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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

“It Should Happen To You”

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

Covid-fears have been nudged aside in the news cycle, as “Black Lives Matter” has asserted its place on the country’s center stage, and rightfully so. We’re all mad as hell and we’re not gonna take this anymore. Of course, opportunists have jumped into the orderly demonstrations to whip things up and blur the boundaries, creating more divisiveness (and making off with some high-ticket items).

Macy’s was looted last week. It had already been gutted, along with so much retail in the last decade, but the brick and mortar giant on 34th Street limped on. I find myself longing for images of a younger New York—it doesn’t matter if it’s from the tawdry ’70s when I first arrived, or the seemingly innocent 1950s, when I was being taught to be a good little girl. They peacefully co-exist in me. Just—New York, hang tough! 

This is one of my all-time favorite films, with one of my all-time favorite cinema couples—Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon. (Was I a little like Gladys Glover? Weren’t we all?)

 

 

Stepping outside the slightly threadbare art deco hotel lobby—which I refused to perceive as anything but Busby Berkeley-glamorous—I melded into the midtown throng. While no one looked like Holly Golightly, I was not going to be disappointed on my first day in New York City. Not if I had any say in the matter. Our high school Tri-Hi-Y club, the Katrells, had sold enough cupcakes and cookies at our junior year bake sale to buy Broadway theater tickets and charter a bus. It was 1970—a new decade for adventure and adulthood.

Across Eighth Avenue, finishing touches were being added to the block-long construction site of a relocated Madison Square Garden, and a bit farther east was Macy’s. I split from my coterie of classmates who were making a beeline toward the landmark store we all knew from Miracle on 34th Street. My plan was to bond in private with the city I had chosen as my future home.

A bit tentative, I decided to walk around the block. That way I wouldn’t get lost. Once I turned down 35th Street I was in another world, not of tourists and shoppers, but garment workers pushing huge clothing racks to clatter over the sidewalk cracks and somehow successfully navigate intersections pulsing with turning cars, honking horns, and swarming pedestrians. I was merging my pace into this strange ballet on a narrow one-way street with no sunny side, eager to blend in, when he entered my peripheral vision.

     “Comin’ through!”

“He” was a torso. Literally half a man—a black man—propelling himself with quick assurance using only his arms, palms paddling the dirty sidewalk while seated (if that is the right word) on a mover’s dolly. No one gave him so much as a glance.

Except me. I was shocked. How could such a person exist? Where did his digested food go? How did his body end, under his shirt? And what was he doing here, rolling knee-height along the streets—a human skateboard! Would he get squashed by a taxi before my very eyes?

He continued on his way, swallowed by an unfazed crowd, out of my sightline. Breathing a sigh of relief, I got my bearings. Not sure where to look—up? down? straight ahead?—I still wanted to take in everything and everybody. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be looked at. I needn’t have worried, as any eye contact was fleeting-to-nonexistent.

Heading back to the hotel, I had a more classic, yet still unanticipated, encounter. As I waited at an intersection, a man flashed me. Contrary to cliché, he was not wearing a trench coat. He may have been playing to the crowd, but I felt singled out, as if I were being put to a test by the city itself. And so, turning on a dime, I got to practice my new persona—jaded nonchalance. After all, by now I had been around the block a few times.

I met up with my girlfriends in the lobby where they opened Macy’s shopping bags to show me their purchases, including wild pantyhose designed by counterculture artist Peter Max.

     “Wow! Groovy!” Or, more likely, I would have said “Neat!”

Nobody could have scored this fashion coup back home. Only in New York. I kept my own recent discoveries to myself, not quite knowing how to share them with my friends. Not wanting anyone to cast a provincial pall on my future.

We next turned toward our evening plans: dressing up in suburbia-tamed psychedelic print mini dresses for dinner and the theater, with chaperone moms who had volunteered to herd us into Manhattan on an early weekend in spring. Promises, Promises was the show. I took it as an official invitation. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

promises-promises-broadway-movie-poster-1968-1010409312

 

copyright Sharon Watts

Jokers and Uncut Gems: Street Characters

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

Who knew that I would get a double jolt of Vitamin G (for grit, grime, and gristle) this winter? S.A.D., cabin fever, the kozmic blues (I just finished the recent bio on Janis Joplin) —call it what you will—winter can do a number on you. Even, or especially, with global warming enveloping us all in a cocoon of dread.

