Schlomo got a crush on me.”
Is there one thing you feel you absolutely must do every single day? “Express gratitude,” she tells me, “but I don’t manage to do it every day.”
Christine’s work can be found through a search for her name on Getty Images.com; under Past Exhibitions on the Robin Rice website at www.robinricegallery.com; and on her own website at www.christinecody50.com.
Silvia's Interview
with Eze Bongo, Artist
December 22, 2011
Eze Bongo was born in Trials, Saint Anthony, Montserrat, on July 29, 1976. A Leo. Those born under this sign are considered by most modern astrologers as natural leaders. They are also considered as outgoing, proud, warm-hearted, loyal, and notable for their wish to excel in all they do. Leo personalities are known to love those they are close with and their wish to protect and defend all those that need it. Eze is all this and more. He is all artist.
When I first met Eze about eight years ago, I commented on his compelling jewelry. He flashed one of his magnetic smiles and told me he designed and fabricated it. The more I got to know him, the more I believed he had the power to master anything. He seems to have that dazzling instinct of looking at something and understanding how it’s done. He is a master carpenter, a woodcarver, a welder, a plumber, an electrician, a furniture designer, a painter, a musician, and a poet. Last spring he gave me an autographed copy of his beautiful book Fabiruckus, a collection of poems and narratives, a stirring look into growing up in Montserrat.
His mother was in labor with him for 24 hours and he has always had enormous respect for the struggle she endured to bring him into this world. They are great friends and she has always been more like a sister. He was raised by his great grandmother, who was the head of a plantation and 105 when she died. Growing up, he was taught to love, to respect, and to demand respect from others. He never experienced servitude. There was always plenty of food and whatever excess there was went to those in need. His grandfather would bring him fresh milk and bush tea, a tea made from herbs. He was breast fed until he was a year old and never had canned milk. When he was very young he had a severe panic attack which was treated by washing him with bark. His favorite pastime was making toys; as a young boy he made cars and in his early teens, tables and benches. He walked a half mile to school every day, looked forward to going, and his favorite subject was English. He was expected to be in the top five in his class and was always a straight A student. He was the first in his family to get a diploma and says he did it only for his family. He places no value on the academic methods of rewarding students with gold stars and ribbons – he says he is not a dog who does what his master wants in order to get a treat. Eze once read the encyclopedia straight through from A to Z and says all that raw information is still in his head. Knowledge, he tells me, is transmitted through the air we breathe. He continues to embrace learning.
He credits his favorite childhood memory to being lucky enough to grow up with his grandparents. Of all the things he learned from them, the most valuable was to be self sufficient. I asked if he has a five year plan, but he says no, he lives day to day because nothing is guaranteed. The blueprint he grew up with was not so much about rewards or retribution; it was about “doing what you can do.” His grandfather would work in the mountains all day long and Eze would say “why don’t you get a tractor?” His grandfather would shake his head and simply say “you don’t get it.” “I used to wonder why my grandfather never hired government tractors to plow his ground. Now I realize he was doing it for the fun of it all. Now I am working on my own house and people are asking me why I don’t hire people — truth is I am having the time of my life.”
Eze grew up with no curfews. All that he was required to do was to take care of his responsibilities. He had to get up every morning at five a.m., seven days a week. Even if he went to bed at four a.m. he still had to get up at five. Otherwise, he’d get cold water thrown on him. At the age of 13 Eze already had his “own ground,” a farm; Montserrat no longer challenged him and his mother encouraged him to leave. He arrived alone in New York Cityin 1993 and went to live with his uncle. His entire family, brothers and sisters, are still down there. He has never gone back.
The tradition in Montserrat is to name a baby after someone who has died. Even before the baby is conceived, the belief is that the mother or grandmother has a vision and knows how to name the baby when it comes. Eze has a daughter who is 15 and a son who is 12; his son is named after his grandfather and amazingly exhibits the same behaviors and displays the same conduct as his grandfather. And even though his son has never been to Montserrat, he speaks Creole English as though he had lived there all his life.
Eze is outspoken, out there, and upfront. How about: “Somebody should of told Kim Kardashian that once u go black u can’t go back. Reggie tap that ass like a black man should. White boy got played.” He knows what he wants. He lives life the way it feels right to him, but remains highly principled, living life well but with a conscience. He is a Rasta and Rastas are spiritual gurus. They are never subservient, never compliant, never subjugated to the values of society. They are liberated, never dominated. The more he talks about it, the more I understand it is a way of life that I deeply respect. He says things like “cast no shadow, blame nor doubt, make no excuses, regrets or apologies. Be unprecedented — back down from nothing or no one, stay committed to fundamentals.”
Is there one thing you absolutely must do every day? “Be creative. The toughest thing about being creative is finding the time to do it.” He sometimes finds it challenging to work with people on inspired projects because he has his own ideas; “people can break my rhythm.”
These days when he takes a break from the renovations he is working on both in upstate New York and in Brooklyn, he does a lot of his creating on Facebook. It is a unique medium and it is where he shares his soul. I commented on the close to 1500 Facebook friends he has and ask if he really knows them all personally; he tells me yes. Two-thirds of the island’s population was forced to flee after the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano in July of 1995; they migrated to all parts of the world . . . and they’re pretty much all on Facebook.
His Facebook posts are peppered with his plans for designing a couch, his witticisms, his shrewdness, his adventures in and out of the city, and the word pum pum. Judging from his Facebook status, he spends an enormous amount of time on porn sites which could be why he is always beaming. He tells me porn is what calms him down. “Some hot gal put some sexy pictures on the internet before they got old or die of whatever reasons and am thankful for their thoughtfulness. If they never did anything else in their life they sure place a smile on my face and a warmth in my heart.”
His words: “I don’t want to hear fuck all about your hard life; tell me more about your sex life if its more interesting and inspiring. The hard life is too depressing; a great sex life is worth an intriguing and entertaining listen.”
“I got this invincible, untouchable, indestructible feeling running trough my veins. Am running on full throttle plowing trough the waves of emotions life throws at me, my head does now bow it dives and split the waves with equal force. I am channeling and commanding an icebreaker heading to the north pole. I will go trough the iceberg or move it out the way.”
While his strength is sexual energy which he assures me he can transform into creative muscle, he is defenseless to people who get emotionally tangled up with him when he doesn’t feel the same about them – women who have fantasies, women who want to take care of him, and women who want to marry him. “Love is a security blanket for the insecure, sex is the installment payments. You can only be covered by one policy or person at a time.
Eze doesn’t drink and has never taken a drug in his life, never even smoked weed. He says he never needed it because he was never confined. No one has ever broken his spirit. He has never filled out a job application because he considers it degrading. He counsels: never let anyone take your euphoria from you.
Punk rock was the music most popular when he was growing up, especially the Ramones and some British bands, but his favorite was Bob Marley and the Wailers. He says Trinidad has the best music and that is where Jamaicans study; after all, he tells me, it was Trinidad that invented the steel pan. He started playing music when he was five years old; he made a guitar out of a piece of wood with nylon strings and taught himself how to play in his own back yard.
Most of the time he exists in what he calls the spirit realm and at times admits to going completely out of his mind. He claims a warrior spirit and says “what I do for excitement is not what normal people do.” Like what? I ask. “I put on African music and throw spears.” Where? “In my living room.”
He works 12 hour days seven days a week, seemingly with unlimited energy, yet always a perfectionist. ”If it’s not excellence it’s not good enough and you should be sorry cause it is sorry and a sad expectation of self worth, skill and abilities.” He has both the emotional drive and the physical capacity to overwork, but he trusts his body and says the body knows itself and you have to listen to it and let it shut down when you hear it begging for that. “Saving yourself and energy is like saving your Sunday best for when you’re dead and someone uses your best to go work ground. I’ve seen it done before and it prompted me to say fuck that — I want my best now!”
What kind of people do you dislike, I ask. He doesn’t dislike anybody, then pauses and says well, maybe he does dislike some people’s principles. “You are meant to have what you have” he explains and goes on with a story. His great grandmother couldn’t read or write and an aunt would regularly write her letters and enclose some money. The lady who took care of his great grandmother would be the first to pick up the mail and read the letters but would lie about the amount of cash enclosed and pocket a substantial part. The grandmother became aware of what was going on but let it go; she assured Eze that punishment would come to the woman when the time was right. “People lie to you because they fear you. If it comes to you, you take it. If it doesn’t come to you, you leave it.”
What would you do it you had a time machine? “I wouldn’t use it.”
What makes him angry? “When I give advice and people don’t take it. Then they ask me the same thing again and still don’t take it. They mess up and I have to clean up. I tell my son not to take his Ipod down the street but he does it anyway and then he loses it. People don’t think about what the outcome will be. They don’t know how to think for themselves.”
Tell me one thing about yourself you wouldn’t want me to know. “I’m afraid to perform in front of people I know.” He is very sensitive to the emotions of others and says that is something not a lot of people know about him that he wishes they would see. He admits to getting too caught up with how people perceive what he creates.
His big dream in life is to buy a boat and sail back toMontserrat.
How would you describe yourself in three words? “Arrogant, assertive, aggressive.”
What one thing that has happened in your life has made the biggest impact on who you are today? Lots of things, he tells me, many near death experiences: an almost fatal bicycle accident, getting washed away in a river, and most brutally, the Category 5 Hurricane Hugo in 1984. Debris was everywhere, people had to make sense out of how to eat, where to sleep; it was a total rebuilding effort. Did you lose a lot? I ask him. “No, I gained a lot.
“Some people think and feel the money they pay you is for you to barely survive on necessities and not for you to invest to be bigger and better than them. If me want food me go work ground; if I need water me go a river; if I need sleep I lay on the ground, if I want shelter I’ll sleep under a bridge. Get the point?”
What would you like to ask from God? “Nothing. God knows everything. I don’t have to ask him.”
On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you. Without skipping a beat, he says “10.”
For more Bongo and to order his book, visit his website at www.bongowarrior.com
When I first met Eze about eight years ago, I commented on his compelling jewelry. He flashed one of his magnetic smiles and told me he designed and fabricated it. The more I got to know him, the more I believed he had the power to master anything. He seems to have that dazzling instinct of looking at something and understanding how it’s done. He is a master carpenter, a woodcarver, a welder, a plumber, an electrician, a furniture designer, a painter, a musician, and a poet. Last spring he gave me an autographed copy of his beautiful book Fabiruckus, a collection of poems and narratives, a stirring look into growing up in Montserrat.
His mother was in labor with him for 24 hours and he has always had enormous respect for the struggle she endured to bring him into this world. They are great friends and she has always been more like a sister. He was raised by his great grandmother, who was the head of a plantation and 105 when she died. Growing up, he was taught to love, to respect, and to demand respect from others. He never experienced servitude. There was always plenty of food and whatever excess there was went to those in need. His grandfather would bring him fresh milk and bush tea, a tea made from herbs. He was breast fed until he was a year old and never had canned milk. When he was very young he had a severe panic attack which was treated by washing him with bark. His favorite pastime was making toys; as a young boy he made cars and in his early teens, tables and benches. He walked a half mile to school every day, looked forward to going, and his favorite subject was English. He was expected to be in the top five in his class and was always a straight A student. He was the first in his family to get a diploma and says he did it only for his family. He places no value on the academic methods of rewarding students with gold stars and ribbons – he says he is not a dog who does what his master wants in order to get a treat. Eze once read the encyclopedia straight through from A to Z and says all that raw information is still in his head. Knowledge, he tells me, is transmitted through the air we breathe. He continues to embrace learning.
He credits his favorite childhood memory to being lucky enough to grow up with his grandparents. Of all the things he learned from them, the most valuable was to be self sufficient. I asked if he has a five year plan, but he says no, he lives day to day because nothing is guaranteed. The blueprint he grew up with was not so much about rewards or retribution; it was about “doing what you can do.” His grandfather would work in the mountains all day long and Eze would say “why don’t you get a tractor?” His grandfather would shake his head and simply say “you don’t get it.” “I used to wonder why my grandfather never hired government tractors to plow his ground. Now I realize he was doing it for the fun of it all. Now I am working on my own house and people are asking me why I don’t hire people — truth is I am having the time of my life.”
Eze grew up with no curfews. All that he was required to do was to take care of his responsibilities. He had to get up every morning at five a.m., seven days a week. Even if he went to bed at four a.m. he still had to get up at five. Otherwise, he’d get cold water thrown on him. At the age of 13 Eze already had his “own ground,” a farm; Montserrat no longer challenged him and his mother encouraged him to leave. He arrived alone in New York Cityin 1993 and went to live with his uncle. His entire family, brothers and sisters, are still down there. He has never gone back.
The tradition in Montserrat is to name a baby after someone who has died. Even before the baby is conceived, the belief is that the mother or grandmother has a vision and knows how to name the baby when it comes. Eze has a daughter who is 15 and a son who is 12; his son is named after his grandfather and amazingly exhibits the same behaviors and displays the same conduct as his grandfather. And even though his son has never been to Montserrat, he speaks Creole English as though he had lived there all his life.
Eze is outspoken, out there, and upfront. How about: “Somebody should of told Kim Kardashian that once u go black u can’t go back. Reggie tap that ass like a black man should. White boy got played.” He knows what he wants. He lives life the way it feels right to him, but remains highly principled, living life well but with a conscience. He is a Rasta and Rastas are spiritual gurus. They are never subservient, never compliant, never subjugated to the values of society. They are liberated, never dominated. The more he talks about it, the more I understand it is a way of life that I deeply respect. He says things like “cast no shadow, blame nor doubt, make no excuses, regrets or apologies. Be unprecedented — back down from nothing or no one, stay committed to fundamentals.”
Is there one thing you absolutely must do every day? “Be creative. The toughest thing about being creative is finding the time to do it.” He sometimes finds it challenging to work with people on inspired projects because he has his own ideas; “people can break my rhythm.”
These days when he takes a break from the renovations he is working on both in upstate New York and in Brooklyn, he does a lot of his creating on Facebook. It is a unique medium and it is where he shares his soul. I commented on the close to 1500 Facebook friends he has and ask if he really knows them all personally; he tells me yes. Two-thirds of the island’s population was forced to flee after the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano in July of 1995; they migrated to all parts of the world . . . and they’re pretty much all on Facebook.
His Facebook posts are peppered with his plans for designing a couch, his witticisms, his shrewdness, his adventures in and out of the city, and the word pum pum. Judging from his Facebook status, he spends an enormous amount of time on porn sites which could be why he is always beaming. He tells me porn is what calms him down. “Some hot gal put some sexy pictures on the internet before they got old or die of whatever reasons and am thankful for their thoughtfulness. If they never did anything else in their life they sure place a smile on my face and a warmth in my heart.”
His words: “I don’t want to hear fuck all about your hard life; tell me more about your sex life if its more interesting and inspiring. The hard life is too depressing; a great sex life is worth an intriguing and entertaining listen.”
“I got this invincible, untouchable, indestructible feeling running trough my veins. Am running on full throttle plowing trough the waves of emotions life throws at me, my head does now bow it dives and split the waves with equal force. I am channeling and commanding an icebreaker heading to the north pole. I will go trough the iceberg or move it out the way.”
While his strength is sexual energy which he assures me he can transform into creative muscle, he is defenseless to people who get emotionally tangled up with him when he doesn’t feel the same about them – women who have fantasies, women who want to take care of him, and women who want to marry him. “Love is a security blanket for the insecure, sex is the installment payments. You can only be covered by one policy or person at a time.
Eze doesn’t drink and has never taken a drug in his life, never even smoked weed. He says he never needed it because he was never confined. No one has ever broken his spirit. He has never filled out a job application because he considers it degrading. He counsels: never let anyone take your euphoria from you.
Punk rock was the music most popular when he was growing up, especially the Ramones and some British bands, but his favorite was Bob Marley and the Wailers. He says Trinidad has the best music and that is where Jamaicans study; after all, he tells me, it was Trinidad that invented the steel pan. He started playing music when he was five years old; he made a guitar out of a piece of wood with nylon strings and taught himself how to play in his own back yard.
Most of the time he exists in what he calls the spirit realm and at times admits to going completely out of his mind. He claims a warrior spirit and says “what I do for excitement is not what normal people do.” Like what? I ask. “I put on African music and throw spears.” Where? “In my living room.”
He works 12 hour days seven days a week, seemingly with unlimited energy, yet always a perfectionist. ”If it’s not excellence it’s not good enough and you should be sorry cause it is sorry and a sad expectation of self worth, skill and abilities.” He has both the emotional drive and the physical capacity to overwork, but he trusts his body and says the body knows itself and you have to listen to it and let it shut down when you hear it begging for that. “Saving yourself and energy is like saving your Sunday best for when you’re dead and someone uses your best to go work ground. I’ve seen it done before and it prompted me to say fuck that — I want my best now!”
