Attic Archaeology

June 23, 2016November 13, 2016 ~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 2 Comments

Attic overview

In my attic is my own personal Collyer Brothers scenario. Childhood scrapbooks tower precariously as I trip over shoe boxes filled with the dubious bounty of a lifetime’s routine—over-sentimentalizing or saving for posterity. Contents include a not-quite complete set of Beatle bubblegum cards (both black & white and color), the long hair I chopped off just before my church Confirmation (my patron saint in 1967 became Twiggy), and elementary school classroom photos that I look at and can still name nearly everyone (!) Plus all my report cards (Where did that D in Algebra come from?) I can easily get lost in the past. But I am archiving! Not going crazy. Not yet.

art & scrapbooks

Shifting around my ankles are layers of my old art—from my earliest attempts at drawing princesses (on the back of Civil Defense notebooks—Duck and Cover!), to the waning work-for-hire that I still do—a stratum of my life in fashion-centric art.

Necklines & heart hems

I find my Scholastic Award from 1971—my ticket to New York. The accompanying art is somewhere in here . . . under yellowing newsprint pads and portfolio pages and illustration boards and spiral sketchbooks. The cement of memory is dry and flaky in spots, but what I remember most are my dreams, and how light I once felt. I was going to fly like a crow from the only nest I knew, and make a new one in a skyscraper. Or a railroad flat.

Incessantly creating outfits for paper dolls in fourth grade was a sure sign that I was a future fashion designer, despite a brief defection into the world of secret agents. TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers, and Honey West toyed with my trajectory as cool characters in chic black turtlenecks and trench coats, walking pet ocelots on leashes, filled the screen. I soon realized I was not so much interested in thwarting Evil as I was fixated on what figure I would cut while taking an Emma Peel stance, my diamond-encrusted mini-derringer aimed at the enemy agent.

My subscription to Seventeen magazine (a fifteenth birthday gift), was added to a tower of 16 magazines that kept me in tune with all my favorite pop stars, and I continued exploring ways to express myself in the trendy world of fashion. Which, in the Mod 60s, was everywhere.

By my senior year, the high point of my creative life so far was winning a National Scholastic Art award. This was the holy grail for our public high school art department, with the winners exhibited in New York City. I had entered a fashion drawing; my subject: Ali MacGraw, fresh from Love Story, lounging in a maxi-skirt. Instead of just rendering from a photograph, I used white line on a black background, with the skirt pattern popping out of the negative space.

“Can I go to New York to see my art? Please, Mom, please please?” — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

Elvis and Me (and another footnote that I won’t go into here)

June 6, 2016November 13, 2016 ~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 1 Comment

Looking back, I realize this was a busy weekend in June 1972.

I remembered that I had seen the King.

And that I lost (or tossed) my virginity.

I just forgot the particulars.

Elvis pic.jpg

The collective cultural energy building up was from the littered streets, the cracks in the sidewalk, the “are you talkin’ to me?” and “I’m walking here” and fuck-you attitude of survivors that perhaps has always been the backbone of the city. Holly Golightly had retreated to the wings and Patti Smith was about to take center stage.

I must have sensed this changing of the guard when I purchased a ticket to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden. I probably should see him before he dies, I thought, already shelving and archiving a cultural icon who represented so much of the America I grew up in. I went by myself partly because no one I knew was interested. But mostly because—I realized even then—I feel most comfortable when alone in a crowd. I sat in five dollar nosebleed seats behind the stage, never really connecting with The King on that sold-out afternoon. For all these years I assumed that I had seen “fat Elvis” on the ebb. While perusing a forty year-old scrapbook, a yellowed New York Post review fell out and I read to discover that this was his first live appearance in New York since the 1950s, and one of his finest. I wish I had felt it at the time. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

It was a great show that Elvis Presley put on at the Garden last night, this cornball express, this John Wayne of music, this heavyweight champion in a game that his successors don’t play anymore —Alfred G. Aronowitz

elvis article.jpg

I Am My Mother’s Daughter, Kinda

June 5, 2016June 5, 2016 ~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 2 Comments

At least when it comes to letter-writing and archiving. A few years ago I helped my mom and stepfather downsize, and was re-gifted every handmade card, every letter I ever sent to her when I was young. As eager as I was to leave the nest, I still wanted my mom to know all about my exciting new life in New York City. It was 1971.

Letters I wrote to one of my best friends from high school were also returned to me, a few years before I started this memoir. These sat in my basement collecting mildew until I curled up on the couch with a glass of wine, opened the shoe box, and discovered a girl I had forgotten all about. Me.

I was mesmerized. And a bit appalled. Who was that girl?

My friend D. and I wrote several times a week, describing every little factoid of our emotional lives. Long distance phone calls were expensive, and letter-writing was not the lost art it is now. It simply was how we communicated.

With my old letters, I am able to flesh out long dormant memories. I vaguely remember that I once was escorted by “Ace,” a member of the Black Panthers, past the Hell’s Angels headquarters in the East Village as I checked out the neighborhood. Now I can not only write about the experience from my current vantage point, but also add the contents of a letter that I wrote in “real time,” with all the feelings I had as I eagerly shared my life.

Tizzy and letters (This is just a small sampling!)