Two recent films were the forces of nature that got me out of my doldrums and into that New York state of mind pre-hypergentrification, Disney-fication, and Bloomberg-ification, a trifecta that razed so much of what added a real feel to the city I had decided was home before I even arrived, in 1971.

JOKER. I was dragging my heels on this one. I hate cartoon and action-figure movies. Heath Ledger had already nailed it, so what was the point? Then I remembered—I had noticed “Leaf” Phoenix when he was a troubled kid in 1989’s Parenthood. I told myself then to watch and see who he became. He (now, of course, Joaquin) and director Todd Phillips transported, thrilled, and unnerved me, all the while opening me up to the ongoing hurt in the world. The stuff I had glanced over, mostly out of self-preservation during my early days in the city, was here in full-focus. Arthur Fleck is one of those struggling people whose mental fragility is stomped on just one time too many. Brilliant while disturbingly dark, JOKER is the only film I have ever watched three nights in a row, thanks to the Fandango app. I hid in the restroom between showings of 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, while the ushers emptied the theater, so I could see it twice for one admission. Now I can watch JOKER’s dance on the stairs enough to be considered fit for Arkham Asylum.

UNCUT GEMS. If you ever told me I’d want to see an Adam Sandler movie, well. . . I do like to be surprised. And that he did. His character, Howard Ratner, is so vivid and jittery and real—and charasmatic!— that I knew I brushed shoulders (and more) with this type all my years in New York. They still exist. That kind of pushing the envelope and betting against the odds requires a chutzpah that can only be created in a NYC petrie dish. Adam, you should have been nominated for Best Actor—but Joaquin, you deserved it.

So—I look at Manhattan and see the obvious “new.” I also see the ghosts of the past. If you scratch beneath the glossy chrome and glass surface, the underbelly is still there. And if you can peel your eyes from your iPhone, you might be surprised..

guy on phone

 

A roster of truly eccentric, seemingly homeless men who were also street artists never missed a performance, their sidewalk stages radiating for several blocks around Carnegie Hall either by plan or ironic happenstance. On 54rd and Sixth, a horned Viking helmet poked above the heads and shoulders of office workers milling by on lunch break.

     I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time, proclaimed Moondog, a blind poet and performer who sold his poems and writings on music philosophy to anyone with a dollar. Cloaked in a self-made cape, he emulated his notion of the Norse god Thor while playing a self-invented instrument he called an Oo. Moondog was in fact a respected and often-recorded composer, I learned years later, after his death in 1999.    

     I would pass him and continue uptown, coming upon an even stranger character who was hunched over a snare drum, beating it with a concentrated, compulsive fervor.

     “Gene Krupa!”

     “Buddy Rich!”

     He announced these iconic Big Band names to himself, or to the air, or to anyone who stopped, while continuing with his set. The drummer’s look upstaged his act. He had applied black shoe polish to his hair, then continued it onto his skin, drawing an almost cartoon-shape of a haircut down over his forehead and around his temples. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese would use him as a documentary touch in 1976’s Taxi Driver. Sweetly garish and only in New York.

     Hanging a left on 57th Street, I would next encounter the aria-singing tenor who was also in his own world, pouring his heart and soul out to some lost love: person, place, or dream. He too would be a fixture for many years on that patch of a sidewalk stage, surrounded by footsteps instead of footlights. I would first hear, then see him even decades later. He may still be planted there, pleading for his own personal Aida. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Lovin’ Avenue A — again, if not always.

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

It hurts to still be in love with a city you now barely recognize. The rampant hyper-gentrification always sucker-punches me when I return: irreversible, botched plastic surgery on beloved neighborhoods and skylines, not allowed to age and change organically or with any grace. Yet I still manage to find, here and there, a vestige of what I remember from the early 70s—tactile reference to a certain dignity when New York City was considered (by the non-believers) to be down and out. It might be a faded sign on a building, or a scrawl of defiant graffiti. Or the city’s marginal people who still somehow survive, defying the slick surfaces of the latest bland glass and chrome box, and the iPhone culture that has no perception of anything or anyone beyond that screen.

