Covid-19

Risen

~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 2 Comments

I have not visited New York City since November 2020. With the relief of Joe Biden at my back, I bided my time. Hibernated. Incubated. Hoping for a rebirth of . . .well . . .hope!

What has changed? The malignant orange cancer is out, but not without some horror-show nail-biting that lasted through January 6. The trail of slime remains, festering. Or— maybe—drying up. Wouldn’t that be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

Here we are, pandemic still lapping around our ankles as we try to move forward. This Easter weekend I will spend at home working on my projects, and watching the version of Jesus Christ Superstar that I discovered last year streaming on YouTube (part of Broadway’s The Shows Must Go On). I had hoped that it would be a filmed version of the original that I saw in 1971, but was shaken out of my nostalgic disappointment when I realized that Tim Minchin was a true dynamo in the role of Judas. I had never heard of him, and he became my first Covid silver lining.

The first play I remember sneaking into was Jesus Christ Superstar. I already knew the lengthy 1970 Webber-Rice soundtrack by heart, had blasted it on our family’s stereo console, mincing along with King Herod: 

So you are the Christ, you’re the great Jesus Christ? 

Let me know that you’re no fool 

Walk across my swimming pool

Here it was on stage in full, bizarre, glam rock excess, putting in the limelight my crush dilemma from the past. In one corner, Jesus Christ, representing the highly desirable and parentally-approved high school jocks. In the other, Judas Iscariot, pinch-hitting for all the doubters, the questioners, the misunderstood (and, of course, sexy) James Deans. 

At the crowded stage door, I waited for Jesus. I was careful not to clutch too tightly and bend that week’s Time magazine, its cover featuring this golden creature I was about to ask for an autograph. More nervous anticipating a Broadway stage actor than I would have been with a true messiah, I threaded after Jesus into a nearby bar. 

Timidly approaching him, I asked, “Would you mind signing this?” 

“Be Sweet,” the actor Jeff Fenholt wrote on his visage with my Flair pen. Thus blessed, I headed back to the Y, leaving him on his barstool with whatever libations liberated him from the shackles of being the Son of God.— Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Fifty Years Ago—1971

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

Here I sit, pondering where my story fits. Where I fit. When I started this memoir, in 2010, the time-gap didn’t seem all that huge. Now 1971 feels like centuries ago, and without knowing what will happen even tomorrow, I wonder. Will I be able to finish this? Does the world need one one more coming-of-age-in-NYC story? Maybe not, but this feels like an organic way to fill my days at this strange time. Looking back at the path taken, because there really was no other.

It’s hard to believe that I was preparing my portfolio to apply to Parsons School of Design fifty years ago. I decided to share some of my earlier art and influences that led to my wanting to become a fashion designer/illustrator.

1971 – Harrisburg Art Exhibit
1970 – Ali MacGraw
1970 – Girl In Striped Dress
1970 – Al Hirschfeld – The New York Times
1968 – Franco Zefferelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” (used on an envelope sent from NYC, 1971)
1967 – Cher
My library card – 1965, Age 12
1966 – Conservative Mod

And, to enter “The Way-Back Machine”! . . .

And let’s not forget the influence of my mother. She’s the one who encouraged me with that very first ruffle.

*****

 In the beginning was a pink mushroom cloud. The obligatory childhood Crayola scribble of girlish self-expression on a sheet of construction paper documented the efforts of my three-year-old brain and eye and hand. Looking back, it was as if I were trying to mesh gears and get on with the business of growing up in the slipstream of postwar America. 

     And becoming a fashion artist.

     It all started, according to family folklore, with an appliance. To anyone (i.e., my “Mammaw”) who questioned the subject matter of my first recognizable creative masterpiece, my father (her son) would boom, “It’s an iron!” And then point to the other drawing on the paper that further emphasized my genius: a two-prong wall outlet. My iron had a dangling cord and plug—even then I knew the importance of detail and accessorizing properly. 

     Luckily for me, my mother put down the Sunbeam Steam/Dry as often as she could and picked up a graphite pencil, encouraging me to follow. My dad continued to beam his pride like a beacon, into my future. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams 

copyright Sharon Watts

My Back Pages

~ DIRNDL SKIRT
Seen on 5th Ave. my last visit to NYC, the day Biden was announced the WINNER!