What kind of people do you dislike, I ask. He doesn’t dislike anybody, then pauses and says well, maybe he does dislike some people’s principles. “You are meant to have what you have” he explains and goes on with a story. His great grandmother couldn’t read or write and an aunt would regularly write her letters and enclose some money. The lady who took care of his great grandmother would be the first to pick up the mail and read the letters but would lie about the amount of cash enclosed and pocket a substantial part. The grandmother became aware of what was going on but let it go; she assured Eze that punishment would come to the woman when the time was right. “People lie to you because they fear you. If it comes to you, you take it. If it doesn’t come to you, you leave it.”
What would you do it you had a time machine? “I wouldn’t use it.”
What makes him angry? “When I give advice and people don’t take it. Then they ask me the same thing again and still don’t take it. They mess up and I have to clean up. I tell my son not to take his Ipod down the street but he does it anyway and then he loses it. People don’t think about what the outcome will be. They don’t know how to think for themselves.”
Tell me one thing about yourself you wouldn’t want me to know. “I’m afraid to perform in front of people I know.” He is very sensitive to the emotions of others and says that is something not a lot of people know about him that he wishes they would see. He admits to getting too caught up with how people perceive what he creates.
His big dream in life is to buy a boat and sail back toMontserrat.
How would you describe yourself in three words? “Arrogant, assertive, aggressive.”
What one thing that has happened in your life has made the biggest impact on who you are today? Lots of things, he tells me, many near death experiences: an almost fatal bicycle accident, getting washed away in a river, and most brutally, the Category 5 Hurricane Hugo in 1984. Debris was everywhere, people had to make sense out of how to eat, where to sleep; it was a total rebuilding effort. Did you lose a lot? I ask him. “No, I gained a lot.
“Some people think and feel the money they pay you is for you to barely survive on necessities and not for you to invest to be bigger and better than them. If me want food me go work ground; if I need water me go a river; if I need sleep I lay on the ground, if I want shelter I’ll sleep under a bridge. Get the point?”
What would you like to ask from God? “Nothing. God knows everything. I don’t have to ask him.”
On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you. Without skipping a beat, he says “10.”
For more Bongo and to order his book, visit his website at www.bongowarrior.com
Silvia's Interview
with Tish, Female Impersonator
February 10, 2012
Anyone who’s been around the Village for a while knows Tish. Colorful, compelling, and always a good neighbor, he can be found on sunny days on his Bank Street stoop presiding over his famous sidewalk sales, accompanied by the music of the forties coming from his radio. Tish will be 88 years old on February 24, 2012. He was the first person I met when I moved into my apartment on Bank Street. He would tease me about my boyfriends and I would tease him about his.
He was born Joseph Touchette and grew up in New England to French Canadian parents, an only child for almost seven years, spoiled by both sides of the family. He was the “petit garcon” which got garbled into half French and half English and became his nickname, Ti-boy. He is blessed with a large and close knit family: brother Dede, six years younger than Tish, and married 56 years; Bang, two years younger than Dede, and married 52 years; his brother Donnie who he used to take care of and who loved to hide in the maze of cornfields, now 57; his sister Agnes who lives in Florida; and his sister Rita who lives in Connecticut in his mother’s house. Tish lost one brother, Buck, who was born when Tish was 11 years old. When he goes home to his many nieces and nephews, he’s “Uncle Joe.”
Tish started working as a young boy. He recalls running across the field from school, dressed in a suit and tie, to work at the woolen mills factory. The mill was converted by the Germans and become known as William Primms Metals; they manufactured safety pins and bobby pins. Tish’s job was to thread the wire; he started out as the #3 boy who oiled the machines. Eventually he moved up to the #2 and then to the #1 boy where he supervised others. He weighed 98 pounds and was expected to lift 98 lbs. He laughs now and says “I didn’t know I was so macho.” He also worked at the La Rosa Macaroni Company.
He made $18 a week, gave his mother $12, and spent the remaining few dollars for tap dancing and ballet lessons at the Rhode Island Conservatory.
Tish sang in church at weddings, funerals, Sunday services and Tuesday night devotions to the Blessed Mother until he was 25. His closest friends were his piano teacher and her sister, the organist, two unmarried women known in those days as “old maids”. He had some friends who were likely gay but no one used that expression back then; anyone effeminate was called sissy or pansy. It was unsettling to be a gay person in so small a community, always wondering if you are the only one.
Early on Tish went to Boston and was so naïve he didn’t realize the dancing girls were all dancing boys. What he did realize was that he was in awe of the elegance of the experience. He was about 17 or 18 when he heard of a club in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, called a “gay bar.” The first time he saw two men dancing was at The College Inn in Boston and it took him a week to get over it. His uncle was in a jitterbug contest and one of the men dancing was a friend of his mother’s.
Tish was twenty, ready and eager to move to New York City, when his father died at the age of forty. This was the saddest time of his life not only because he loved and missed his father but because he knew it was up to him to stay home and help his mother who was then thirty eight years old. For the next six years he helped care for his siblings until his mother remarried a man who was a very good stepfather to Tish and the father of his brother Donnie. Tish lived across the street from the church where his grandparents were sextons and the cemetery was literally in his back yard. When his father died the family went directly from the house to the church to the cemetery and instead of taking a limousine they simply walked back to the house. Tish joked with his brother that all they had to do was look out their window to see if the wind blew the flowers off their father’s grave. His favorite subject in school was history and he loved walking through the graveyards of the different churches where he could see the tombstones of the French Canadians. The Protestant cemeteries were where the revolutionary war Yankees were buried.
One of his early jobs was at the legendary Celebrity Club in Providence, Rhode Island, believed to be the first interracial nightclub in New England, where he and his friend Bing would go for Sunday afternoon jam sessions. The club featured top national jazz and R&B acts as well as local talent in the 1950s. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday would come to Providence and stay for week-long engagements. On one of those Sunday afternoons Louis Armstrong was there; he didn’t have all the members of his band with him, just six people. Tish heard the gravelly voice behind him “Wanna do a set?” And so Tish did “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “All of Me” with Louis and rounded out the afternoon at the bar talking with Armstrong’s singer, Thelma Middleton.
Tish had been working at the Wonder Bar in Norwich, Connecticut for six weeks when the owner received a letter from the State Liquor Authority (SLA) stating Tish could no longer work there in women’s attire because it was against the laws of the state of Connecticut for a man to wear female clothes. The Connecticut mill towns were struggling to deal with the SLA. So Tish’s career as a female impersonator – the word “drag” was never used – was delayed a while longer. He compares his appearance at that time to Adam Lambert: he didn’t want to break any laws but delighted in being obvious; he wore pants but lots of theatrical make-up. He had his brown hair curled and used his mother’s bleach to gradually lighten it. Three quarters of the audience was from the submarine base. Tish’s brother, then a sailor stationed in New London, would tell Tish how his friends would say what a great time they had at the club. Tish warned him not to let on that the star of the show was his brother – 80% might like it but the other 20% might want to kill him. He was so popular that the Wonder Bar put his picture in the Norwich Bulletin advertising “Miss Tish”. His friends, his family, his relatives, in fact the whole state accepted him as the “Joe” they always knew.
He left the Wonder Bar for the Stage Coach Inn in Voluntown, in the town of Norwich, the birthplace of Benedict Arnold, a club that had been a real stage coach inn during the Revolutionary War. It was across the street from a Catholic church. One afternoon a priest came in to the club. “Are you Tish?” the priest asked. “I have nothing against your show but when my parishioners come to seven o’clock confessions on Saturday evening, there’s no parking!” Tish’s fans from The Wonder Bar had followed Tish the twelve miles to the Stagecoach Inn. He assured the priest he would be there for only two more weeks because The Wonder Bar wanted him back. The owner there said that since Tish started, he had paid off his mortgage and gotten a new car.
Part of his act was telling the audience that the owner of the bar had decided that Tish should have other impersonators in his act and so he was going to audition some people from the audience. Tish would seriously scrutinize the room, pick out the three roughest looking sailors and prompt them to do exactly as he did; he would sashay around the room in flowing chiffon and, to the delight of the audience, the sailors would have to do exactly the same.
Tish met his first boyfriend when he was 27. Philip was 24, lived across from Brown University, and was planning to get married, when he visited a club in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Tish was singing Sunday and Monday nights. The club was located next to Slaters Textile Mills, the first textile mill in the country, constructed in 1789. Tish tells the story of the seven clowns from Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to the club one night from the circus in Providence. The next day the circus moved on to Hartford where 67 people died in a huge fire, making that the last time Barnum & Bailey Circus was held under a tent.
Philip’s father was a sergeant in the Korean War and Philip introduced him to Tish in Connecticut. It was a congenial enough meeting but afterward his father made it clear to Philip that if he kept seeing Tish he’d have to move out. Philip lived in his car for three or four days without saying anything. Soon after he moved into the barn with Tish. The barn belonged to Tish’s great aunt and her husband who lived in a colonial home on the property. They had converted part of the barn to a two room apartment and when the couple would argue, that’s where the husband would sleep. Tish had been living with his mother but when she remarried and the apartment became available, Tish moved in and gave his aunt three dollars a week. There was no plumbing and no water and he cooked with a kerosene stove and used an outhouse at the bottom of the hill, but he loved living there and stayed for two years.
In 1952 Philip visited New Yorkto find a place to rent. Within a week he found an apartment at 49 Macdougal Street, got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and came back to get Tish and Francis, a friend of theirs who was what in those days was called a “state kid”, essentially a foster child, who went on to become a doorman in a very exquisite hotel. They packed the car with as much as they could possibly squeeze in; Tish says it reminded him of Tobacco Road.
Their next apartment was four rooms on West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue above a club called The Pepper Pot where Tony Bennett got his start. Tish says it was Bob Hope who first saw him and urged a name change from Anthony Dominick Benedetto to Tony Bennett. Jimmy Walker who had been mayor of New York City in 1926 had once kept a mistress on the top floor of the building. In 1953 when that apartment became vacant, Tish wanted to live there but the rent was too high. It was $200 a month.
Tish decided to apply for a job at Moroccan Village.
“I’d like to work here,” he told them.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a female impersonator.”
Tish’s act consisted of singing French standards in the style of Edith Piaf in a black dress or as Mary Martin singing “Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” from South Pacific which was then playing to enthusiastic reviews.
He auditioned, got the job, everyone happily took him under their wings, and Tish began his reign in New York City. It was at Moroccan Village that he started wearing wigs and exquisite gowns. The bullet holes were still evident in Tish’s dressing room where Bobby Dell, the M.C., had gotten shot in the arm two years before. Tish says if there had never been a mafia, there would never have been gay clubs. The Profacis and Gambinos kept them going. They were known only as The Boys.
He had been working at Moroccan Village for two years and was feeling overwhelmed; he was understudying everybody, singers and dancers, and was considering giving his notice. A man came in and introduced himself as Tutty and said he had a club in Hoboken, had heard Tish was leaving, and said he was looking to replace someone named Georgette and would pay Tish for two nights’ work what he was now getting for six. Tish soon found out it wasn’t a club at all; it was a bar. One of the musicians who played for Tish had been the person who accompanied Frank Sinatra to his audition on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, American radio’s best-known talent show.
In 1954 Tish, Philip, and Francis moved fromWest Fourth Street into a one family house in Hoboken where Tish worked at Tutty’s, the bar downstairs. The house was next door to the Democratic Club. Frank Sinatra’s mother, who was the president of the Democratic Club, would come in to use the oven to make chicken in the basket and French fries to sell for a dollar at fundraisers. On The Waterfront was being filmed in Hoboken; the longshoremen would come in and drink beer and try to get the guys to peddle the dresses they confiscated from the ships.
In 1955 Tish began working at the Holiday Lounge which was around the corner from the Clam Broth House on Hudson Street; he sang on Friday and Saturday and was the bartender on Sunday and Wednesdays. He remembers the spectacular views from the window of their apartment overlooking the Hudson and loved watching the ocean liners, the Queen Elizabeth going out and the America coming in.
On the last day of 1955 Tish moved into Apartment Number 1 at51 Bank Street. He piled his belongings on the floor and went out clubbing to bring in the new year. His rent was $52 a month.
Tish’s early days on Bank Street were busy ones. He already enjoyed a circle of friends from his two years working at MoroccanVillage. When Moroccan Village closed, he went to the Soiree on Third Street. He was never without work and performed both in what were known as “white tablecloth clubs” and clubs with sawdust on the floor. Posh or less than posh, he always insisted on the same salary.
Next was Tippy’s. “Where’s the dressing room?” he asked when he walked in for the first time with his group. “Oh, we don’t have a dressing room.” So they found a few empty beer crates in the backyard, turned them upside down, put tablecloths on them, and that’s where they would put on their wigs and makeup. The neighbors in the adjoining building would look out the windows and talk to them while they got ready for their show.
For about three months in the early sixties Tish worked at the Heat Wave, now the Blue Note. At the Heat Wave Tish was a male dancer in an ensemble of four guys and one girl named Helen. It was Helen who suggested that during this slow period Tish might as well work as a male dancer while he waited for female impersonation jobs to come along.
The opening number was the French Apache Dance, featuring one guy wearing a beret and a handkerchief around his neck. The finale was the same group dressed in tuxedos, with top hats and canes. Soon the manager asked Tish why he was working as a male dancer. The manager’s friend had a club called the Capri, in the same building as the famous 82 club, known as “the” club for female impersonators. So off Tish went to the Capri where booking agents regularly attended the performances. One agent suggested Tish start his own a revue and promised him bookings. At the time, circa 1962, the Jewel Box Revue was very popular – it was composed of 25 men and one woman who is almost 90 now. The booking agent suggested the name The French Box Revue.
Once the booking agents saw the show Tish quickly was offered club dates at resorts in the Catskills. For three years from the fourth of July to Labor Day, six nights a week, Tish was booked. He was featured at Evans Nightclub in Loch Sheldrake which burned to the ground in the mid seventies. Another club he worked was Martha Kaye’s Peppermint Lounge off Route 17. Sunday night after the last show was a quick trip into the city to pick up his mail and Tuesday afternoon it was back to the Catskills by car with his friend Lenny, with whom he is still close friends today. They speak every night on the telephone. If one doesn’t call, the other one will.
Winters he was back with his revue at the Crazy Horse on Bleecker Street, now Terra Blues. The Crazy Horse, an espresso house that let you bring in a bottle of wine, was next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen played. Bill Cosby worked in the cellar at another club on Bleecker Street. It was the heyday of nightclubs in Greenwich Village.
Tish worked six nights a week, would come home at four in the morning, get up at one in the afternoon and go to Jeanne’s Patio or Tors for coffee and socializing, always on the lookout for beautiful guys to work in his shows. His weekends were spent going out for fun. He headed for after hours clubs with a mix of straight and gay people, show people, musicians, dancing and relaxation.
The Catskill work lasted about three years. By now it was 1970 and the French Box Revue was being booked everywhere. At Silhouette, a club in Brooklyn, the owner apologized to Tish for having promised a booking to someone else for one week — it was Christine Jorgenson. But that run was short lived and the owner told Tish he was relieved to have the French Box Revue back because all Jorgenson could do was talk about her operation. Often the Revue would get booked for a single week and end up staying for much longer – that was the case with a club in Hazlet,New Jersey where a one week booking became 22 weeks. Owners were always ecstatic with the audience enthusiasm.
In those days these were all straight clubs. Straight couples went there for the entertainment value. Revues like the Powder Puff Revue and Guys Will Be Girls were very popular. Tish was friends with Mabel who played piano at Arthur’s Café where the club owner, like so many other proprietors of the day, was careful not to have his place singled out as a gay bar. But even in full drag Tish was welcomed. Often the bartender would say “Tish, there’s a drink for you over here.” “From who?” Tish would always ask. One night the bartender answered “From a lieutenant!” It turned out to be one of the policeman from the Sixth Precinct where Tish had been booked for a one night special party.
Tish loved being an entertainer and never felt it was a chore, but the world of female impersonator revues was slowly drifting away. That’s when Tish started his celebrated stoop sales. On Saturdays and Sundays he would set up shop with tables and clothes racks; feather boas, beaded gowns, and rhinestone studded treasures would be for sale. It is a Bank Street tradition to see him out there on the stoop from early spring until it gets too cold, selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, books, art, and whatever else friends and neighbors bring him.
In the sixties Tish had a silver gray French poodle called Albert. A French designer who created Tish’s wardrobe was breeding French poodles. Albert, the product of a brother and sister poodle who mated, could no longer be considered pure bred. This incited the French designer’s boyfriend who threw the puppy across the room, leaving the dog with a limp. The designer was shaken and told Tish he had to help her find someone to adopt the dog before it suffered any more abuse. Tish planned to give the dog away – he said the dog looked like a sheep because he had never been groomed or properly cared for – but instead he took the dog to a groomer and Albert turned out so handsome that Tish kept him. They were inseparable for 17 years. Tish laughs when he tells the story that on the night he met the boyfriend he told the guy “You’re not much of a man for what you did to that dog. I ought to get the boys to break your leg.” That night at the club Tish was impersonating Kim Novak but he likes to say there was no doubt who the real man was.