IMG_5066
Ave. A signage thru the decades

Deport Trump
Yes! Or better yet—JAIL!

IMG_5073
Willie shaving next to his chair-cocoon draped in a Hefty bag

Our neighborhood, and almost all New York, was dangerous. Full of litter and garbage, the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Beggars, drug addicts, and homeless schizophrenics taking up valuable real estate on the sidewalks provided a reason for me to develop that famous New York attitude of detachment: dodging deftly without breaking stride while staring straight ahead. No eye contact, ever. Compassion, fear, distaste, curiosity; I had no time to process these feelings, and instead began to hone what seemed a necessary tool for survival.

Movies that took place here (that I watched as if doing research, while still in the safety of suburbia) portrayed something that was decidedly not for everyone. Midnight Cowboy transfixed me: a dark, achingly sad yet funny valentine that I held as a ticket to my intrepidity. There were stories here, and dreams, and roses in Spanish Harlem. And now, two new immigrants to the New World.

In fifteen years, the East Village would be gentrified and sweet-tarted up for The Slaves of New York, and today the Lower East Side is morphed unrecognizably into a clubland for the new, moneyed millennials. But “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” meant something different in 1972. Sure, we wanted to have fun. We also just wanted to get home alive. A demographic virtually unto ourselves, my roommate and I did not loiter after dark.

I took the long, slow bus fifty blocks up First Avenue to my classes at Parsons, near Sutton Place. Peering out the window, my Army Navy bag and portfolio at my feet, I absorbed everything. The route took me through the East Village and past Bellevue, founded to serve “lunatics and paupers” in 1736, through Methadone Alley (I would learn later), past the immense and bland Met Life housing communities, then eventually opening up to UN Plaza, the elegant pocket parks of Tudor City, and finally into the high-rent neighborhood where Johnny Carson lived.

I carried a brown bag lunch the half-block from class to Sutton Park, overlooking the East River, and on days after my modest allowance arrived from home, would treat myself to a deli sandwich and almond horn pastry. Marilyn Monroe had lived here nearly a decade before, and on the corner of First Avenue I once caught a rare glimpse of the legend—Greta Garbo.

IMG_5068
Still in business!

The return route went down Second Avenue, depositing me at dusk near the Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home. My pace and my pulse picked up as I navigated east, choosing 6th Street for its strip of macrobiotic restaurants and hippie element as the first leg of my walk home. Next I zig-zagged, positively toward 4th Street and down First Avenue with its dairy restaurants and bakeries, to 2nd Street where I hung a left, past the housing project that was full of elderly immigrants living out their days. All of ten minutes from the bus stop, I arrived at Avenue A, where I picked up a pint of Haagen Dazs at Key Food and scuttled several doors down to our building, just past the minuscule Hispanic storefront selling candy and contraband. Finally, up five flights of stairs, until barred in safely for the night. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Not Yet the Boss of Me

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

1969
Me in 1969

The Age of Aquarius dawned on my generation with a bowl of granola, a “Make Love, Not War” protest sign, and a birth control pill.

Hugely popular books were Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Joy of Sex, and The Sensuous Woman, offering us heady new empowerment to push puritanical boundaries and discover the pleasures that (thank god!) went beyond those church-issued booklets on “becoming a woman.”

The rules for the guys, however, hadn’t really changed (not since they basically took the liberties to invent them in the first place). As the saying went: “Boys will be boys.” And in the early 1970s, a lot of them were now our bosses. (Not much has changed there either.)

If we didn’t feel any support when we needed it back then, we certainly have it now. We are Woman, hear us roar (finally)! In 1973, I found myself in a near-universal #metoo predicament.

*****

A few months into my third and final year of art school, I decided I could manage yet another part-time job. I turned to the Village Voice classifieds and saw something I imagined would be a perfect fit. Having no previous experience had never stopped me before, and so I circled with a red pen: Cocktail waitresses wanted for new restaurant in garment district. I had lost a few pounds over the summer and my hair was longer, giving me the courage to imagine stepping into one of my teen fantasies—the one where I am soignée and sophisticated, twirling on a bar stool at dusk, the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop and a martini in the foreground.