This is the last day of this past year. 2020 was a life game-changer. Priorities were turned upside down, chaos reigned and rained supreme, silver linings peeked through, fires ravaged and the virus savaged. We divided and nearly were conquered by human behavior I simply can’t fathom—mostly, the absence of empathy and kindness. If hindsight is 20/20, I need a new prescription for my glasses.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what I am doing with this writing—this memoir—that was supposed to capture a bitter-sweet not-too-distant past. Ironically, I “officially” ended the writing (countless drafts after starting what was a series of essays a decade ago) in early March of this year. Pre-covid awareness. So, in that sense, this documents what once was, in an unanticipated way. I wrote about many things that now seem almost quaint in my missing them. Post-covid, the places and people and feelings that once existed and will likely never return have been documented and lamented in many a New York Times and New Yorker article over the last eight months. I’ve already put my two cents in. Just multiply it by infinity.

So, I will randomly choose an excerpt of something that I will miss about New York City and my life in the early 1970s.

Nine months of living off-off Broadway had me waxing nostalgic for neon lights, missing the jutting marquees that trumpeted what magic went on, just inside. One day in early autumn I returned to Times Square to get my theater fix, peering at cast photos for new shows that had opened since I last snuck in at intermission and squatted discreetly on the steps of the rear mezzanine for the second act. Jaywalking the cross streets between Broadway and Eighth Avenue had me in a comfortable groove. 

The granddaddy of them all—naughty, bawdy, gaudy 42nd Street—I knew to avoid. There was not one iota of a good reason for me to be there, I learned after my daring first foray down that long block. Peep shows, porn palaces, massage parlors, hustlers, junkie prostitutes, con men, and all other forms of lowlife brazenly hawked their wares and flaunted their presence in the glare refracted from the Great White Way. This kind of cockroach didn’t scatter when the lights came on. This was their stage, every night.

Loitering was encouraged, necessary for a scam.  

“All you hafta do is tell me where the queen is.”

A version of the classic shell game, Three-card Monte was set up at a moment’s notice and instant throngs gathered around, the rising excitement blending the shill with both out-of-town rubes and city know-it-alls who thought they could beat the odds. New York’s Finest occasionally broke up the G-rated entertainment almost apologetically; this was just filler-fluff on their beat until something bigger trumped in, featuring screaming sirens and drawn guns. In this neighborhood, that didn’t take long. 

I was getting accustomed to mayhem. There was something tantalizing about being so close to the action, to being caught in the klieg light—an invisible non-participant—while absorbing it all through every sensory organ in my body. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Hair (Yesterday and) Today, Gone Tomorrow

~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 2 Comments

Losing Astor Hair is a deep puncture in a wounded cityscape.

When I started writing about my time spent in New York City as a young art student (1971-1974), I was no longer living there. Like many ex-pats, I lamented the changes from afar (well, not too far afar, but with enough perspective to know that the unrecognizable now outweighs the recognizable). I’ve only visited twice this past year, bombarded with tentative uncertainty, undying street energy, joy of meeting friends—and ghosts. A certain numbness overtakes me—and I realize I have already mourned. I started on September 11, 2001 and never stopped. (Do I now have antibodies against more mourning?)

Covid continues to crush—on top of hyper-gentrification (the Blob that ate New York). The most recent fatality is the beloved Astor Hair. I only went there a few times in the ’80s (always calling it Astor Barber), but they were not my favorite cuts and I never cultivated a regular hairdresser. Still, just knowing the shop was there soothed me as I rounded the corner, all the way up through last year. Those steps, the charmingly painted barber pole, and the poster with more styles than Baskin-Robbins had flavors—if I were in a dangerously spontaneous mood I might come out with a three-inch pixie, just like 1984. Then I’d shake off the urge and venture down St. Mark’s Place. Which, coincidentally, was the scene of the crime in 1972—my very first NYC haircut.

May 1972 — Bleecker St. with Droogie

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Come hear the music play

 I squirmed excitedly in my Ziegfeld movie theater seat. Bob Fosse had done it again. All my previous style icons (mostly Mod mid-Sixties British models and actresses), were being vaporized by a blazing comet: the real-life daughter of a girl who once had a feeling she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Twenty-six-year-old Liza Minnelli was belting her way into her own rightful place in the galaxy as the film version of Cabaret’s Fraulein Sally Bowles. 