In the seventies Tish, then 41, had a girlfriend. Diane was 21, lived on Carmine Street, and was a beautiful blonde who Tish said looked like Alice in Wonderland. She worked as an elevator operator at the New Yorker Hotel and started coming to the Capri where Tish worked. They were together for three years and became very close but she became demanding. She told Tish “I want to have your child, a baby with blue eyes and blonde hair.” And Tish said “But, Diane, I have brown hair!” If you’re alone and depressed, invite Tish. Tish can make a joke out of anything. He was recently in the hospital and whispered to the nurse “You’ll have to give me your phone number so I can find out where the people who work here learned to cook so bad.”
Tish considers himself lucky because any affair or relationship he has had always came to him. He never had to go looking.
One of those relationships was Peter Russell. Peter would follow Tish down the street until one day they started talking and became friends and Peter moved in to Bank Street and lived there for several years. Tish tried to talk Peter out of his desire to get breast implants, but Peter wouldn’t listen. Determined to become an entertainer, he had his implants, became known as Eve, and became one of the best strippers and dancers in Tish’s revue. Peter and Tish would go out to clubs after hours and one night a doorman greeted them with “Here they are, mother and daughter” to which Tish replied “What do you mean? Peter doesn’t look like my mother.” Another time they were leaving a club at six in the morning. From behind someone put his arms around Tish and said “You’re coming home with me this morning.” Without seeing his face, Tish resisted and kept walking. Peter saw who it was, though – it was Mick Jagger.
Drugs and alcohol took their toll and Peter died young of cirrhosis of the liver. Murphy, one of the original organizers of the Gay Pride Parade, planned a memorial at St. John’s Church on Waverly Place in the Village. Tish made him promise not to call on him to come up to speak. When Murphy started saying how so many people loved Eve “but no one loved Eve more than Tish,” Tish walked up to the pulpit. He talked about how he had loved Peter when Peter was Peter and how he had loved Peter when Peter was Eve. He talked about the many arguments they had and how he always took him back. “You don’t turn away someone you love.”
Tish and Billy first met at the Crazy Horse. “I hear you take in roommates,” Billy said to Tish, and Tish said yes, he did. So in moved Billy as roommate who for twenty dollars a week slept on one of the two couches in the front room. One night Tish found a note from Billy that said “please don’t go to any after hours clubs. Come home. I love you.” And that was how Billy moved into Tish’s bed. Billy continued to give Tish money and one night started peeling off hundred dollar bills, 18 in all, for a grand total of $1800. Tish always knew Billy was a hustler and suspected that’s where the money was coming from.
One day there was a knock on the door. Who is it? “FBI”. Billy in only a t-shirt and underwear bolted through the window, fled into the next building, made his way up to the roof, and then sprung through a skylight into a living room. He told the people he had just been robbed, they gave him some clothes, and he walked away. What Tish didn’t know until the FBI told him was that Billy had been forging checks. When Billy would go home with a john he would tear out the last check in the john’s checkbook and forge it. In time Billy met a girl and they had a son. “If anything ever happens to me,” he said to Tish, “I want you to raise my son.” Tish said “of course” and Billy was off. Five years later Tish ran into Billy’s wife and son at the Chicken Rib. The son was in a cub scout uniform and was selling chances. Billy’s wife told the boy, “this is your father’s best friend.” Billy had vanished.
One night Tish walked into his living room to find Mikey, Peter and a new boy sitting on his couch. Mikey said “I want you to meet Roger.” Roger had come to the city from Albany, had gotten a job as a busboy at Studio 54, and had met Mikey and Peter at the Haymarket, a club notorious for young boys looking to meet older men. Mikey explained that Roger had gotten robbed his first time there and needed a place to stay. Tish immediately felt protective of him. He was 34 years younger than Tish.
He told Roger if that’s how he wanted to make his money, that was his business, but he should let Tish introduce him to some generous and trustworthy older men. Roger continued to live with Tish for ten years; his parents would come down from Albany to have dinner with them. During all those years Roger had a generous companion, Ray, who spent over one hundred thousand dollars on him and together they traveled the world. Roger and Ray had their share of break-ups, mostly because Ray insisted on showing off Roger and introducing him as his “boyfriend” to which Roger would say “No I’m not.” Tish always encouraged Roger to make up and go back, reminding him that he didn’t have that kind of money and to be nice and enjoy the attention and lifestyle Ray was able to give him.
One night Roger came home with a t-shirt that said “I love Tish”. Tish wouldn’t let him wear it –he didn’t want it to look like he owned the boy. When Tish was working his night clubs, Roger would go out dancing and bar hopping. He would come home and wake Tish up and make bacon and eggs for him. He would bring Tish flowers and give him a kiss every night before he went out. His friends would tell Roger, “What do you want with Tish? He’s old enough to be your father” and Tish would tell him “what do they mean ‘your father’? I’m old enough to be your grandfather”. For the entire ten years they lived together, Roger always gave Tish thirty dollars a week even when he went away on his trips.
Roger’s drinking got alarmingly worse. As his health started to fail, he moved out of Tish’s and went to live with Ray who took very good care of him and paid for the funeral. Tish went to the funeral in Albany with Roger’s mother, grandmother and sister. Roger was twenty-eight when he died.
We sit in Tish’s living room. He points to an urn on a shelf and tells me that’s where Peter’s ashes are. He sits across from me on a roomy burgundy couch. On the wall behind him are two ornate crystal backed mirrors and dozens of framed photos of Tish’s past, his days as an impersonator, his friends as impersonators, his boyfriends, and his four friends who had sex changes. On the wall behind me is a picture of his mother, four brothers and two sisters. I ask if there is anything he wished he had done but never got to do. He answers “travel”. He continues to subscribe to National Geographic, to a French Canadian Genealogy monthly publication, and to Readers Digest in French from Montreal. He has never been to Montreal and plans to go with his friend Lenny in the spring.
Tish loves Bank Street. He treasures the friends he has made through the years, some only familiar faces whose names he’s never known. He misses those who have come and gone, the ones he worked with through the years, the ones who lived with him, and the neighbors who lived in our building. We reminisce about the old days and how the block has changed. The years have brought steep and staggering hikes in commercial rents with the newest retail clothing shop on the block rumored to be paying sixty six thousand dollars a month. Shanvilla, the grocery store on the corner of Bank and West Fourth, is now a French country antique store; the hair salon on the northeast corner and the travel company on the southwest corner are both Marc Jacobs boutiques. All kinds of stores have come and gone in the retail space in our corner building: the Chinese laundry and Left Bank Books on West Fourth are now Minerva Café, a lively café run by great people. The corner store was a butcher shop where Tish remembers buying steaks in 1956; then came a cobbler; next Ivan’s Tie Dye where Ivan created clothes for Janis Joplin; Arnold’s Turtle, a vegetarian restaurant; Joe’s Café run by a father and son; and for twenty years La Focaccia. The newest addition is Tremont, an exceptional restaurant featuring New American food with a Mediterranean accent.
Happy 88th birthday, Tish. You are one of Bank Street’s treasures.
He was born Joseph Touchette and grew up in New England to French Canadian parents, an only child for almost seven years, spoiled by both sides of the family. He was the “petit garcon” which got garbled into half French and half English and became his nickname, Ti-boy. He is blessed with a large and close knit family: brother Dede, six years younger than Tish, and married 56 years; Bang, two years younger than Dede, and married 52 years; his brother Donnie who he used to take care of and who loved to hide in the maze of cornfields, now 57; his sister Agnes who lives in Florida; and his sister Rita who lives in Connecticut in his mother’s house. Tish lost one brother, Buck, who was born when Tish was 11 years old. When he goes home to his many nieces and nephews, he’s “Uncle Joe.”
Tish started working as a young boy. He recalls running across the field from school, dressed in a suit and tie, to work at the woolen mills factory. The mill was converted by the Germans and become known as William Primms Metals; they manufactured safety pins and bobby pins. Tish’s job was to thread the wire; he started out as the #3 boy who oiled the machines. Eventually he moved up to the #2 and then to the #1 boy where he supervised others. He weighed 98 pounds and was expected to lift 98 lbs. He laughs now and says “I didn’t know I was so macho.” He also worked at the La Rosa Macaroni Company.
He made $18 a week, gave his mother $12, and spent the remaining few dollars for tap dancing and ballet lessons at the Rhode Island Conservatory.
Tish sang in church at weddings, funerals, Sunday services and Tuesday night devotions to the Blessed Mother until he was 25. His closest friends were his piano teacher and her sister, the organist, two unmarried women known in those days as “old maids”. He had some friends who were likely gay but no one used that expression back then; anyone effeminate was called sissy or pansy. It was unsettling to be a gay person in so small a community, always wondering if you are the only one.
Early on Tish went to Boston and was so naïve he didn’t realize the dancing girls were all dancing boys. What he did realize was that he was in awe of the elegance of the experience. He was about 17 or 18 when he heard of a club in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, called a “gay bar.” The first time he saw two men dancing was at The College Inn in Boston and it took him a week to get over it. His uncle was in a jitterbug contest and one of the men dancing was a friend of his mother’s.
Tish was twenty, ready and eager to move to New York City, when his father died at the age of forty. This was the saddest time of his life not only because he loved and missed his father but because he knew it was up to him to stay home and help his mother who was then thirty eight years old. For the next six years he helped care for his siblings until his mother remarried a man who was a very good stepfather to Tish and the father of his brother Donnie. Tish lived across the street from the church where his grandparents were sextons and the cemetery was literally in his back yard. When his father died the family went directly from the house to the church to the cemetery and instead of taking a limousine they simply walked back to the house. Tish joked with his brother that all they had to do was look out their window to see if the wind blew the flowers off their father’s grave. His favorite subject in school was history and he loved walking through the graveyards of the different churches where he could see the tombstones of the French Canadians. The Protestant cemeteries were where the revolutionary war Yankees were buried.
One of his early jobs was at the legendary Celebrity Club in Providence, Rhode Island, believed to be the first interracial nightclub in New England, where he and his friend Bing would go for Sunday afternoon jam sessions. The club featured top national jazz and R&B acts as well as local talent in the 1950s. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday would come to Providence and stay for week-long engagements. On one of those Sunday afternoons Louis Armstrong was there; he didn’t have all the members of his band with him, just six people. Tish heard the gravelly voice behind him “Wanna do a set?” And so Tish did “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “All of Me” with Louis and rounded out the afternoon at the bar talking with Armstrong’s singer, Thelma Middleton.
Tish had been working at the Wonder Bar in Norwich, Connecticut for six weeks when the owner received a letter from the State Liquor Authority (SLA) stating Tish could no longer work there in women’s attire because it was against the laws of the state of Connecticut for a man to wear female clothes. The Connecticut mill towns were struggling to deal with the SLA. So Tish’s career as a female impersonator – the word “drag” was never used – was delayed a while longer. He compares his appearance at that time to Adam Lambert: he didn’t want to break any laws but delighted in being obvious; he wore pants but lots of theatrical make-up. He had his brown hair curled and used his mother’s bleach to gradually lighten it. Three quarters of the audience was from the submarine base. Tish’s brother, then a sailor stationed in New London, would tell Tish how his friends would say what a great time they had at the club. Tish warned him not to let on that the star of the show was his brother – 80% might like it but the other 20% might want to kill him. He was so popular that the Wonder Bar put his picture in the Norwich Bulletin advertising “Miss Tish”. His friends, his family, his relatives, in fact the whole state accepted him as the “Joe” they always knew.
He left the Wonder Bar for the Stage Coach Inn in Voluntown, in the town of Norwich, the birthplace of Benedict Arnold, a club that had been a real stage coach inn during the Revolutionary War. It was across the street from a Catholic church. One afternoon a priest came in to the club. “Are you Tish?” the priest asked. “I have nothing against your show but when my parishioners come to seven o’clock confessions on Saturday evening, there’s no parking!” Tish’s fans from The Wonder Bar had followed Tish the twelve miles to the Stagecoach Inn. He assured the priest he would be there for only two more weeks because The Wonder Bar wanted him back. The owner there said that since Tish started, he had paid off his mortgage and gotten a new car.
Part of his act was telling the audience that the owner of the bar had decided that Tish should have other impersonators in his act and so he was going to audition some people from the audience. Tish would seriously scrutinize the room, pick out the three roughest looking sailors and prompt them to do exactly as he did; he would sashay around the room in flowing chiffon and, to the delight of the audience, the sailors would have to do exactly the same.
Tish met his first boyfriend when he was 27. Philip was 24, lived across from Brown University, and was planning to get married, when he visited a club in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Tish was singing Sunday and Monday nights. The club was located next to Slaters Textile Mills, the first textile mill in the country, constructed in 1789. Tish tells the story of the seven clowns from Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to the club one night from the circus in Providence. The next day the circus moved on to Hartford where 67 people died in a huge fire, making that the last time Barnum & Bailey Circus was held under a tent.
Philip’s father was a sergeant in the Korean War and Philip introduced him to Tish in Connecticut. It was a congenial enough meeting but afterward his father made it clear to Philip that if he kept seeing Tish he’d have to move out. Philip lived in his car for three or four days without saying anything. Soon after he moved into the barn with Tish. The barn belonged to Tish’s great aunt and her husband who lived in a colonial home on the property. They had converted part of the barn to a two room apartment and when the couple would argue, that’s where the husband would sleep. Tish had been living with his mother but when she remarried and the apartment became available, Tish moved in and gave his aunt three dollars a week. There was no plumbing and no water and he cooked with a kerosene stove and used an outhouse at the bottom of the hill, but he loved living there and stayed for two years.
In 1952 Philip visited New Yorkto find a place to rent. Within a week he found an apartment at 49 Macdougal Street, got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and came back to get Tish and Francis, a friend of theirs who was what in those days was called a “state kid”, essentially a foster child, who went on to become a doorman in a very exquisite hotel. They packed the car with as much as they could possibly squeeze in; Tish says it reminded him of Tobacco Road.
Their next apartment was four rooms on West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue above a club called The Pepper Pot where Tony Bennett got his start. Tish says it was Bob Hope who first saw him and urged a name change from Anthony Dominick Benedetto to Tony Bennett. Jimmy Walker who had been mayor of New York City in 1926 had once kept a mistress on the top floor of the building. In 1953 when that apartment became vacant, Tish wanted to live there but the rent was too high. It was $200 a month.
Tish decided to apply for a job at Moroccan Village.
“I’d like to work here,” he told them.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a female impersonator.”
Tish’s act consisted of singing French standards in the style of Edith Piaf in a black dress or as Mary Martin singing “Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” from South Pacific which was then playing to enthusiastic reviews.
He auditioned, got the job, everyone happily took him under their wings, and Tish began his reign in New York City. It was at Moroccan Village that he started wearing wigs and exquisite gowns. The bullet holes were still evident in Tish’s dressing room where Bobby Dell, the M.C., had gotten shot in the arm two years before. Tish says if there had never been a mafia, there would never have been gay clubs. The Profacis and Gambinos kept them going. They were known only as The Boys.
He had been working at Moroccan Village for two years and was feeling overwhelmed; he was understudying everybody, singers and dancers, and was considering giving his notice. A man came in and introduced himself as Tutty and said he had a club in Hoboken, had heard Tish was leaving, and said he was looking to replace someone named Georgette and would pay Tish for two nights’ work what he was now getting for six. Tish soon found out it wasn’t a club at all; it was a bar. One of the musicians who played for Tish had been the person who accompanied Frank Sinatra to his audition on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, American radio’s best-known talent show.
In 1954 Tish, Philip, and Francis moved fromWest Fourth Street into a one family house in Hoboken where Tish worked at Tutty’s, the bar downstairs. The house was next door to the Democratic Club. Frank Sinatra’s mother, who was the president of the Democratic Club, would come in to use the oven to make chicken in the basket and French fries to sell for a dollar at fundraisers. On The Waterfront was being filmed in Hoboken; the longshoremen would come in and drink beer and try to get the guys to peddle the dresses they confiscated from the ships.
In 1955 Tish began working at the Holiday Lounge which was around the corner from the Clam Broth House on Hudson Street; he sang on Friday and Saturday and was the bartender on Sunday and Wednesdays. He remembers the spectacular views from the window of their apartment overlooking the Hudson and loved watching the ocean liners, the Queen Elizabeth going out and the America coming in.
On the last day of 1955 Tish moved into Apartment Number 1 at51 Bank Street. He piled his belongings on the floor and went out clubbing to bring in the new year. His rent was $52 a month.