 
I showed up for the interview and was hired on the spot. However, I would not be serving Manhattans straight up, my witty banter and insouciant smile drawing generous tips and flirtations from charming men. Those three positions went to exotic young Asian beauties whose graceful bodies were perfect for leaning over in their tight, black dresses while balancing a tray of cocktails. No, I was going to be something else entirely, something I had never even heard of— a wine sommelier. For a kosher-Chinese restaurant. I was neither Jewish nor Chinese, and I knew nothing about wine. Moshe Peking now had a goy on staff.

 
The bottle-blonde wife of one of the owners took me to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy my uniform—two suits in polyester double-knit by Act III. The red, white and blue plaid won the dowdiness title hands down. I looked in the dressing room mirror, utterly doubtful, as Elaine adjusted the shoulders.

 
“You know, you were hired because you have a wholesome quality. It will encourage the customers to order bottles of wine for the table.”

 
Next stop was to visit the president of the wine company. This I was entrusted to do on my own. A diminutive yet pudgy middle-aged man ushered me into his office. The windows offered a view of Macy’s and on the streets far below, racks of wholesale clothing shuttled between trucks and warehouse entrances with an urgency that provided the current to this strange neighborhood I had first explored on my high school field trip. That seemed like eons ago. I listened conscientiously while he described every type of wine his Israeli vineyards produced, as he loaded me up with a barrage of pamphlets to study in order to become an expert company representative. I gathered everything together to leave.

 
“Wait a minute, there is something else.” Turning toward him as he lunged—with octopus arms and a badly aimed kiss—I managed to dodge any follow-through to this decidedly unkosher advance. (Was I becoming conditioned to unexpected moves from grown men?) What resulted was an almost farcical chase around the brown leather couch, until I slipped out the door and down the hallway to the elevator. Flushed and angry, my discomfort level was both tempered and confused by a gut feeling that I wasn’t in any real danger, just in yet another predicament where my power as a woman was squashed. (If I wasn’t in real danger, did that make it all okay?) Sexual harassment on the job still offered a blurry definition to me. I never told my bosses what had transpired, afraid I would be fired before my first paycheck. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanging Out in Washington Square

~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 4 Comments

The Lower East Side’s counterrevolutionary troubadour David Peel died last Thursday. I knew of him because he used to hang out in Washington Square Park, and because he was collaborating with John and Yoko at a time I was feeling a bit untethered to my Beatlemania roots. They had officially and publicly split on April 10, 1970, when Paul made the announcement (dragging a few years behind John’s admission of the fact). I halfheartedly followed the Fab Four individually, with less passion and success. John and Yoko were living at the Dakota, and alternately drove around in a white limo and walked by themselves like regular New Yorkers in Central Park and Washington Square, where they discovered Peel.

Living on Bleecker Street in 1972, I often hung out in the park, keeping to myself. Sometimes I was approached. As anonymous as I thought I wanted to be, there was something about being there and singled out for anything other than panhandling that felt like a casting call. One time, it actually was.

28 June 72
Dear D____ ,
My social life at present consists of going to Washington Square with Tessa at night and grooving with the local derelicts. Tony, the toothless poet, King Frog, Enoch, & Rudy . . . all of them black & always drunk. On weekends David Peel & the Lower East Side (John & Yoko sang & played with them on “David Frost”) come to the park & play really weird chanting, neat music that turns on every drunk in the place. I like it too. That’s how we get to meet the local celebrities (not David Peel & the Lower East Side, but the derelicts).

Washington Square Park was the magnet that drew everyone below 14th Street, and I was no exception. I took along a sketchbook in my knapsack and filled it with drawings of people’s backs, too shy to engage in eye contact with my subjects while capturing them in charcoal. I blended in with the crowd of laid back loungers, war protesters, troubadours, pot dealers, pram pushers, chess players, frisbee tossers, young lovers, and elderly pensioners. Starting with kids and dogs in the fountain, the diversity of co-existence fanned out centrifugally, leaving no patch of park unoccupied.