Exiting the theater, I made a beeline to Block drugstore. I couldn’t wait to apply iridescent green nail polish to my fingertips, anteing up my own “divine decadence.” Like Sally Bowles, however, this femme was also about as fatale as an after-dinner mint.     

My once low-maintenance shag haircut was now a flat, shapeless sprawl, so I decided it was time for the full Minnelli. Next stop: Paul McGregor’s salon on St. Mark’s Place, armed with Liza’s Time magazine cover shot. 

  

“Can you give me something like this?”

I wasn’t completely sold on her quirky bangs that pointed down to a V between penciled eyebrows arcing over spiky-lashed eyes as big as a Keane painting waif’s. My own brows were a bland line that marked the start of a too-wide forehead, and did not warrant extra attention. I got the basic cut, paid my $15, and waltzed out to the street, wondering why my hairdresser was shooting daggers at me the whole way. Much later I realized that it was customary to tip, something that was never done in the basement shop of my mother’s friend Mary. Where I came from, a cut was $5, plain and simple. Throughout my teens, I stretched scotch tape across my bangs, and with my sewing scissors, carefully snipped just below those same straight eyebrows. The rest of my hair—shoulder length or longer! Here baby, there, momma! Everywhere, daddy, daddy—kept on growing. 

Liberated by my sassy, sophisticated bob, I bounced down St. Marks Place as if life truly were a Cabaret. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Visiting the old ‘hood—behind a mask

~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 3 Comments

Rush Hour
Rush hour

It was time. After over five months, I needed to face down my anxiety and fears. (Not of Covid-19 germs, surprisingly. We New Yorkers had beat back the curve under the savvy leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo. We were, and are, “New York Tough.” And smart.)

I took the Metro-North train from my home, an hour and twenty minutes north of NYC, behind a mask for the longest time in my mostly at-home sheltering of the last five months. Reading, what else? The New Yorker. Roz Chast is always my preferred interpreter of generalized-anxiety-disorder, and she covers Covid pretty well, too.

But what would it feel like? I had lamented the changes in my city for years, bashing greedy corporate culprits responsible for the decimation of the unique texture that was once every neighborhood’s rightful claim. Now you need to be very observant to see what once was.

Silver Monuments

My first apartment was a typical tenement, and now is spiffed up with a restaurant and outdoor seating.

156 E. 2nd

I sugar-coated when I described the building and apartment to my friends and family back home, in 1971. But my authentic enthusiasm was that of an 18-year-old who was living her dream:

E. 2nd St. map address

 

Wed. Nov. 10, 1971

Dear D____ ,

     First of all . . . we got an apartment! Hooray! We found it in 1 day, & we’re moving in tomorrow evening. The neighborhood is not too hot—Lower East Side—but the apartment itself is so nice. It’s in a pretty old building, & when the landlord showed it to us it was being completely renovated. It’s only $180/mo., & has loft beds (double size) built into the bedrooms and underneath is a clothes rack & desk built into the wall. The living room has one wall entirely in brick, & the kitchen is big (compared to most NY apt.’s) The bath tub is in the kitchen, but it’ll have a shower attachment & curtain. There’s a new sink, a big refrigerator, & a small stove. We just can’t wait to move in & start making it a home. But before we do anything we have to spray for cockroaches. They’re all over the city, & do they give us the creeps! It’s neat cause Alan [the landlord] is giving us $125 to furnish it (from thrift shops, Salvation Army, etc.) So it’ll be fun buying furniture. And he gave us free (but used) wall-to-wall carpeting. I just can’t wait.—Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

So, now—2020—how did I feel? People were out, mostly masked, and street energy was good. But I was disoriented. Not sure if I was mourning the changes of the last 5 months or the last 50 years, or was it all rolled up into one scribbly cloud? I couldn’t wait to get home and take my mask off, and sit in my little yard—my comfort zone. I know my boundaries need to be stretched from time to time, and I’ll be heading back to the city soon. I wonder what that tenement apartment rents for now. Let’s see.  And I wonder if the cockroaches are gone.