Tish’s early days on Bank Street were busy ones. He already enjoyed a circle of friends from his two years working at MoroccanVillage. When Moroccan Village closed, he went to the Soiree on Third Street. He was never without work and performed both in what were known as “white tablecloth clubs” and clubs with sawdust on the floor. Posh or less than posh, he always insisted on the same salary.
Next was Tippy’s. “Where’s the dressing room?” he asked when he walked in for the first time with his group. “Oh, we don’t have a dressing room.” So they found a few empty beer crates in the backyard, turned them upside down, put tablecloths on them, and that’s where they would put on their wigs and makeup. The neighbors in the adjoining building would look out the windows and talk to them while they got ready for their show.
For about three months in the early sixties Tish worked at the Heat Wave, now the Blue Note. At the Heat Wave Tish was a male dancer in an ensemble of four guys and one girl named Helen. It was Helen who suggested that during this slow period Tish might as well work as a male dancer while he waited for female impersonation jobs to come along.
The opening number was the French Apache Dance, featuring one guy wearing a beret and a handkerchief around his neck. The finale was the same group dressed in tuxedos, with top hats and canes. Soon the manager asked Tish why he was working as a male dancer. The manager’s friend had a club called the Capri, in the same building as the famous 82 club, known as “the” club for female impersonators. So off Tish went to the Capri where booking agents regularly attended the performances. One agent suggested Tish start his own a revue and promised him bookings. At the time, circa 1962, the Jewel Box Revue was very popular – it was composed of 25 men and one woman who is almost 90 now. The booking agent suggested the name The French Box Revue.
Once the booking agents saw the show Tish quickly was offered club dates at resorts in the Catskills. For three years from the fourth of July to Labor Day, six nights a week, Tish was booked. He was featured at Evans Nightclub in Loch Sheldrake which burned to the ground in the mid seventies. Another club he worked was Martha Kaye’s Peppermint Lounge off Route 17. Sunday night after the last show was a quick trip into the city to pick up his mail and Tuesday afternoon it was back to the Catskills by car with his friend Lenny, with whom he is still close friends today. They speak every night on the telephone. If one doesn’t call, the other one will.
Winters he was back with his revue at the Crazy Horse on Bleecker Street, now Terra Blues. The Crazy Horse, an espresso house that let you bring in a bottle of wine, was next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen played. Bill Cosby worked in the cellar at another club on Bleecker Street. It was the heyday of nightclubs in Greenwich Village.
Tish worked six nights a week, would come home at four in the morning, get up at one in the afternoon and go to Jeanne’s Patio or Tors for coffee and socializing, always on the lookout for beautiful guys to work in his shows. His weekends were spent going out for fun. He headed for after hours clubs with a mix of straight and gay people, show people, musicians, dancing and relaxation.
The Catskill work lasted about three years. By now it was 1970 and the French Box Revue was being booked everywhere. At Silhouette, a club in Brooklyn, the owner apologized to Tish for having promised a booking to someone else for one week — it was Christine Jorgenson. But that run was short lived and the owner told Tish he was relieved to have the French Box Revue back because all Jorgenson could do was talk about her operation. Often the Revue would get booked for a single week and end up staying for much longer – that was the case with a club in Hazlet,New Jersey where a one week booking became 22 weeks. Owners were always ecstatic with the audience enthusiasm.
In those days these were all straight clubs. Straight couples went there for the entertainment value. Revues like the Powder Puff Revue and Guys Will Be Girls were very popular. Tish was friends with Mabel who played piano at Arthur’s Café where the club owner, like so many other proprietors of the day, was careful not to have his place singled out as a gay bar. But even in full drag Tish was welcomed. Often the bartender would say “Tish, there’s a drink for you over here.” “From who?” Tish would always ask. One night the bartender answered “From a lieutenant!” It turned out to be one of the policeman from the Sixth Precinct where Tish had been booked for a one night special party.
Tish loved being an entertainer and never felt it was a chore, but the world of female impersonator revues was slowly drifting away. That’s when Tish started his celebrated stoop sales. On Saturdays and Sundays he would set up shop with tables and clothes racks; feather boas, beaded gowns, and rhinestone studded treasures would be for sale. It is a Bank Street tradition to see him out there on the stoop from early spring until it gets too cold, selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, books, art, and whatever else friends and neighbors bring him.
In the sixties Tish had a silver gray French poodle called Albert. A French designer who created Tish’s wardrobe was breeding French poodles. Albert, the product of a brother and sister poodle who mated, could no longer be considered pure bred. This incited the French designer’s boyfriend who threw the puppy across the room, leaving the dog with a limp. The designer was shaken and told Tish he had to help her find someone to adopt the dog before it suffered any more abuse. Tish planned to give the dog away – he said the dog looked like a sheep because he had never been groomed or properly cared for – but instead he took the dog to a groomer and Albert turned out so handsome that Tish kept him. They were inseparable for 17 years. Tish laughs when he tells the story that on the night he met the boyfriend he told the guy “You’re not much of a man for what you did to that dog. I ought to get the boys to break your leg.” That night at the club Tish was impersonating Kim Novak but he likes to say there was no doubt who the real man was.
In the seventies Tish, then 41, had a girlfriend. Diane was 21, lived on Carmine Street, and was a beautiful blonde who Tish said looked like Alice in Wonderland. She worked as an elevator operator at the New Yorker Hotel and started coming to the Capri where Tish worked. They were together for three years and became very close but she became demanding. She told Tish “I want to have your child, a baby with blue eyes and blonde hair.” And Tish said “But, Diane, I have brown hair!” If you’re alone and depressed, invite Tish. Tish can make a joke out of anything. He was recently in the hospital and whispered to the nurse “You’ll have to give me your phone number so I can find out where the people who work here learned to cook so bad.”
Tish considers himself lucky because any affair or relationship he has had always came to him. He never had to go looking.
One of those relationships was Peter Russell. Peter would follow Tish down the street until one day they started talking and became friends and Peter moved in to Bank Street and lived there for several years. Tish tried to talk Peter out of his desire to get breast implants, but Peter wouldn’t listen. Determined to become an entertainer, he had his implants, became known as Eve, and became one of the best strippers and dancers in Tish’s revue. Peter and Tish would go out to clubs after hours and one night a doorman greeted them with “Here they are, mother and daughter” to which Tish replied “What do you mean? Peter doesn’t look like my mother.” Another time they were leaving a club at six in the morning. From behind someone put his arms around Tish and said “You’re coming home with me this morning.” Without seeing his face, Tish resisted and kept walking. Peter saw who it was, though – it was Mick Jagger.
Drugs and alcohol took their toll and Peter died young of cirrhosis of the liver. Murphy, one of the original organizers of the Gay Pride Parade, planned a memorial at St. John’s Church on Waverly Place in the Village. Tish made him promise not to call on him to come up to speak. When Murphy started saying how so many people loved Eve “but no one loved Eve more than Tish,” Tish walked up to the pulpit. He talked about how he had loved Peter when Peter was Peter and how he had loved Peter when Peter was Eve. He talked about the many arguments they had and how he always took him back. “You don’t turn away someone you love.”
Tish and Billy first met at the Crazy Horse. “I hear you take in roommates,” Billy said to Tish, and Tish said yes, he did. So in moved Billy as roommate who for twenty dollars a week slept on one of the two couches in the front room. One night Tish found a note from Billy that said “please don’t go to any after hours clubs. Come home. I love you.” And that was how Billy moved into Tish’s bed. Billy continued to give Tish money and one night started peeling off hundred dollar bills, 18 in all, for a grand total of $1800. Tish always knew Billy was a hustler and suspected that’s where the money was coming from.
One day there was a knock on the door. Who is it? “FBI”. Billy in only a t-shirt and underwear bolted through the window, fled into the next building, made his way up to the roof, and then sprung through a skylight into a living room. He told the people he had just been robbed, they gave him some clothes, and he walked away. What Tish didn’t know until the FBI told him was that Billy had been forging checks. When Billy would go home with a john he would tear out the last check in the john’s checkbook and forge it. In time Billy met a girl and they had a son. “If anything ever happens to me,” he said to Tish, “I want you to raise my son.” Tish said “of course” and Billy was off. Five years later Tish ran into Billy’s wife and son at the Chicken Rib. The son was in a cub scout uniform and was selling chances. Billy’s wife told the boy, “this is your father’s best friend.” Billy had vanished.
One night Tish walked into his living room to find Mikey, Peter and a new boy sitting on his couch. Mikey said “I want you to meet Roger.” Roger had come to the city from Albany, had gotten a job as a busboy at Studio 54, and had met Mikey and Peter at the Haymarket, a club notorious for young boys looking to meet older men. Mikey explained that Roger had gotten robbed his first time there and needed a place to stay. Tish immediately felt protective of him. He was 34 years younger than Tish.
He told Roger if that’s how he wanted to make his money, that was his business, but he should let Tish introduce him to some generous and trustworthy older men. Roger continued to live with Tish for ten years; his parents would come down from Albany to have dinner with them. During all those years Roger had a generous companion, Ray, who spent over one hundred thousand dollars on him and together they traveled the world. Roger and Ray had their share of break-ups, mostly because Ray insisted on showing off Roger and introducing him as his “boyfriend” to which Roger would say “No I’m not.” Tish always encouraged Roger to make up and go back, reminding him that he didn’t have that kind of money and to be nice and enjoy the attention and lifestyle Ray was able to give him.
One night Roger came home with a t-shirt that said “I love Tish”. Tish wouldn’t let him wear it –he didn’t want it to look like he owned the boy. When Tish was working his night clubs, Roger would go out dancing and bar hopping. He would come home and wake Tish up and make bacon and eggs for him. He would bring Tish flowers and give him a kiss every night before he went out. His friends would tell Roger, “What do you want with Tish? He’s old enough to be your father” and Tish would tell him “what do they mean ‘your father’? I’m old enough to be your grandfather”. For the entire ten years they lived together, Roger always gave Tish thirty dollars a week even when he went away on his trips.
Roger’s drinking got alarmingly worse. As his health started to fail, he moved out of Tish’s and went to live with Ray who took very good care of him and paid for the funeral. Tish went to the funeral in Albany with Roger’s mother, grandmother and sister. Roger was twenty-eight when he died.
We sit in Tish’s living room. He points to an urn on a shelf and tells me that’s where Peter’s ashes are. He sits across from me on a roomy burgundy couch. On the wall behind him are two ornate crystal backed mirrors and dozens of framed photos of Tish’s past, his days as an impersonator, his friends as impersonators, his boyfriends, and his four friends who had sex changes. On the wall behind me is a picture of his mother, four brothers and two sisters. I ask if there is anything he wished he had done but never got to do. He answers “travel”. He continues to subscribe to National Geographic, to a French Canadian Genealogy monthly publication, and to Readers Digest in French from Montreal. He has never been to Montreal and plans to go with his friend Lenny in the spring.
Tish loves Bank Street. He treasures the friends he has made through the years, some only familiar faces whose names he’s never known. He misses those who have come and gone, the ones he worked with through the years, the ones who lived with him, and the neighbors who lived in our building. We reminisce about the old days and how the block has changed. The years have brought steep and staggering hikes in commercial rents with the newest retail clothing shop on the block rumored to be paying sixty six thousand dollars a month. Shanvilla, the grocery store on the corner of Bank and West Fourth, is now a French country antique store; the hair salon on the northeast corner and the travel company on the southwest corner are both Marc Jacobs boutiques. All kinds of stores have come and gone in the retail space in our corner building: the Chinese laundry and Left Bank Books on West Fourth are now Minerva Café, a lively café run by great people. The corner store was a butcher shop where Tish remembers buying steaks in 1956; then came a cobbler; next Ivan’s Tie Dye where Ivan created clothes for Janis Joplin; Arnold’s Turtle, a vegetarian restaurant; Joe’s Café run by a father and son; and for twenty years La Focaccia. The newest addition is Tremont, an exceptional restaurant featuring New American food with a Mediterranean accent.
Happy 88th birthday, Tish. You are one of Bank Street’s treasures.
Silvia's Interview
with Mariah Graham, Illustrator
March 2, 2012
Mariah Graham was born in Williamsburg, South Carolina, and was named after her grandmother. There were six children, five boys and one little girl. She was what was known as a “knee baby” – the baby who sits on her mother’s knee while the mother plays with the babies, in her case her twin brothers who are now 61.
Her parents were sharecroppers. They grew tobacco and cotton and she stated working in the fields when she was five or six picking cotton until she was 18. There was little time for fun and she doesn’t remember having any toys. Weekdays were for picking cotton and on weekends she would help her mother wash everyone’s clothes in a wash pot. She went directly from child to adult and never enjoyed her teenage years; yet, always the oddball, she stayed happy, never feeling victimized or deprived, seeing her life as perfectly fine just the way it was, unlike others who did nothing but complain.
She did not have a lot of friends growing up and her brothers didn’t understand girls nor appreciate having a sister. Her brothers were spoiled because the family’s hopes and dreams hinged on the boys; a daughter was merely “there.” She was tall, skinny, and smart, which she says didn’t make her too popular. She went to school in a three room schoolhouse until fourth grade, walking the four or five miles back and forth every day, and then to Tomlinson High School until eleventh grade. For as long as she can remember she drew and sketched endlessly. Inspired by the Sears Roebuck catalogues that ignited her imagination and awakened her dreams, she knew that when she grew up she would be a fashion illustrator.
Her father worked at Drexel, a furniture company, for forty dollars a week. At Christmas her father’s boss would give the family a large basket of fruits and candies. The family ate together every evening, often just one little chicken: her father got the breast, her mother the neck and the back; the twin brothers got the wings; Mariah got the thigh. It was all according to the hierarchy of the family. Mariah refused to do any of the cooking because her brothers didn’t have to do it. There was little justice when it came to equitable distribution with her brothers.
She was raised Methodist but neither religion nor spirituality were important components of their lives. Her parents weren’t bible touting people, but they were decent and honorable, snug and secure in their own skin. (Her relatives, she adds with a sly smile, sure had their hang-ups, though). Of all the things she learned from her parents, the most valuable was to treat people the way you expect to be treated. “What would you like to ask from God? I ask. She answers with conviction. “This is how I handle religion: God helps those that help themselves.”
One day the family who owned the farm sold it. There was no more sharecropping and no more money coming in. In 1964 the family moved to New York, their entire household in the trunk of the car. With the two older brothers grown up and already living in New York, there were five children making the trip north with her parents — three brothers, one nephew, and Mariah. The family rented an apartment on 128th Street. She fell in love with New York City. She was still in high school and continued her studies at Benjamin Franklin (now the High School of Science and Math) on East 115th Street off the east river. Her father was comfortable with the move to New York, but her mother wasn’t too happy and continued to go down south with the twins to pick cotton on other people’s farms; she stopped going down only when her sister moved north. The most difficult times in Mariah’s life were when she lost her parents – her father in 1982, her mother in 1990.
The person who has made the biggest impact on her life was Jack Potter, her teacher at The School of Visual Arts from 1965 to 1968; the course in those days was three years. He taught illustration and was a tough teacher but a caring one. “That’s the kind of teacher I have become, no nonsense but always compassionate, and I hope I’m the kind of teacher my students will never forget.” She has been teaching since 1977 and is currently at the International School of Language, headquartered in Sweden, and part of Fordham University in New York. “I teach exactly what I do,” she tells me. The school gives her an art room and a computer lab and she and the students shuffle from one to the other. She is passionate about her students and delighted to be able to pass on her lifetime of knowledge; her students number about 14 at any one time and currently are from ten different countries. They all want to go into different aspects of the design world. She explains that even in merchandising — the financial side of fashion — illustration is an essential skill. Some students insist they can’t draw but Mariah knows better; she never intimidates anyone, truly loves them, and is enough of a master that even the ones who think they will never be good at it, learn how.
What kind of people does she dislike? “Crazy people,” she laughs, pauses a minute, admits she can’t tolerate ignorance and stupidity, and then confesses she really doesn’t dislike anybody — she simply treats everyone as they treat her.
What is something that not a lot of people know about you? “That I’m a recluse. A loner. I like my own company and don’t really need to see another person.” She enjoyed a long and happy relationship with someone with whom she lived for 12 years until he died in 1994. She is presently in a new relationship.
On a scale of one to ten, how happy is she? “Eleven,” she answers, without skipping a beat. “Life is too short to have it any other way. I’m glad I had the childhood I had because I can’t get any lower than I’ve already been. I don’t have any weaknesses. And I can’t even think of any flaws. I just go ahead and take care of business and do what needs to be done. I am at my best every day. I don’t panic. Certainly there are things I have to deal with but I deal with them calmly. I’m just always calm. I never smoked, I never drank, my worst indulgence has been eating too many cookies. I’ve made a couple of mistakes – my woulda/shoulda/coulda’s – but why cry about it? You’re only going to get wet!” Very little stresses her out. “Maybe for two seconds I feel stressed and then I tell myself I better figure out another way. I’m a great figure-outer!” She is so even keeled, she tells me, that she very rarely even cries. She is not at all moody and her personality never changes – “what you see is what you get.” She doesn’t get political because she has no energy to fight for others, only for herself – but when that’s necessary, she does it.