That’s why I was surprised when singled out to participate in a NYU student film. Getting over my self-consciousness, I followed direction until the late afternoon light turned to dusk. Much to my disappointment, the film did not become the follow-up to Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets. And I never saw the final clip. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

BJ in the park

17 June 72
Dear Mom,
I guess I didn’t tell you I was in a film, did I? I was in Washington Square reading, & as I got up to leave a girl asked me if I’d be in a film she was doing (she was in 3rd year at NYU filmmaking). It was silent, & just about a girl (me) sitting in the park and a black guy comes up like all guys do (“Hey baby, whatcha doing?”) etc. and I just sit there with no expression, but then there’s a fantasy where I get mad & shove him off, & then it goes back to reality where I still have no expression and walk off. It was fun to do, & finally I got a chance to act (Ha!) Look for me in your local theatre. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

David Peel

copyright Sharon Watts

March Madness

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

The term refers to college basketball, but I’m going to play it fast and loose here. I have snow in my driveway that tops my mukluks, dumped by a lion of a nor’easter that had the nerve to roar in after Daylight Savings Time arrived. Ignoring that, I plow through scrapbook memorabilia on my dining room table, as I add visuals to my memoir (after all, it is being labeled as a scrapbook-memoir).

I am hoping for solar power to kick in outdoors, as cabin fever propels this project forward.

scrapbook

When I was in high school I had virtually no interest in sports. I got laid up with a bout of mononucleosis in 1970 and ended up on the sofa, becoming mesmerized by  “Pistol” Pete Maravich.

My sister wrote me a letter after I moved to New York that I saved in my scrapbook. Pete had gone professional, my interest had faded, but seeing this made me recall that moment where basketball, and not fashion (or cold water flats), claimed all of my attention:

Dianne letter

26 Jan 72
Dear Mom,
The heat & hot water came back yesterday . . . And our rug is finally drying. There’s still one more little leak . . .We don’t have an ironing board yet—not too much to iron but we do it on the living room rug.

me & pipe copy

After five months of broken faucets, flooding pipes, and stints of no heat or hot water in the dead of winter, Tessa and I were no longer so enamored of the Lower East Side. And those were just the plumbing issues. Another indoor assault—cockroaches! Having never seen one until I arrived, the little antennae poking out of a hole in the wall one day were kind of cute—who could this be? Apparently a scout, who then deemed our humble abode to be ripe for pillaging. The toxic spray and boric acid we bought in the local hardware store were no match for these seasoned veterans. When the apocalypse comes, both water and cockroaches will prevail.

Outside was a more dangerous war zone. It started with a quality of life issue—within a week, our newly installed downstairs buzzer had its wires clipped and the buzzer stolen. Then an upstairs neighbor was robbed, and we were informed by a septuagenarian Slavic tenant that he shooed away someone trying to break into our apartment through the front door. We had witnessed a mugging on the street, and on Avenue B, two police officers were gunned down by a splinter group of the Black Panthers. Hopefully not Ace.

Our only new friend was our downstairs neighbor. A recent Baltimore transplant and Dylan fanatic, Jim had hair past his shoulders and managed to be more of a movie nut than I was. He had seen Midnight Cowboy sixteen times to my three, and conversed in exclamation points:

“Watts!! You gotta see the John Ford triple bill playing at the St. Marks! Red River! Best film ever made! John Wayne and Montgomery Clift!”

Soon he would almost convince me that a macrobiotic diet was the way to go, and lent me his bible: You Are All Sanpaku by George Ohsawa, who introduced the west to eating according to yin and yang. And what is “sanpaku”?

Jim was only too happy to explain. “It’s when the whites of the eye can be seen below the iris! Look at our unhealthy western diet—all that over-processed white flour and white sugar! Look at JFK—he had sanpaku really bad!”

According to my new friend, this condition had something to do with the demise of the president, and so for weeks I couldn’t help but stare into the mirror to see if my irises were floating up into my head, precipitating some horrible lurking fate.

Bypassing the brown rice and broccoli for our last supper in our first apartment, we invited Jim and our old HoJo’s pal Julio to a tuna noodle casserole followed by my latest food obsession, Häagen-Dazs rum raisin. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts