Hell’s Kitchen

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Nostalgie de la Boue”

~ DIRNDL SKIRT ~ 1 Comment

Here is a phrase I only just became aware of: nostalgie de la boue (“yearning for the mud”). In his chapter on the demise of Times Square in Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul, author and blogger Jeremiah Moss further clarifies this, via architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, as “the sentimental attachment to decrepitude and sleaze . . .a venerable urban tradition.”

Muschamp went further, in 1996: “Where have they gone, the chicken hawks and stiletto knife displays, the peep show shills, the pickpockets, coke heads, winos, pimps and tramps? We had a world class gutter here. Must we trade it in for a shopping strip of retail chain outlets?”

If Muschamp and Moss can lament, let me add my small voice to the chorus. That tawdry, tactile, magnificent mess of a neighborhood was my first home in New York City, and I too mourn its demise. The world it contained informed the adult-child I was in the early Seventies just as indelibly as had the small suburban enclave where I grew up.

Danger always flickers at the edges of any child’s universe. Disappearing fathers with their strong, reassuring arms catapult one closer to the flames, testing personal limits and capabilities of how to feel safe. Alone. All these years later, faint tracers of that trajectory still stream through my consciousness.

The last time I was on 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and felt any vestige of that hyper-pulsating block (that I dared myself to walk down upon arrival, just to see if I came out of it alive), was in the late 1980s. I had earned my green belt in karate and needed to buy a bō, a long martial art stick, from a shop that might have been there all those years previous, tucked between peep shows and porn theaters. The irony didn’t escape me. All I was packing in 1971 was an eighteen-year-old “good girl’s” sense of daring. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I knew it.

The Disney-fication starting to happen in the 1990s, and my red flags went up as the red light district went out. It all sort of sounded good, on the surface. Make things safer? Who could argue? Perversely, me.

Fear is a basic instinct—nothing else heightens the sense of feeling alive as that breath you finally exhale when you get just past it. Yet, I guess it’s all relative. For me, the all-consuming plague of corporate porn is far worse than the old-fashioned garden variety that once flourished in Times Square. I could never attempt to match Jeremiah Moss as he describes meticulously why it this is so, in Vanishing New York.

All I know is that I feel gutted when I visit my old neighborhood.

8th Ave.

How easily I plugged into that throbbing street energy, and with it, the tactile seediness. My suburban backdrop faded into history—bland Colonial and ranch houses (reflecting even blander life prospects), slow trawls through the local hangout, McDonalds (required first stop with a newly acquired drivers license), unrequited crushes on boys (both squeaky clean jocks and the shadier rebels without a cause)—all just an out-of-town tryout for the stage set before me.

Our turf. Irish bars with wafts from steam table fare and stale beer snaking over the sidewalks, pawnshops beckoning with diamond rings and musical instruments long abandoned by desperate owners, shoeshine men stationed on high-traffic corners with stained fingers whipping the rag, over and over, and tired hookers tucked into sooty SRO doorways trying to meet nightly quotas for their pimps, who, like cockroaches, were rarely seen in the light of day. Enveloping, even nurturing—while soaring above it all—was that ever-seductive siren, the Broadway theater world: the heart of the sexy beast beating deep behind velvet curtains.

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway
They say there’s always magic in the air.

 

Second Day in NYC – Mon. Sept. 6, 1971 (Labor Day)
[Letter to high school friend]
Dear D____ ,
Tessa and I were walking all over town today—I really like her. The Y is fantastic—big room (not dingy at all), good location (the theater district). Like 8th Ave. is junky, but things improve as you go east. The location is good cause it’s a 10 minute walk to Central Park, 5th Ave., & any other midtown place & subway. Yesterday we got in at 1:30, lugged all my junk up (my mom got the look-over by the elevator guy & told me to watch out for him). Tessa got in at 6 and we didn’t go out, just talked and talked. Today we found out 8th Ave. is the prostitute hang-out, & there’s a porno movie house opposite our room. But there’s also, just catty-corner from us, a Howard Johnson’s, a deli (with YOGURT!) around the corner—like everything is so convenient. So we’ll likely stay here all year. We fell in love with the city today. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

lyrics copyright Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller

 

 

 

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

“You Can’t Go Home Again” . . . (but we always try)

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

The holiday season is upon us. My knee jerk reaction to the first jarring jangle of a Christmas carol is always a groan, usually while running an errand in a dollar store, buying toilet paper or hydrogen peroxide.

I know I’ll eventually get with the program, even though I’ve strayed from my suburban shopping roots. I just like to keep things simple, stay out of malls, and no, I do not need to make a trek to Rockefeller Plaza to see the tree. (But I might, if the spirit moves me.)

I have no childhood memory of Black Friday, now with all its stampeding, guns-in-Walmart-parking-lots notoriety that we’ve come to expect. We bought Christmas gifts, but it wasn’t out of control. ( I feel every tipping point has been reached in my lifetime, for the worse, and so I’ve become more of a Gregorian chanting grinch this time of year. And I like it.)