Mariah loves antiques and antiquing and that is her only hobby. Her favorite collectible is “furniture – the bigger, the better!” Her house is a testament to her enthusiasm and admiration for fine things. You don’t know where to look first. Each corner and every wall has something exquisite tucked, nestled, draped, or hung. If she had a time machine, she would go back to the Victorian era or even the thirties “mostly to check out the furniture.”
What three character traits would your friends use to describe you? “Well, some of my friends call me a pioneer.” I can certainly understand why and I nod in agreement. Then she adds “confident . . . if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” and, finally, “strong willed.” We have a discussion about whether or not there is a distinction between confident and strong willed and decide that yes, they are indeed two different qualities, and she, happily, is both.
Breakfast every morning is oatmeal with fresh fruit. She would like to visit China and Japan, likes to read and enjoys the classics, especially Dickens. Her heroes are “people in their 70’s and 80’s who are still ‘doing’ – that’s what I call heroes, the ones who are still out there ‘doing.’”
What does she like to spend money on? “I like nice clothes. I bought myself an ankle length mink coat once. I just had to have it. But I don’t wear it much in the country because there’s always so much snow on the ground in the winters. I bought myself a pair of cowboy boots for $500 and those I wear all the time.”
Her highest paying job was $30,000, a rush job for a lingerie company that had to be completed in three weeks. She thrives on deadlines. One of her most famous illustrations is the leg of a woman for No Nonsense – she did that in 24 hours and it ran in every magazine in the country. She retains the rights. She is her own publicist, agent, mediator, and negotiator. Her past clients have included The New York Times, Vogue, and Disney, and she is currently embracing a new client with work in China. She has done illustrations for books, posters for movies, and editorial illustrations for print advertising.
Mariah spends a good portion of her day on the computer looking for work in her field. The transition to drawing on the computer and mastering software like Photoshop came easy for her. I ask what is the toughest thing about being creative and she answers there’s nothing at all tough about being creative. Even though she does not draw every day, drawing is like breathing for her; it has always been gratifying and her enormous affection for what she does assured her she would never get wedged in a job she hated.
She has had several exhibits at the Society of Illustrators on East 63rd Street in New York City. Founded in 1901, the mission of the Society is to promote the art, appreciation, and history of illustration. Her work has also been shown at Butler Gallery in Tarrytown, among other venues.
Her dream in life is simply to keep doing what she’s doing and introduce more people to her art. This is what she most wants to be remembered for. Her website is www.MariahGraham.com
Her parents were sharecroppers. They grew tobacco and cotton and she stated working in the fields when she was five or six picking cotton until she was 18. There was little time for fun and she doesn’t remember having any toys. Weekdays were for picking cotton and on weekends she would help her mother wash everyone’s clothes in a wash pot. She went directly from child to adult and never enjoyed her teenage years; yet, always the oddball, she stayed happy, never feeling victimized or deprived, seeing her life as perfectly fine just the way it was, unlike others who did nothing but complain.
She did not have a lot of friends growing up and her brothers didn’t understand girls nor appreciate having a sister. Her brothers were spoiled because the family’s hopes and dreams hinged on the boys; a daughter was merely “there.” She was tall, skinny, and smart, which she says didn’t make her too popular. She went to school in a three room schoolhouse until fourth grade, walking the four or five miles back and forth every day, and then to Tomlinson High School until eleventh grade. For as long as she can remember she drew and sketched endlessly. Inspired by the Sears Roebuck catalogues that ignited her imagination and awakened her dreams, she knew that when she grew up she would be a fashion illustrator.
Her father worked at Drexel, a furniture company, for forty dollars a week. At Christmas her father’s boss would give the family a large basket of fruits and candies. The family ate together every evening, often just one little chicken: her father got the breast, her mother the neck and the back; the twin brothers got the wings; Mariah got the thigh. It was all according to the hierarchy of the family. Mariah refused to do any of the cooking because her brothers didn’t have to do it. There was little justice when it came to equitable distribution with her brothers.
She was raised Methodist but neither religion nor spirituality were important components of their lives. Her parents weren’t bible touting people, but they were decent and honorable, snug and secure in their own skin. (Her relatives, she adds with a sly smile, sure had their hang-ups, though). Of all the things she learned from her parents, the most valuable was to treat people the way you expect to be treated. “What would you like to ask from God? I ask. She answers with conviction. “This is how I handle religion: God helps those that help themselves.”
One day the family who owned the farm sold it. There was no more sharecropping and no more money coming in. In 1964 the family moved to New York, their entire household in the trunk of the car. With the two older brothers grown up and already living in New York, there were five children making the trip north with her parents — three brothers, one nephew, and Mariah. The family rented an apartment on 128th Street. She fell in love with New York City. She was still in high school and continued her studies at Benjamin Franklin (now the High School of Science and Math) on East 115th Street off the east river. Her father was comfortable with the move to New York, but her mother wasn’t too happy and continued to go down south with the twins to pick cotton on other people’s farms; she stopped going down only when her sister moved north. The most difficult times in Mariah’s life were when she lost her parents – her father in 1982, her mother in 1990.
The person who has made the biggest impact on her life was Jack Potter, her teacher at The School of Visual Arts from 1965 to 1968; the course in those days was three years. He taught illustration and was a tough teacher but a caring one. “That’s the kind of teacher I have become, no nonsense but always compassionate, and I hope I’m the kind of teacher my students will never forget.” She has been teaching since 1977 and is currently at the International School of Language, headquartered in Sweden, and part of Fordham University in New York. “I teach exactly what I do,” she tells me. The school gives her an art room and a computer lab and she and the students shuffle from one to the other. She is passionate about her students and delighted to be able to pass on her lifetime of knowledge; her students number about 14 at any one time and currently are from ten different countries. They all want to go into different aspects of the design world. She explains that even in merchandising — the financial side of fashion — illustration is an essential skill. Some students insist they can’t draw but Mariah knows better; she never intimidates anyone, truly loves them, and is enough of a master that even the ones who think they will never be good at it, learn how.
What kind of people does she dislike? “Crazy people,” she laughs, pauses a minute, admits she can’t tolerate ignorance and stupidity, and then confesses she really doesn’t dislike anybody — she simply treats everyone as they treat her.
What is something that not a lot of people know about you? “That I’m a recluse. A loner. I like my own company and don’t really need to see another person.” She enjoyed a long and happy relationship with someone with whom she lived for 12 years until he died in 1994. She is presently in a new relationship.
On a scale of one to ten, how happy is she? “Eleven,” she answers, without skipping a beat. “Life is too short to have it any other way. I’m glad I had the childhood I had because I can’t get any lower than I’ve already been. I don’t have any weaknesses. And I can’t even think of any flaws. I just go ahead and take care of business and do what needs to be done. I am at my best every day. I don’t panic. Certainly there are things I have to deal with but I deal with them calmly. I’m just always calm. I never smoked, I never drank, my worst indulgence has been eating too many cookies. I’ve made a couple of mistakes – my woulda/shoulda/coulda’s – but why cry about it? You’re only going to get wet!” Very little stresses her out. “Maybe for two seconds I feel stressed and then I tell myself I better figure out another way. I’m a great figure-outer!” She is so even keeled, she tells me, that she very rarely even cries. She is not at all moody and her personality never changes – “what you see is what you get.” She doesn’t get political because she has no energy to fight for others, only for herself – but when that’s necessary, she does it.
Mariah loves antiques and antiquing and that is her only hobby. Her favorite collectible is “furniture – the bigger, the better!” Her house is a testament to her enthusiasm and admiration for fine things. You don’t know where to look first. Each corner and every wall has something exquisite tucked, nestled, draped, or hung. If she had a time machine, she would go back to the Victorian era or even the thirties “mostly to check out the furniture.”
What three character traits would your friends use to describe you? “Well, some of my friends call me a pioneer.” I can certainly understand why and I nod in agreement. Then she adds “confident . . . if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” and, finally, “strong willed.” We have a discussion about whether or not there is a distinction between confident and strong willed and decide that yes, they are indeed two different qualities, and she, happily, is both.
Breakfast every morning is oatmeal with fresh fruit. She would like to visit China and Japan, likes to read and enjoys the classics, especially Dickens. Her heroes are “people in their 70’s and 80’s who are still ‘doing’ – that’s what I call heroes, the ones who are still out there ‘doing.’”
What does she like to spend money on? “I like nice clothes. I bought myself an ankle length mink coat once. I just had to have it. But I don’t wear it much in the country because there’s always so much snow on the ground in the winters. I bought myself a pair of cowboy boots for $500 and those I wear all the time.”
Her highest paying job was $30,000, a rush job for a lingerie company that had to be completed in three weeks. She thrives on deadlines. One of her most famous illustrations is the leg of a woman for No Nonsense – she did that in 24 hours and it ran in every magazine in the country. She retains the rights. She is her own publicist, agent, mediator, and negotiator. Her past clients have included The New York Times, Vogue, and Disney, and she is currently embracing a new client with work in China. She has done illustrations for books, posters for movies, and editorial illustrations for print advertising.
Mariah spends a good portion of her day on the computer looking for work in her field. The transition to drawing on the computer and mastering software like Photoshop came easy for her. I ask what is the toughest thing about being creative and she answers there’s nothing at all tough about being creative. Even though she does not draw every day, drawing is like breathing for her; it has always been gratifying and her enormous affection for what she does assured her she would never get wedged in a job she hated.
She has had several exhibits at the Society of Illustrators on East 63rd Street in New York City. Founded in 1901, the mission of the Society is to promote the art, appreciation, and history of illustration. Her work has also been shown at Butler Gallery in Tarrytown, among other venues.
Her dream in life is simply to keep doing what she’s doing and introduce more people to her art. This is what she most wants to be remembered for. Her website is www.MariahGraham.com
Silvia's Interview
with Beriah Wall, Artist
April 2, 2012
Beriah Wall was born on February 12, 1947, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, the first of seven children: four boys, Beriah, John, David and Jeremiah, and three girls, Nancy, Marjorie and Hope.
His favorite childhood memory is his mother making meringues, pastries of whipped egg whites and sugar. His earliest childhood memory is being chastised for playing in shaving cream at the age of three; by that time the second child, his brother, had been born and the family moved from their home on East 52nd Street to Vermont. There he enjoyed a privileged boyhood playing tennis, plenty of room outdoors, Christmas holidays with piles of presents, and family vacations where parents and all seven children went skiing.
His father was eleven years older than his mother and had a printing business inVermont; Beriah remembers him as being fairly busy most of the time, but always with time for golf. He was a punitive man: “What happened to that hammer? Did it grow legs and walk away?” Beriah was grateful he wasn’t always around.
The children had their share of discipline and boundaries. They lived on the edge of town in a house with a big field; from the ages of ten to about thirteen, he remembers having goats to feed. His sister, five years younger, collected goat milk and sold it. He had a paper route in seventh and eighth grades and that was when he first started reading newspapers. His heroes were Willie Mays and Ernie Banks. He was raised Episcopalian but says that God is a bigger question than he really likes to tackle.
Beriah’s great great great paternal grandfather was a famous art collector in Providence. One of Beriah’s treasures is a passport dated 1796 from another ancestor, also named Beriah Wall. His paternal grandfather, Beriah Wall, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother had died giving birth to him. As a young man he moved to Puerto Rico in 1905, making him somewhat of a black sheep, an outcast, a colonialist, who wore white linen suits, grew grapefruit, and married Beriah’s grandmother, a schoolteacher from Minneapolis and the daughter of a Methodist minister.
Beriah’s mother was a Radcliffe-educated blue blood New Yorker who enjoyed a first-rate background while his father grew up in Puerto Rico. In his mother’s family, it was expected and understood that children would go away to boarding school. When he was 14, Beriah was sent off to The Barlow School in Amenia, New York.
Beriah recalls himself in those days as unformed, uninformed and ill-defined, his thoughts the baggy thoughts of a fourteen year old — he dabbled in some artistic pursuits, was good in English and history, liked all his subjects but had a bad math teacher. He was glad to be free of the tension of his parents’ home and to be in a co-ed progressive high school where he could be around girls. His mother hoped he would aim for the Diplomatic Corps but his father was less optimistic: “What are you gonna be when you grow up? A garbage man?” His father invested a lot of worry in Beriah, distressed that he was a mama’s boy and wasn’t tough enough. When Beriah came home from the University of Vermont with his first piece of pottery, his father asked if they had courses in marketing. But Beriah already knew he was destined to be an artist and his mantra became the lines from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.
Following boarding school Beriah went to Bard for a year and flunked out. While there he suffered a serious knee injury. He recalls a stark memory of his parents coming to see him in the hospital and arguing about divorce at his bedside while he was facing knee surgery. After his recovery, in the summers of 1966 and 1967 he worked in the Forest Service making $2.14 an hour; in the winters he worked for his uncle, Richard Bliss, who ran a little boarding school on a hilltop in Andover,Vermont. In those days college was cheap and he was able to pay his way at the University of Vermont where he studied pottery and sculpture: welded steel, carved marble, and created stone assemblages. Painting came later.
In the mid-seventies he met Janice Farley, whose father had moved from Baltimore to Manchester,Vermont to manage the Equinox House, a well-known hotel. Both potters, they lived together for four years and launched The Pot Shop in Vermont.
One day in 1975 while playing Frisbee a little too passionately, the Frisbee sailed toward the window of The Pot Shop. Seized with the panic of seeing the window about to be shattered, he grabbed for the Frisbee and went through the window and ended up impaled halfway. He did extensive nerve damage to his left arm and was no longer able to work at the potter’s wheel. He cites this as the one thing in his life that made the biggest impact on who he is today. It was a game changer and set in motion a period of evaluation. It was then that he came up with the idea of minting coins. These are ceramic discs, the size of poker chips, embossed with short messages: real/good, income/outcome, man/made, fun/fund, dated, with the initials bw. These mobile sculptures travel hand to hand everywhere. Beriah is never without a pocketful and sprinkles them everywhere; friends take them along on vacation and scatter them all over the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/nyregion/17coins.html
Beriah and Janice were married in Vermont in October 1977 by a Justice of the Peace. They made a ceramic heart-shaped coin to commemorate the small and very private ceremony where only one friend, Leonard Dubrow, was present as a witness. The next day he and Janice came to New York City and leased a loft on Franklin Street and didn’t tell anybody about the marriage for two or three weeks. They immersed themselves in their art and put off having children for ten years. In 1986 Josiah was born and Emma came along two years later in 1988, and it is his children that he is most proud. Janice and Beriah divorced after seventeen years of marriage and remain close friends.
He is an accomplished artisanal plasterer, a master in the art of complex detailing for interiors, mixing pigments with plaster to match paint chips or to coordinate colored interiors. He has worked on many notable projects, the most recent of which is the David Barton Gym on Astor Place in New York City.
Beriah lives simply and doesn’t ask for a lot of advice or direction. Like all baby boomers, he is fearful of retirement, of the shrinking of skills and abilities, and the inevitable losses that come with age. It is this uncertainty about the future that causes him stress. He always assumed he would be a great artist and never worried about money.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy is he? “I’d go for eight,” he tells me. What makes him happy? The winter sunlight streaming deep down the hall of his home in the morning and his studio in Red Hook where he works on his painting almost every day; his studio is proof of his fertile creative punch with paintings, big and small, everywhere. The hardest thing to give up would be his art, but the toughest thing about being creative, he says, is maintaining the belief that it is worthwhile and that it has a purpose. He does not enjoy seclusion, is far from a loner, and is nourished by an audience, feedback and interaction. He relishes open minded people who are curious. If he had only six months to live, he would spend it making lots of art, and would want most to be remembered for “the brilliance of his artistic vision.” What three words would his friends use to describe him? “Artistic, flaky, and I would like them to say thoughtful.” How would he describe himself? “Lucky”
We talked about “what if” he hadn’t become an artist; what else might he have been drawn to. At first he says the practice of law because he loves the word play of it, the articulation, the sophistry, the turning of phrases. Later he concedes law school would certainly be quality training but he’d much rather make movies because he loves watching them. I ask if he would rather write, direct, or produce, and he says all of it. He shares a metaphor from a screenwriter friend who said writing a screenplay is like serving a volleyball — it is bound to get shaped, transformed and transfigured by 50 different pairs of hands.
If he could meet anyone, dead or alive, it would be President Obama. He enjoys shooting pool and playing ping pong. And if he could be anywhere in the world right now, he’d pick Morocco.
What are your strengths, I ask: “My arm is strong, my aim is true.” And your weaknesses? “Chocolate and women.” What is his favorite comfort food? “Well, I don’t keep ice cream in the fridge.”
His work can be found on his website at www.BeriahWall.com
His favorite childhood memory is his mother making meringues, pastries of whipped egg whites and sugar. His earliest childhood memory is being chastised for playing in shaving cream at the age of three; by that time the second child, his brother, had been born and the family moved from their home on East 52nd Street to Vermont. There he enjoyed a privileged boyhood playing tennis, plenty of room outdoors, Christmas holidays with piles of presents, and family vacations where parents and all seven children went skiing.
His father was eleven years older than his mother and had a printing business inVermont; Beriah remembers him as being fairly busy most of the time, but always with time for golf. He was a punitive man: “What happened to that hammer? Did it grow legs and walk away?” Beriah was grateful he wasn’t always around.
The children had their share of discipline and boundaries. They lived on the edge of town in a house with a big field; from the ages of ten to about thirteen, he remembers having goats to feed. His sister, five years younger, collected goat milk and sold it. He had a paper route in seventh and eighth grades and that was when he first started reading newspapers. His heroes were Willie Mays and Ernie Banks. He was raised Episcopalian but says that God is a bigger question than he really likes to tackle.
Beriah’s great great great paternal grandfather was a famous art collector in Providence. One of Beriah’s treasures is a passport dated 1796 from another ancestor, also named Beriah Wall. His paternal grandfather, Beriah Wall, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother had died giving birth to him. As a young man he moved to Puerto Rico in 1905, making him somewhat of a black sheep, an outcast, a colonialist, who wore white linen suits, grew grapefruit, and married Beriah’s grandmother, a schoolteacher from Minneapolis and the daughter of a Methodist minister.
Beriah’s mother was a Radcliffe-educated blue blood New Yorker who enjoyed a first-rate background while his father grew up in Puerto Rico. In his mother’s family, it was expected and understood that children would go away to boarding school. When he was 14, Beriah was sent off to The Barlow School in Amenia, New York.
Beriah recalls himself in those days as unformed, uninformed and ill-defined, his thoughts the baggy thoughts of a fourteen year old — he dabbled in some artistic pursuits, was good in English and history, liked all his subjects but had a bad math teacher. He was glad to be free of the tension of his parents’ home and to be in a co-ed progressive high school where he could be around girls. His mother hoped he would aim for the Diplomatic Corps but his father was less optimistic: “What are you gonna be when you grow up? A garbage man?” His father invested a lot of worry in Beriah, distressed that he was a mama’s boy and wasn’t tough enough. When Beriah came home from the University of Vermont with his first piece of pottery, his father asked if they had courses in marketing. But Beriah already knew he was destined to be an artist and his mantra became the lines from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.
Following boarding school Beriah went to Bard for a year and flunked out. While there he suffered a serious knee injury. He recalls a stark memory of his parents coming to see him in the hospital and arguing about divorce at his bedside while he was facing knee surgery. After his recovery, in the summers of 1966 and 1967 he worked in the Forest Service making $2.14 an hour; in the winters he worked for his uncle, Richard Bliss, who ran a little boarding school on a hilltop in Andover,Vermont. In those days college was cheap and he was able to pay his way at the University of Vermont where he studied pottery and sculpture: welded steel, carved marble, and created stone assemblages. Painting came later.
In the mid-seventies he met Janice Farley, whose father had moved from Baltimore to Manchester,Vermont to manage the Equinox House, a well-known hotel. Both potters, they lived together for four years and launched The Pot Shop in Vermont.
One day in 1975 while playing Frisbee a little too passionately, the Frisbee sailed toward the window of The Pot Shop. Seized with the panic of seeing the window about to be shattered, he grabbed for the Frisbee and went through the window and ended up impaled halfway. He did extensive nerve damage to his left arm and was no longer able to work at the potter’s wheel. He cites this as the one thing in his life that made the biggest impact on who he is today. It was a game changer and set in motion a period of evaluation. It was then that he came up with the idea of minting coins. These are ceramic discs, the size of poker chips, embossed with short messages: real/good, income/outcome, man/made, fun/fund, dated, with the initials bw. These mobile sculptures travel hand to hand everywhere. Beriah is never without a pocketful and sprinkles them everywhere; friends take them along on vacation and scatter them all over the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/nyregion/17coins.html
Beriah and Janice were married in Vermont in October 1977 by a Justice of the Peace. They made a ceramic heart-shaped coin to commemorate the small and very private ceremony where only one friend, Leonard Dubrow, was present as a witness. The next day he and Janice came to New York City and leased a loft on Franklin Street and didn’t tell anybody about the marriage for two or three weeks. They immersed themselves in their art and put off having children for ten years. In 1986 Josiah was born and Emma came along two years later in 1988, and it is his children that he is most proud. Janice and Beriah divorced after seventeen years of marriage and remain close friends.
He is an accomplished artisanal plasterer, a master in the art of complex detailing for interiors, mixing pigments with plaster to match paint chips or to coordinate colored interiors. He has worked on many notable projects, the most recent of which is the David Barton Gym on Astor Place in New York City.
Beriah lives simply and doesn’t ask for a lot of advice or direction. Like all baby boomers, he is fearful of retirement, of the shrinking of skills and abilities, and the inevitable losses that come with age. It is this uncertainty about the future that causes him stress. He always assumed he would be a great artist and never worried about money.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy is he? “I’d go for eight,” he tells me. What makes him happy? The winter sunlight streaming deep down the hall of his home in the morning and his studio in Red Hook where he works on his painting almost every day; his studio is proof of his fertile creative punch with paintings, big and small, everywhere. The hardest thing to give up would be his art, but the toughest thing about being creative, he says, is maintaining the belief that it is worthwhile and that it has a purpose. He does not enjoy seclusion, is far from a loner, and is nourished by an audience, feedback and interaction. He relishes open minded people who are curious. If he had only six months to live, he would spend it making lots of art, and would want most to be remembered for “the brilliance of his artistic vision.” What three words would his friends use to describe him? “Artistic, flaky, and I would like them to say thoughtful.” How would he describe himself? “Lucky”
We talked about “what if” he hadn’t become an artist; what else might he have been drawn to. At first he says the practice of law because he loves the word play of it, the articulation, the sophistry, the turning of phrases. Later he concedes law school would certainly be quality training but he’d much rather make movies because he loves watching them. I ask if he would rather write, direct, or produce, and he says all of it. He shares a metaphor from a screenwriter friend who said writing a screenplay is like serving a volleyball — it is bound to get shaped, transformed and transfigured by 50 different pairs of hands.
If he could meet anyone, dead or alive, it would be President Obama. He enjoys shooting pool and playing ping pong. And if he could be anywhere in the world right now, he’d pick Morocco.
What are your strengths, I ask: “My arm is strong, my aim is true.” And your weaknesses? “Chocolate and women.” What is his favorite comfort food? “Well, I don’t keep ice cream in the fridge.”
His work can be found on his website at www.BeriahWall.com
Silvia's Interview
with Janet Kaplan, Poet
June 3, 2012
Janet walked into my apartment bearing gifts: three of her most recent poetry books: Ascending Descending, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, and The Glazier’s Country; an “apple” handmade from recycled fibers embedded with seed that, when planted, will grow Sweet Leaf Basil; and lemon drop cookies. She was the sweetest gift of all, in her pink t-shirt and outrageous mane of hair.
Janet walked into my apartment bearing gifts: three of her most recent poetry books: Ascending Descending, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, and The Glazier’s Country; an “apple” handmade from recycled fibers embedded with seed that, when planted, will grow Sweet Leaf Basil; and lemon drop cookies. She was the sweetest gift of all, in her pink t-shirt and outrageous mane of hair.
Our conversation sprung easy: romancing life, divulging harbored hates, laughing at shared silliness, reflecting on haunted childhoods.
Janet grew up in the Bronx in the sixties and seventies. She was a tomboy until she was seven and played with a rough and tumble crowd. While not a particularly rough and tumble game, despite the name, her favorite game was slug. It was played mostly by girls, slapping a Spalding (which of course was pronounced “spaldine”) against the brick of an apartment building. She also played with her dolls, with her friend Stephen’s Matchbox cars, and teased Louise’s younger brother into “doctor and nurse.” She had an art show but nobody came. And because she was an only child with grandparents and two unmarried aunts, she had more toys than she knew what to do with – Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, plastic soldiers and dinosaurs, a Thumbelina doll, and a Chatty Cathy among them.
As a little girl her parents held an irresistible aura for her and, perhaps because they themselves were busy with marital troubles and other emotional woes, the things they possessed were a fascination. Like her father’s shampoo. It was a plastic bottle, refillable, but a bottle unlike any she had ever seen, kept in a medicine cabinet instead of in the shower and easy to reach. She could smell the shampoo, a scent both glorious and wicked, a smell like metal. It held a strange fascination and she was certain it was a concoction that would grow back her father’s shedding hair.
She could spend a whole day in her mother’s closet, closets really, plural, because her mother commandeered her husband’s closet as well. Janet would hide in her mother’s closet, way way back; she says it was like a tree house; she once fell asleep in there and her mother, not knowing where she was, called the police. Every hanger held two or more items of clothing, things that were never worn and just hung there. Her mother set few boundaries and didn’t mind at all when Janet would rummage through the closet and come away dressed up in her clothes. Janet still has some of her mother’s exquisite velvet and crinoline skirts. She recalls her mother’s white go-go boots and a mod mini dress, orange and purple with horizontal stripes. Her mother wrote poetry and had two serious nervous breakdowns, one when she was eighteen and the second at twenty-five, after Janet was born. She went back to work when Janet was seven and Janet felt abandoned; even when her mother was “there,” she never really was. Yet she cherishes the memories of those early days when together they would share her mother’s love of crafts, making clay from flour and paste and constructing mug racks out of the cardboard cylinders from paper towel rolls.
Janet recalls the day in 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. She was in kindergarten when she heard the news. They were having a fire drill in the corridor, four children standing per square. The teacher ran down the hall shouting “The President’s been shot.” “I’m not even sure I knew what a ‘president’ was, but I knew it was very sad.” At five years old, Janet was right between the ages of John and Caroline Kennedy and remembers identifying strongly with the children.
It was around the time of the Kennedy assassination that her father began exhibiting strange behaviors and getting very withdrawn. He could walk only with the help of crutches and by wrapping bandages around his legs for extra support. The doctors could find nothing wrong. It was a psychiatrist who said it was his rage and told her father it was essential that he speak out and stand up to his needy wife. Instead he drank vodka and did whatever he could not to be home. Her mother’s emotional reserves were wearing out. She weakened and stopped taking care of herself; she was unkempt and the house was a shambles. Janet was terrified that someone would come and take her away, as her grandfather had once threatened would happen.
Poetry was the path. She started young and in secret with a 2 x 3 notepad and a pencil. Her mother loved sweets but could not limit herself to one cookie or one piece of candy so she asked Janet to hide them. Then she’d ravage the house, unearthing Janet’s room, to hunt them down; there was no way Janet could take a chance on hiding a diary there. They lived in an Art Deco-style building (“1181Sheridan Avenue, Apartment 6J, Jerome 6-6289.”) Vintage apartments hold lovely surprises. There was a contraption in the bathroom, a clothing drying rack, never used because it didn’t sit over the tub, and water would have ended up dripping onto the floor. Janet would sit on the toilet, write her heart out, and hide her notes in the drying rack contraption. The first thing she remembers writing was two lists: People I Love, People I Hate. Maybe, she suggests, that’s where the poetry began.
I ask if she had any pets growing up; “endless turtles,” she tells me, “they got lost in the apartment.” She wanted a cat but her father didn’t like cats so they ended up getting a dog from Bide-a-Wee. One puppy, shivering and cowering, was the one she identified with.
Janet grew up loving fashion. One of her favorite things was a pair of brown and white pants; one pant leg was brown, the back side white; the second leg: front white, back brown. “Very ‘70s. But if anything could make a person look two dimensional, that was it,” she says. Her father’s two sisters dressed her in every trendy thing: maxi coats, mini dresses, rabbit fur bonnets, and her first and nostalgically favorite pair of jeans: bell bottoms with the signs of the zodiac. Her father’s friend had a store called Uptown Branch where he sold fringed leather vests and other hippie clothes, love beads, and alpaca coats whose untreated hides still smelled of the animal.
Her religion growing up was “Jewish-based atheism.” Her father and mother had no interest in religion but sent her to the YMHA where she acted in Purim plays. When she was in junior high school, she decided she wanted to learn Hebrew but her classmates were eight-year-old boys; after three months, she decided she was bored.
Janet was in a class for gifted students in her junior high school, Jordan L. Mott. They were a racial mix — Chinese, Black, White and Hispanic. One day, walking with her class from one classroom to the next, a girl she didn’t know called her a “strawberry”; picturing a ripe red juicy strawberry, Janet took it as a compliment. But another girl, keen to provoke a fight, said “She called you a name. What are you going to do about it?” Janet didn’t get it. She says, “that’s what racism is. You don’t even know what it is until someone tells you.”
At thirteen she was tall and gawky. “I wasn’t popular. I was invisible.”
She clearly remembers the impact of Martin Luther King’s assassination; his death lingered, sparking in her an impassioned need to see justice done. At sixteen she was in college, working on the school newspaper and getting involved in student politics; she was a campus radical; she calls it Finding My Way Part I. At one of her publishing jobs in the mid 80′s she became active in the union when the company decided, without consulting the employees, to trade in the employee pension plan for company stock. Several decades later she formed Brooklyn Poets Against the War with three friends and colleagues, organizing readings and events to protest the invasion of Iraq. She told me how she recently changed from Con Ed electric to wind turbine energy. We talked about wanting to revolutionize the world, salvage the world, rescue the world, and how we both came to recognize that sometimes you can do that only one step at a time without a single human being ever knowing—or having to know.
She was 31 in 1989 when she began studying poetry in earnest, at Columbia University’s Writing Program in the School of General Studies. She had an administration job at Columbia; tuition was free. Writing had saved her as a child, helping her sculpt a self, a bubble away from the disquieting bedlam of her parents but she hadn’t had the faith in herself or the sense of permission to take it up as a craft. Besides, she says, she was a lousy student with no confidence in her intellectual abilities—until she got into the Columbia program. Now those abilities fashioned and fortified, launching a stronger ego. She does not enjoy discussing the process of her poetry but does say she is less interested in pursuing emotion and subject matter and more interested in structure and language, “noise and music”: what is text and what is poetry?
In 1988 she’d taken a four-day retreat at an ashram in the Catskills. A chanting session hurled her into a trance state and long-buried rage buried her again. The aftermath was merciless; she felt muddy, polluted, crazed; she didn’t eat for two weeks. At the time she was living with her partner in the Bronx, not far from the apartment her mother lived in. During this time her mother was spiraling downward and would leave nasty messages on Janet’s answering machine that it was “all her fault.”
In 1991, her mother committed suicide. She was in agony by then, talked obsessively — “crazy salad” – had become psychotic, believed that she’d undergone brain surgery and that the doctor had left a knife inside. Janet said that her mother, crazy as she was, had enough sanity left in her to “make her suicide work.” She died in January in a summer cabin where she knew no one would find her. It was April when her boyfriend found her, having come upstate to open the cabin on the first nice day of spring.
In the ten years following her mother’s death, Janet’s sexual appetite engulfed her. She was drawn to promiscuity after a series of monogamous relationships. She needed to feel coupled, even when the glue was without the underpinning she desperately coveted. She answers yes to my question about whether she is a loner, but adds that she craves companionship too and has lived with one boyfriend or another since she was 18 years old. She and Ethan, a photographer and writer, have been together happily for five years.
Her favorite comfort food is elbow macaroni slathered in butter and salt, the way Molly, her neighbor across the hall on Sherman Avenue, used to make it. Her favorite junk food is Drake Cakes’ Funny Bones, filled with peanut butter cream.
My next two questions are “What would you do if you had a time machine?” and “Which super power would you like to have and why?” She turns two questions into one glorious response. She would like to turn into a winged insect, a scarab beetle woman, so that she could fly to places unsafe for women. She’d start by going back in time, to the dawn of story-telling and law making, back to the Sumerian city of Ur, its biblical name, also known as Mesopotamia; once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates, the present site is believed to be in Iraq midway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, south of the Euphrates River, on the edge of the Al-Hajarah Desert. The city is the first record of civilization, where the historically significant writing system, cuneiform, was used. But this was no glowing utopia: men owned slaves; wives were property. Their word for outsiders was “haribu,” which sounds suspiciously like that eternally nomadic tribe, the “Hebrew.” While she isn’t religious, she has a connection to her Jewish roots: “You can always tell a real Jew because she is always looking for home.”
She teaches at Hofstra University and loves her students (“I hated school but loved my teachers”), but come summer her heart is with her poetry and the luxury of time to embrace the work. “The toughest thing about writing is the stress, internal and external, that deadens it.”
Do you have a five year plan? “My five year plan is ‘How to Live Day by Day.’”
Janet’s most recent venture, just one year old, is Red Glass Books, a series of limited-edition fine-art chapbooks, manuscripts from poets with distinctive styles and varying backgrounds. Three have already been published and she has a long list of what’s next. Listening to Janet talk about Red Glass and her approach to publishing poetry is a delight. She honors each book as a work of art, garnishing it as befits the content; she smiles deeply as she talks about her joy in selecting the paper each edition will be printed on, bequeathing words a new life, making them visible to new eyes. Each book has handmade elements that she designs. The graphics are unfussy, but matchless: a black crescent moon, a star shaped sun with black polka dots. She doesn’t have to adhere to anyone’s desires but her own; the form and space are hers to do with as she wishes. What does the text want? she asks herself. What typeface would pair best with it?
Janet’s own books are The Groundnote, published in 1998 by Alice James Books; The Glazier’s Country, winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press; a chapbook, Ascending Descending, published in 2010 by BroBroo Books in Brooklyn (excerpts of which were commissioned for musical setting by the contemporary classical composer Martin Hennessey and have been performed in, among other places, the famed Galapagos theater in DUMBO); and Dreamlife of a Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets, which was selected by Joyelle McSweeney for the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame Press. She’s fast at work this summer on three—count ‘em—manuscripts: “Chronicles,” “Technopastoral” and a poetry-prose-fiction hybrid tentatively titled “The Desire of the Line.”
What are the biggest misconceptions people have about poetry, I ask her. “(1) That it has to be lyrical; (2) that its meaning has to be clear. Not all poetry is meant to be approached linearly or logically. It can be intentionally oblique, eroded, unfinished – and it can be fascinating.”
What is her favorite poem? She answers: ”My favorite poem is the one I could never imagine, the one that provokes a gasp and fills me with sublime emptiness.”
Janet’s web site: Website: http://www.janetkaplan-litworks.com
Email: [email protected]
For more Janet: http://www.pw.org/content/janet_kaplan
Silvia's Interview
with Dodge Landesman, Politician
December 15, 2012
Janet walked into my apartment bearing gifts: three of her most recent poetry books: Ascending Descending, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, and The Glazier’s Country; an “apple” handmade from recycled fibers embedded with seed that, when planted, will grow Sweet Leaf Basil; and lemon drop cookies. She was the sweetest gift of all, in her pink t-shirt and outrageous mane of hair.
Our conversation sprung easy: romancing life, divulging harbored hates, laughing at shared silliness, reflecting on haunted childhoods.
Janet grew up in the Bronx in the sixties and seventies. She was a tomboy until she was seven and played with a rough and tumble crowd. While not a particularly rough and tumble game, despite the name, her favorite game was slug. It was played mostly by girls, slapping a Spalding (which of course was pronounced “spaldine”) against the brick of an apartment building. She also played with her dolls, with her friend Stephen’s Matchbox cars, and teased Louise’s younger brother into “doctor and nurse.” She had an art show but nobody came. And because she was an only child with grandparents and two unmarried aunts, she had more toys than she knew what to do with – Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, plastic soldiers and dinosaurs, a Thumbelina doll, and a Chatty Cathy among them.
As a little girl her parents held an irresistible aura for her and, perhaps because they themselves were busy with marital troubles and other emotional woes, the things they possessed were a fascination. Like her father’s shampoo. It was a plastic bottle, refillable, but a bottle unlike any she had ever seen, kept in a medicine cabinet instead of in the shower and easy to reach. She could smell the shampoo, a scent both glorious and wicked, a smell like metal. It held a strange fascination and she was certain it was a concoction that would grow back her father’s shedding hair.
She could spend a whole day in her mother’s closet, closets really, plural, because her mother commandeered her husband’s closet as well. Janet would hide in her mother’s closet, way way back; she says it was like a tree house; she once fell asleep in there and her mother, not knowing where she was, called the police. Every hanger held two or more items of clothing, things that were never worn and just hung there. Her mother set few boundaries and didn’t mind at all when Janet would rummage through the closet and come away dressed up in her clothes. Janet still has some of her mother’s exquisite velvet and crinoline skirts. She recalls her mother’s white go-go boots and a mod mini dress, orange and purple with horizontal stripes. Her mother wrote poetry and had two serious nervous breakdowns, one when she was eighteen and the second at twenty-five, after Janet was born. She went back to work when Janet was seven and Janet felt abandoned; even when her mother was “there,” she never really was. Yet she cherishes the memories of those early days when together they would share her mother’s love of crafts, making clay from flour and paste and constructing mug racks out of the cardboard cylinders from paper towel rolls.
Janet recalls the day in 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. She was in kindergarten when she heard the news. They were having a fire drill in the corridor, four children standing per square. The teacher ran down the hall shouting “The President’s been shot.” “I’m not even sure I knew what a ‘president’ was, but I knew it was very sad.” At five years old, Janet was right between the ages of John and Caroline Kennedy and remembers identifying strongly with the children.
It was around the time of the Kennedy assassination that her father began exhibiting strange behaviors and getting very withdrawn. He could walk only with the help of crutches and by wrapping bandages around his legs for extra support. The doctors could find nothing wrong. It was a psychiatrist who said it was his rage and told her father it was essential that he speak out and stand up to his needy wife. Instead he drank vodka and did whatever he could not to be home. Her mother’s emotional reserves were wearing out. She weakened and stopped taking care of herself; she was unkempt and the house was a shambles. Janet was terrified that someone would come and take her away, as her grandfather had once threatened would happen.
Poetry was the path. She started young and in secret with a 2 x 3 notepad and a pencil. Her mother loved sweets but could not limit herself to one cookie or one piece of candy so she asked Janet to hide them. Then she’d ravage the house, unearthing Janet’s room, to hunt them down; there was no way Janet could take a chance on hiding a diary there. They lived in an Art Deco-style building (“1181Sheridan Avenue, Apartment 6J, Jerome 6-6289.”) Vintage apartments hold lovely surprises. There was a contraption in the bathroom, a clothing drying rack, never used because it didn’t sit over the tub, and water would have ended up dripping onto the floor. Janet would sit on the toilet, write her heart out, and hide her notes in the drying rack contraption. The first thing she remembers writing was two lists: People I Love, People I Hate. Maybe, she suggests, that’s where the poetry began.
I ask if she had any pets growing up; “endless turtles,” she tells me, “they got lost in the apartment.” She wanted a cat but her father didn’t like cats so they ended up getting a dog from Bide-a-Wee. One puppy, shivering and cowering, was the one she identified with.
Janet grew up loving fashion. One of her favorite things was a pair of brown and white pants; one pant leg was brown, the back side white; the second leg: front white, back brown. “Very ‘70s. But if anything could make a person look two dimensional, that was it,” she says. Her father’s two sisters dressed her in every trendy thing: maxi coats, mini dresses, rabbit fur bonnets, and her first and nostalgically favorite pair of jeans: bell bottoms with the signs of the zodiac. Her father’s friend had a store called Uptown Branch where he sold fringed leather vests and other hippie clothes, love beads, and alpaca coats whose untreated hides still smelled of the animal.
Her religion growing up was “Jewish-based atheism.” Her father and mother had no interest in religion but sent her to the YMHA where she acted in Purim plays. When she was in junior high school, she decided she wanted to learn Hebrew but her classmates were eight-year-old boys; after three months, she decided she was bored.
Janet was in a class for gifted students in her junior high school, Jordan L. Mott. They were a racial mix — Chinese, Black, White and Hispanic. One day, walking with her class from one classroom to the next, a girl she didn’t know called her a “strawberry”; picturing a ripe red juicy strawberry, Janet took it as a compliment. But another girl, keen to provoke a fight, said “She called you a name. What are you going to do about it?” Janet didn’t get it. She says, “that’s what racism is. You don’t even know what it is until someone tells you.”
At thirteen she was tall and gawky. “I wasn’t popular. I was invisible.”
She clearly remembers the impact of Martin Luther King’s assassination; his death lingered, sparking in her an impassioned need to see justice done. At sixteen she was in college, working on the school newspaper and getting involved in student politics; she was a campus radical; she calls it Finding My Way Part I. At one of her publishing jobs in the mid 80′s she became active in the union when the company decided, without consulting the employees, to trade in the employee pension plan for company stock. Several decades later she formed Brooklyn Poets Against the War with three friends and colleagues, organizing readings and events to protest the invasion of Iraq. She told me how she recently changed from Con Ed electric to wind turbine energy. We talked about wanting to revolutionize the world, salvage the world, rescue the world, and how we both came to recognize that sometimes you can do that only one step at a time without a single human being ever knowing—or having to know.
She was 31 in 1989 when she began studying poetry in earnest, at Columbia University’s Writing Program in the School of General Studies. She had an administration job at Columbia; tuition was free. Writing had saved her as a child, helping her sculpt a self, a bubble away from the disquieting bedlam of her parents but she hadn’t had the faith in herself or the sense of permission to take it up as a craft. Besides, she says, she was a lousy student with no confidence in her intellectual abilities—until she got into the Columbia program. Now those abilities fashioned and fortified, launching a stronger ego. She does not enjoy discussing the process of her poetry but does say she is less interested in pursuing emotion and subject matter and more interested in structure and language, “noise and music”: what is text and what is poetry?
In 1988 she’d taken a four-day retreat at an ashram in the Catskills. A chanting session hurled her into a trance state and long-buried rage buried her again. The aftermath was merciless; she felt muddy, polluted, crazed; she didn’t eat for two weeks. At the time she was living with her partner in the Bronx, not far from the apartment her mother lived in. During this time her mother was spiraling downward and would leave nasty messages on Janet’s answering machine that it was “all her fault.”
In 1991, her mother committed suicide. She was in agony by then, talked obsessively — “crazy salad” – had become psychotic, believed that she’d undergone brain surgery and that the doctor had left a knife inside. Janet said that her mother, crazy as she was, had enough sanity left in her to “make her suicide work.” She died in January in a summer cabin where she knew no one would find her. It was April when her boyfriend found her, having come upstate to open the cabin on the first nice day of spring.
In the ten years following her mother’s death, Janet’s sexual appetite engulfed her. She was drawn to promiscuity after a series of monogamous relationships. She needed to feel coupled, even when the glue was without the underpinning she desperately coveted. She answers yes to my question about whether she is a loner, but adds that she craves companionship too and has lived with one boyfriend or another since she was 18 years old. She and Ethan, a photographer and writer, have been together happily for five years.
Her favorite comfort food is elbow macaroni slathered in butter and salt, the way Molly, her neighbor across the hall on Sherman Avenue, used to make it. Her favorite junk food is Drake Cakes’ Funny Bones, filled with peanut butter cream.
My next two questions are “What would you do if you had a time machine?” and “Which super power would you like to have and why?” She turns two questions into one glorious response. She would like to turn into a winged insect, a scarab beetle woman, so that she could fly to places unsafe for women. She’d start by going back in time, to the dawn of story-telling and law making, back to the Sumerian city of Ur, its biblical name, also known as Mesopotamia; once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates, the present site is believed to be in Iraq midway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, south of the Euphrates River, on the edge of the Al-Hajarah Desert. The city is the first record of civilization, where the historically significant writing system, cuneiform, was used. But this was no glowing utopia: men owned slaves; wives were property. Their word for outsiders was “haribu,” which sounds suspiciously like that eternally nomadic tribe, the “Hebrew.” While she isn’t religious, she has a connection to her Jewish roots: “You can always tell a real Jew because she is always looking for home.”
She teaches at Hofstra University and loves her students (“I hated school but loved my teachers”), but come summer her heart is with her poetry and the luxury of time to embrace the work. “The toughest thing about writing is the stress, internal and external, that deadens it.”
Do you have a five year plan? “My five year plan is ‘How to Live Day by Day.’”
Janet’s most recent venture, just one year old, is Red Glass Books, a series of limited-edition fine-art chapbooks, manuscripts from poets with distinctive styles and varying backgrounds. Three have already been published and she has a long list of what’s next. Listening to Janet talk about Red Glass and her approach to publishing poetry is a delight. She honors each book as a work of art, garnishing it as befits the content; she smiles deeply as she talks about her joy in selecting the paper each edition will be printed on, bequeathing words a new life, making them visible to new eyes. Each book has handmade elements that she designs. The graphics are unfussy, but matchless: a black crescent moon, a star shaped sun with black polka dots. She doesn’t have to adhere to anyone’s desires but her own; the form and space are hers to do with as she wishes. What does the text want? she asks herself. What typeface would pair best with it?
Janet’s own books are The Groundnote, published in 1998 by Alice James Books; The Glazier’s Country, winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press; a chapbook, Ascending Descending, published in 2010 by BroBroo Books in Brooklyn (excerpts of which were commissioned for musical setting by the contemporary classical composer Martin Hennessey and have been performed in, among other places, the famed Galapagos theater in DUMBO); and Dreamlife of a Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets, which was selected by Joyelle McSweeney for the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame Press. She’s fast at work this summer on three—count ‘em—manuscripts: “Chronicles,” “Technopastoral” and a poetry-prose-fiction hybrid tentatively titled “The Desire of the Line.”
What are the biggest misconceptions people have about poetry, I ask her. “(1) That it has to be lyrical; (2) that its meaning has to be clear. Not all poetry is meant to be approached linearly or logically. It can be intentionally oblique, eroded, unfinished – and it can be fascinating.”
What is her favorite poem? She answers: ”My favorite poem is the one I could never imagine, the one that provokes a gasp and fills me with sublime emptiness.”
Janet’s web site: Website: http://www.janetkaplan-litworks.com
Email: [email protected]
For more Janet: http://www.pw.org/content/janet_kaplan
Silvia's Interview
with Dodge Landesman, Politician
December 15, 2012
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy Update #37 was issued: Due to flooding and power related shutdowns caused by Hurricane Sandy, wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations have discharged untreated wastewater into New York City waterways. The Department of Health & Mental Hygiene is advising New Yorkers to avoid direct contact with the Hudson River, East River, New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and the Kill Van Kull. For now, please avoid kayaking, windsurfing, or any other water activity that would entail possible direct contact with the water.
On that same day, Dodge posted this photo of himself with the status: “Couldn’t resist… East River, 12 PM, Hurricane Sandy.” The caption under the photo reads ”Dodge Landesman, risking it all”
Two days later, on October 31, Dodge posted on his Facebook:“Walking back from the UWS to Gramercy to collect a few things. If you live enroute or nearby (ie Village, Tribecca, SoHo, etc…) feel free to call or text me at 917-xxx-xxxx if you would like me to pick you up food, water or whatever necessity. I am charging my phone in Grand Central right now, delis are open and I am happy to help.”
* * *
Dodge came to my apartment at four o’clock one Friday afternoon for our interview, ginger tea, and raisin cake. He was immediately very candid and it was easy to see that was precisely who he was and who he wanted to be. He was never guarded about his feelings or beliefs and I was impressed with how comfortable he was being self-reflective. I was confident it was an acquired habit he had practiced his whole life.
His full name is Dodge Prentice Landesman. He was born November 21, 1990 in Brooklyn Heights. The name Landesman is German and means “Man of the Land.”
His father is Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Obama. His great uncle Jay Landesman was the first person to publish Jack Kerouac in his magazine Neurotica. Jay had a club in St. Louis called the Crystal Palace and headlined Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand. One of Dodge’s great aunts wrote a song that Ella Fitzgerald made famous: Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most. On October 13, 1913, law professor Dr. Charles Gerstenberg and his student Richard Ettinger (Dodge’s great grandfather) founded Prentice Hall, the venerable publishing company. The two men took their mothers’ maiden names—Prentice and Hall—to name their new company. The name Prentice was considered to be good luck and two Landesman brothers out of three share it.
So it’s easy to see why Dodge is a delightfully unique blend of music and politics, charmingly animated, and extremely well spoken — the right words right there at the right time.
Dodge’s earliest memory is a trip to Italy with his parents when his mom and dad were still together. They divorced when he was 3. His parents bought him a stuffed dragon which he zealously hung onto until one day his brother started playing with it and landed it on a roof. Dodge’s tears over losing the dragon dried up as soon as soon as he saw a Macdonalds, a comforting sight so far from home. The tradition he remembers most from his childhood, and one he plans to pass on to his own children, was how his birthday was celebrated. Every year his mother would arrange a path of several small presents trailing into the room holding a big surprise gift.
From the third to the sixth grade, Dodge attended a special ed school; he was having trouble with attention deficit disorder and with sequencing, a condition which can manifest itself in a range of ways and can seriously complicate anything math related.
The most fundamental thing he learned in school was how to develop his talents. He was in the school musical, became more outgoing, and recognized that it was okay to obey his creative impulses. In grade school he was the class clown. He goofed around so much that he regularly, at least once a week, got sent to the principal’s office. That was where he learned that he was destined to become a politician when he realized his consummate skill was pleading his case. Where other student would get a month’s punishment, he was shrewd enough to talk it down to a slap on the hand. After sixth grade he mainstreamed at York Preparatory School and graduated on May 26, 2010. His first two years of college were at Manhattanville and he recently transferred to Fordham University. He excels in English and history, loves vocabulary but says he has trouble with math and science. He loves to read but says he should read a lot more.