So I look back on my first holiday after moving to New York City, in 1971. And I wish I could beam myself back there. One whiff of Lebanon “baloney” would do just that, but you can’t find Seltzers outside Pennsylvania, and ordering it online would defeat the purpose. Besides, by now I am nearly vegan.

mammaw-at-the-stove
Mammaw Watts at her stove top

The Thomas Wolfe quote “You can’t go home again” was starting to resonate when I returned to my hometown. It was the holiday season, and I brought exotic treats back for my family and friends to taste, wanting to share my world that had expanded beyond Sunbeam Bread and Lebanon “baloney,” Charles Chips and sticky buns.

I opened the fresh halvah divided into chunks—plain, with pistachios, and chocolate-covered—bought from the international food market vendor on Ninth Avenue. (“How much you want?” he asked with a vague accent. I held up my thumb and index finger to indicate how thick to slice, and savored a free sample melting on my tongue while my purchase was wrapped in opaque waxed paper.)

Eagerly awaiting their swoons, I received instead: “What exactly is it? It tastes like cold potatoes.” Middle Eastern candy made from sesame seeds? Our family tree didn’t extend to that neck of the woods; its taste buds apparently were quite comfortable squatting where they had been for several centuries, adjacent to Pennsylvania Dutch farmland and connected at the hip to the home of Hershey’s chocolate.

I pulled a chair up to my grandparents’ Formica table. Before me was a smorgasbord of beets and pickled eggs, coleslaw, apple butter, bread, lunch meat, sliced American cheese, and Pappaw’s homemade condiments: mayonnaise and ketchup. This was the part that I always could go home to again. Or so it felt.

Nov. 3rd, 1971
Dear Sharon,
You must be very busy with your work, keep it up. We are so glad you like it there, it’s a busy town. The goodies you were telling me about sound great.
We had a nice time on Sunday, I had your Mom and Dianne down for dinner. I had smoked pork chops, baked potatoes, aramatic vegetables, Jello that I made with the orange juice and pineapple juice, and one tablespoon of plain jelletin. I make my own that way there is nothing but the plain fruit juice, I also put carrots and pineapple in it.
I just made myself some Honey Tea, a tsp. of Honey and a cup of hot water. It’s good for your kidney’s.
I will write soon, be careful.
LOVE
Mammaw & Pappaw

—Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

This memoir is finished. I will still post here while I work on a query letter and try to find an agent in 2017. The scrap-booking aspect continues, and that is the fun part for me. The writing was all cathartic, as well as my sincere effort to share New York City at a particular time. Meanwhile, I am entering a free memoir contest here: http://tinyurl.com/j4d3kqz, with Jennifer Wills of the Seymour Agency as judge. Wish me luck!

“Fasten Your Seat Belts . . .”

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

Two days after the presidential election, I was in the city—my emotional touchstone. All day long I had done my walking meditation, hobbling in new (but sturdy) shoes, from Grand Central to the Upper East Side, through Central Park and over to Riverside Drive. I sometimes forgot that this was a new world. A lunch date with a friend I had reconnected with after a thirty-year hiatus had us lamenting the “good old bad old days” in Hell’s Kitchen. With what we’d been through in our lives, we could deal with this looming apocalypse, right?

Darkness fell, and I continued down upper Broadway past the Trump Tower on Columbus Circle that replaced the Gulf & Western Building (which housed an underground movie theater in 1970, where I first saw Midnight Cowboy). Finally, heading down Eight Avenue somewhere in the 40s, I realized I was desperately seeking comfort, looking for familiar landmarks to pin me to a map in my head (and heart) that went back over forty years.

Entire blocks are now eviscerated. Blarney Stones have yielded to video game streetscapes, a Trump-visioned hell. I didn’t expect such physical disorientation that had me second- and third-guessing my sanity as I tried to locate a cross street sign. Passing the neon reminder that Smith’s Bar still existed, I briefly considered ducking into the neighborhood hangout that I had never hung out in. Spiffed up by new owners, it teemed with pre-theater goers—something that definitely was not part of the Runyonesque clientele that reflected the neighborhood back in 1972. I wasn’t looking for a yuppified Times Square institution. I was looking for a place that felt timeless. All I wanted was something even peripherally from my past, that predated Disney’s porn-ification of Times Square.

Swinging a left onto a stretch of 44th Street layered like a pastrami sandwich with tourists lined up for their 7 p.m. curtain times, I saw the sign.

sardis

Of course.

In 1971, when I lived within spitting distance of the legendary landmark

—famous for its celebrity caricatures marla-maples and frequented by Broadway stars and theater critics—

I was too intimidated to enter. Now I was ready. I was fastening my seat belt for a bumpy four years.