Growing up, he had a pet bird. He called it Bird. His baby sitter christened it Charlie Parker. She ended up moving to New Orleans and taking the bird with her. He liked to play board games, especially Sorry; says he never was much good at sports except for badminton. He loves to go swimming and is a big movie fan. He goes to the movies a lot, often alone, sees probably one film a week, and likes to go early enough when there’s a good chance he can have a whole row to himself. He loves 1950’s music: Perry Como, Patti Page, Jo Stafford, Eddie Fisher. His parents produced Smokey Joe’s Café, a musical revue showcasing pop standards by songwriters Leiber and Stoller. Dodge is also a big fan of country music: anything Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, especially I Walk the Line. Music was always a big part of his life and he credits his love of music for inspiring his love of history. Fifties music led to his appreciating President Eisenhower which led to an appreciation of political history and has shaped who he is today.
His childhood heroes were Dwight Eisenhower, Hubert Humphrey, and Frankie Laine, who, in addition to being a legendary singer, was a civil rights activist and spoke at the Martin Luther King rally in 1963. If he could meet anyone, dead or alive, it would be Jerry Brown. “He’s eccentric, like me. He ran in the presidential election in ’76 when he was 37 years old.”
About his parents’ personalities. “My mom is the opposite of me,” he says, “serene, calculating, a warm and wonderful and very protective mother but she tends to want to think the worst of people. My dad. He’s outgoing , he cracks jokes, he’s an adventurer, loves exploring, appreciative of people, nonjudgmental, not ultra-self-conscious, wants to set himself apart from other people. He enjoys his own company. Personality wise, I’m more like my dad.”
He tells me his family are atheists but he is a Christian. We talk about the precision of the universe, the seasons, sunrise into sunset, days into nights, the harmonious structure of nature that only a divine being could create. Dodge attends the Hillsong Church whose beliefs areEvangelical and Pentecostal; it holds the Bible as accurate and authoritative in matters of faith.
His best friend in seventh grade remains his best friend today. They appeared on a show together called Ice-T’s Rap School, a reality television show on VH1. In Rap School, rapper/actor Ice-T teaches eight teens from Dodge’s school, York Preparatory School in New York City, how to become a real hip hop group called “York Prep Crew”. Dodge’s nickname was Dodge City, the old fashioned student who loves 1940s’ and 1950s’ music and is always dressing in a suit or something vintage.
I ask if there were any world events that had an impact on him while he was growing up. He reminds me “Well, I was ten when 9/11 happened.” He also recalls how entertained he was by the Clinton/Lewinsky buzz. He adds that his father had to fill in a few of the parts that were a little hazy to him.
Any physical characteristics that run in his family? He points to his nose and says “I’m half Jewish” and then says “red hair.”
What makes him angry? “Not situations,” he assures me, “I get angry when I am inconvenienced. I’m impatient. I hate waiting for the subway. “ His greatest fear is that he will not succeed in his dream to become a success in the political world. He adds that while it is not what could be called legitimate distress, he very much wants to get married and finds himself apprehensive about all that goes into choosing the right partner.
What would you do if you had only six months left to live? “I’d visit North America and see every big city in Mexico, Canada and the United States.” He would also thank everyone who he had something to thank for and would engage in long, entertaining, and engaging conversations, something he really enjoys.
Does he have breakfast? Nope. Wakes up too late, usually about noon. There are some things he absolutely must do every day: the first is drinking soda every morning for his caffeine fix, the second would be taking a bath (not a shower, a bath because baths calm him down), and the third is walking. He loves exploring new neighborhoods and especially discovering new clothing stores. He buys lots of clothes, vintage and ethnic, and says he doesn’t have to buy expensive clothes but he does love rummaging for style.
What would you do if you had a time machine. “I would go to a lot of concerts from the fifties. $10 would be like $200.” He expresses his interest in gentrification and would love to take a trip back in time and see what New York City looked like in the 1970’s.
He believes in the legalization of marijuana mainly because he sees the existing laws as a tool of racism. The same joint that might land a minority an overnight in jail would be overlooked in someone else.
What super power would he like to have? “Being able to bring people back to life.”
What would he most like to ask from God? “To be successful enough so that at the age of sixty I can just rest and not do much of anything.” And If you were God what would you do for the world? “I’d create a level playing field for everyone.”
Tell me one thing about yourself you wouldn’t want me to know. “I’m a lazy student but I get by.” The three character traits he believes his friends would use to describe him are original, affable, and appreciative. He thinks he is too trusting and should be more wary and feels he is not selfless enough. His strengths are: he is conscientious, has respect for people, and is open to new experiences. His weakness is occasionally being too cavalier.
He is presently dating a former schoolmate. Her name is Whitley, she is African American and lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He smiles as he tells me, “She’s not political.”
When Dodge was 18, he became the youngest person ever to run for City Council. He says that experience has made the biggest impact on who he is today. His motivation came from wanting to be a voice for learning disabled students. He was aware of the challenges his own parents experienced trying to get him into a special ed school after he was evaluated as learning disabled. Ultimately, he quietly ended his campaign and signed on as youth coordinator for Yetta Kurland, a civil rights attorney, whom he considers his mentor.
What is something that not a lot of people know about him that he wishes more people could know? “That I am more multi-dimensional than most politicians. People don’t realize that I am jaded, strategic, and self aware.” Dodge is the consummate politician. Even though the 2012 presidential election was the first in which he was old enough to vote, the word “politician” is his hallmark, his pledge, his signature. . Speaking of politics, I ask him, what is the difference between good and exceptional? “Good is getting the job done and exceptional is getting the job done with care.”
For Dodge, politics translates to a public arena where a respectable politician can revolutionize the laws to enhance people’s day-to-day existence. He believes the biggest problem in the political world today is that it is too partisan; he fiercely dislikes people evaluating each other solely because of their political viewpoints. He says nobody is smart enough to be an authority on every issue and suggests that people who are excessively judgmental refuse to understand that. While he is definitely pro choice, he is proud of his ability to understand both sides. His big goal is to be Vice President — “being President would be too consequential and too much pressure.”
His political contributions are already impressive. He interned for the Mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, one summer and loves the south. He serves on two committees on Community Board 2: Social Services and Disability and Landmarks. He also works at the Marriage Equality of New York Political Action Committee. He has made the list for City & State’s (the premiere publication dedicated to city politics) Top 40 Under 40 Rising Stars, and is the youngest in the history of the list by three years, the first to be born in the 90′s, and the first to still be in college. http://www.cityandstateny.com/rising-stars-40-under-40-5/
Does he feel obligated to do things he doesn’t really believe in just to placate people? ‘Yes,” he answers, “it comes with the territory.” Although he concedes it is a challenge, he believes it is possible to retain integrity in the world of politics. What needs the most changing? I ask. Do you worry more about planet earth, the country, or New York City? Where would you put your energies? “The country,” he says, without missing a beat.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy is he . . . ”a seven”
After he was gone I cleared the table and found one of my yellow paper clips twisted into two distinctly creative loops. Earlier he had held up that same paper clip and apologized for having bent it; I barely noticed. Now it was demolished. I smile.
* * *
Dodge came to my apartment at four o’clock one Friday afternoon for our interview, ginger tea, and raisin cake. He was immediately very candid and it was easy to see that was precisely who he was and who he wanted to be. He was never guarded about his feelings or beliefs and I was impressed with how comfortable he was being self-reflective. I was confident it was an acquired habit he had practiced his whole life.
His full name is Dodge Prentice Landesman. He was born November 21, 1990 in Brooklyn Heights. The name Landesman is German and means “Man of the Land.”
His father is Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Obama. His great uncle Jay Landesman was the first person to publish Jack Kerouac in his magazine Neurotica. Jay had a club in St. Louis called the Crystal Palace and headlined Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand. One of Dodge’s great aunts wrote a song that Ella Fitzgerald made famous: Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most. On October 13, 1913, law professor Dr. Charles Gerstenberg and his student Richard Ettinger (Dodge’s great grandfather) founded Prentice Hall, the venerable publishing company. The two men took their mothers’ maiden names—Prentice and Hall—to name their new company. The name Prentice was considered to be good luck and two Landesman brothers out of three share it.
So it’s easy to see why Dodge is a delightfully unique blend of music and politics, charmingly animated, and extremely well spoken — the right words right there at the right time.
Dodge’s earliest memory is a trip to Italy with his parents when his mom and dad were still together. They divorced when he was 3. His parents bought him a stuffed dragon which he zealously hung onto until one day his brother started playing with it and landed it on a roof. Dodge’s tears over losing the dragon dried up as soon as soon as he saw a Macdonalds, a comforting sight so far from home. The tradition he remembers most from his childhood, and one he plans to pass on to his own children, was how his birthday was celebrated. Every year his mother would arrange a path of several small presents trailing into the room holding a big surprise gift.
From the third to the sixth grade, Dodge attended a special ed school; he was having trouble with attention deficit disorder and with sequencing, a condition which can manifest itself in a range of ways and can seriously complicate anything math related.
The most fundamental thing he learned in school was how to develop his talents. He was in the school musical, became more outgoing, and recognized that it was okay to obey his creative impulses. In grade school he was the class clown. He goofed around so much that he regularly, at least once a week, got sent to the principal’s office. That was where he learned that he was destined to become a politician when he realized his consummate skill was pleading his case. Where other student would get a month’s punishment, he was shrewd enough to talk it down to a slap on the hand. After sixth grade he mainstreamed at York Preparatory School and graduated on May 26, 2010. His first two years of college were at Manhattanville and he recently transferred to Fordham University. He excels in English and history, loves vocabulary but says he has trouble with math and science. He loves to read but says he should read a lot more.
Growing up, he had a pet bird. He called it Bird. His baby sitter christened it Charlie Parker. She ended up moving to New Orleans and taking the bird with her. He liked to play board games, especially Sorry; says he never was much good at sports except for badminton. He loves to go swimming and is a big movie fan. He goes to the movies a lot, often alone, sees probably one film a week, and likes to go early enough when there’s a good chance he can have a whole row to himself. He loves 1950’s music: Perry Como, Patti Page, Jo Stafford, Eddie Fisher. His parents produced Smokey Joe’s Café, a musical revue showcasing pop standards by songwriters Leiber and Stoller. Dodge is also a big fan of country music: anything Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, especially I Walk the Line. Music was always a big part of his life and he credits his love of music for inspiring his love of history. Fifties music led to his appreciating President Eisenhower which led to an appreciation of political history and has shaped who he is today.
His childhood heroes were Dwight Eisenhower, Hubert Humphrey, and Frankie Laine, who, in addition to being a legendary singer, was a civil rights activist and spoke at the Martin Luther King rally in 1963. If he could meet anyone, dead or alive, it would be Jerry Brown. “He’s eccentric, like me. He ran in the presidential election in ’76 when he was 37 years old.”
About his parents’ personalities. “My mom is the opposite of me,” he says, “serene, calculating, a warm and wonderful and very protective mother but she tends to want to think the worst of people. My dad. He’s outgoing , he cracks jokes, he’s an adventurer, loves exploring, appreciative of people, nonjudgmental, not ultra-self-conscious, wants to set himself apart from other people. He enjoys his own company. Personality wise, I’m more like my dad.”
He tells me his family are atheists but he is a Christian. We talk about the precision of the universe, the seasons, sunrise into sunset, days into nights, the harmonious structure of nature that only a divine being could create. Dodge attends the Hillsong Church whose beliefs areEvangelical and Pentecostal; it holds the Bible as accurate and authoritative in matters of faith.
His best friend in seventh grade remains his best friend today. They appeared on a show together called Ice-T’s Rap School, a reality television show on VH1. In Rap School, rapper/actor Ice-T teaches eight teens from Dodge’s school, York Preparatory School in New York City, how to become a real hip hop group called “York Prep Crew”. Dodge’s nickname was Dodge City, the old fashioned student who loves 1940s’ and 1950s’ music and is always dressing in a suit or something vintage.
I ask if there were any world events that had an impact on him while he was growing up. He reminds me “Well, I was ten when 9/11 happened.” He also recalls how entertained he was by the Clinton/Lewinsky buzz. He adds that his father had to fill in a few of the parts that were a little hazy to him.
Any physical characteristics that run in his family? He points to his nose and says “I’m half Jewish” and then says “red hair.”
What makes him angry? “Not situations,” he assures me, “I get angry when I am inconvenienced. I’m impatient. I hate waiting for the subway. “ His greatest fear is that he will not succeed in his dream to become a success in the political world. He adds that while it is not what could be called legitimate distress, he very much wants to get married and finds himself apprehensive about all that goes into choosing the right partner.
What would you do if you had only six months left to live? “I’d visit North America and see every big city in Mexico, Canada and the United States.” He would also thank everyone who he had something to thank for and would engage in long, entertaining, and engaging conversations, something he really enjoys.
Does he have breakfast? Nope. Wakes up too late, usually about noon. There are some things he absolutely must do every day: the first is drinking soda every morning for his caffeine fix, the second would be taking a bath (not a shower, a bath because baths calm him down), and the third is walking. He loves exploring new neighborhoods and especially discovering new clothing stores. He buys lots of clothes, vintage and ethnic, and says he doesn’t have to buy expensive clothes but he does love rummaging for style.
What would you do if you had a time machine. “I would go to a lot of concerts from the fifties. $10 would be like $200.” He expresses his interest in gentrification and would love to take a trip back in time and see what New York City looked like in the 1970’s.
He believes in the legalization of marijuana mainly because he sees the existing laws as a tool of racism. The same joint that might land a minority an overnight in jail would be overlooked in someone else.
What super power would he like to have? “Being able to bring people back to life.”
What would he most like to ask from God? “To be successful enough so that at the age of sixty I can just rest and not do much of anything.” And If you were God what would you do for the world? “I’d create a level playing field for everyone.”
Tell me one thing about yourself you wouldn’t want me to know. “I’m a lazy student but I get by.” The three character traits he believes his friends would use to describe him are original, affable, and appreciative. He thinks he is too trusting and should be more wary and feels he is not selfless enough. His strengths are: he is conscientious, has respect for people, and is open to new experiences. His weakness is occasionally being too cavalier.
He is presently dating a former schoolmate. Her name is Whitley, she is African American and lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He smiles as he tells me, “She’s not political.”
When Dodge was 18, he became the youngest person ever to run for City Council. He says that experience has made the biggest impact on who he is today. His motivation came from wanting to be a voice for learning disabled students. He was aware of the challenges his own parents experienced trying to get him into a special ed school after he was evaluated as learning disabled. Ultimately, he quietly ended his campaign and signed on as youth coordinator for Yetta Kurland, a civil rights attorney, whom he considers his mentor.
What is something that not a lot of people know about him that he wishes more people could know? “That I am more multi-dimensional than most politicians. People don’t realize that I am jaded, strategic, and self aware.” Dodge is the consummate politician. Even though the 2012 presidential election was the first in which he was old enough to vote, the word “politician” is his hallmark, his pledge, his signature. . Speaking of politics, I ask him, what is the difference between good and exceptional? “Good is getting the job done and exceptional is getting the job done with care.”
For Dodge, politics translates to a public arena where a respectable politician can revolutionize the laws to enhance people’s day-to-day existence. He believes the biggest problem in the political world today is that it is too partisan; he fiercely dislikes people evaluating each other solely because of their political viewpoints. He says nobody is smart enough to be an authority on every issue and suggests that people who are excessively judgmental refuse to understand that. While he is definitely pro choice, he is proud of his ability to understand both sides. His big goal is to be Vice President — “being President would be too consequential and too much pressure.”
His political contributions are already impressive. He interned for the Mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, one summer and loves the south. He serves on two committees on Community Board 2: Social Services and Disability and Landmarks. He also works at the Marriage Equality of New York Political Action Committee. He has made the list for City & State’s (the premiere publication dedicated to city politics) Top 40 Under 40 Rising Stars, and is the youngest in the history of the list by three years, the first to be born in the 90′s, and the first to still be in college. http://www.cityandstateny.com/rising-stars-40-under-40-5/
Does he feel obligated to do things he doesn’t really believe in just to placate people? ‘Yes,” he answers, “it comes with the territory.” Although he concedes it is a challenge, he believes it is possible to retain integrity in the world of politics. What needs the most changing? I ask. Do you worry more about planet earth, the country, or New York City? Where would you put your energies? “The country,” he says, without missing a beat.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy is he . . . ”a seven”
After he was gone I cleared the table and found one of my yellow paper clips twisted into two distinctly creative loops. Earlier he had held up that same paper clip and apologized for having bent it; I barely noticed. Now it was demolished. I smile.