With my modest monthly allowance, I somehow managed to see almost every play that came to life within the neon trapezoid that encompassed the theater district. Balcony seats in 1971 cost $7, yet I had another, still more frugal ploy. I would arrive at intermission break, mingle with the crowd outside, then enter with them for the second act. Making my way up to the rear balcony, I discreetly nestled on the aisle steps, unreported by the paying seat holders and unnoticed by the usherettes in their prim white collars and black cardigans. By now their flashlights were off and they were clustered in the ladies’ lounge puffing on cigarettes or catching up on gossip. By now, they were far too jaded to the magic happening on stage.

Fri. Sept. 17th, 1971
Dear D____ ,
It’s now 11:30, & Penny & I just got back from a walk around town. First we had ice cream at Howard Johnson’s, where we’re pretty good friends with this guy that works at the counter. He always gives us extra and 1/2 off. Then we felt so full we had to walk around (it was dark) & it was really nice—everyone dressed up to go to the theatre. But we decided to walk through the lobbies of the big hotels. First the Taft (to go to the bathroom), then the NY Hilton. We glanced in the Kismet Room at the Hilton, & these guys (def. between 25-60) invited us in & we said we didn’t have any money but they said they’d buy, so they were smashed & we had 2 sloe gin fizzes a piece, plus the musician came by to play the accordian & sing. They spent $3 on each of us & invited us to see Englebert Humperdink right up the street, but we declined & got out. Then we hit the Warwick, the Park Lane (Central Park South—very ritzy) & the Plaza—just hitting the newsstands & gawking at the classy lobbies. Then we went past Thursday’s, a night-clubbish bar/restaurant for “young singles,” & ended up talking to the doorman who wanted Penny’s number. It was about 10:15, so we headed home. . . . Did I tell you about the Hare Krishna guy who got us in his apartment? — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

September 11 & the Unfinished Towers

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

1971 marked my first September 11th in New York City. A few days earlier, I had uprooted from suburbia and moved into the Laura Spellman YWCA on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. I was instantly in love with my new life. I started writing letters immediately to share the wonder of my new home with my mom, who had dropped me off on this tattered street corner, and went back to Pennsylvania in tears.

Sat. Sept 11, 1971

Dear Mom,

There’s just so much to see & do, you can’t get bored. It’s so neat to see famous places you heard of. Like ritzy clubs & restaurants. I just found out today that around the other corner, at 49th Street, is “Hair.” And the famous Italian restaurant “Mama Leone’s” is there too. We decided to splurge today on a Ho Jo double dip.

Well, I have to go. Write soon.

I didn’t see the World Trade towers immediately. It wasn’t until my roommate and I decided to take the Circle Line Tour that I made my acquaintance.

Advertised in all the neighborhood souvenir shops was the Circle Line Tour, a three hour cruise that lassoed the island. It seemed a perfect way to embrace my new home, as well as get some perspective on where, exactly, my dreams had deposited me. On a brisk, sunny day in early November, my roommate and I shelled out $3.50 each for tickets and boarded the boat of tourists docked at 43rd Street.

We settled into deck chairs on the upper level, and, pulling away from the magnet of Manhattan, churned down the Hudson. The guide was expert and entertaining, pointing out neighborhoods and buildings as he embellished with tidbits of cultural and historical interest. Snapping photos with my Kodak Instamatic, I documented the journey.

At Battery Park the cityscape came to an abrupt halt. What seemed to stop the buildings from toppling into the harbor were two unfinished vertical towering blocks, reaching higher into the sky than anything in the world ever before built by man, their facades flat and without charm. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

wtc-1971

One day I decided to walk down to where they were rooted.

Only to the far south was there any evidence of the future, a double exclamation point to the city’s evolution from the days of Dutch commerce. The World Trade Center was nearly finished, looming mirage-like, our own Oz. One afternoon I decided to walk down West Broadway from Houston Street, until I was standing just below the towers. Along the way, quiet brick-surfaced side streets crowded my peripheral vision with ghosts of factory workers hurrying to punch the clock, and massive buildings, once proud dowagers of the industrial age, loitered as shadows of their former selves. Dumpsters were attached in front like aprons, overflowing with fabric scraps from sweatshops, and perched high above were water towers—tiaras from another time. It was the eeriest, emptiest walk I could remember, with the end always a bit further away than it seemed, just out of reach. Iconic—but of what? I didn’t know, in 1972. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

Attic Archaeology

~ 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.

Ali MacGraw

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

copyright Sharon Watts

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

~ 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

Fred B. contact info
for a good time?

copyright Sharon Watts

I Am My Mother’s Daughter, Kinda

~ 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!)

Joel Grey Eat Honey copy

romeo & juliet envelopeE. 2nd sealing wax

 

“I’m Walkin’ Here!”

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

“I arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with my turquoise vinyl trunk, my art school scholarship, and the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy sensurrounding my dreams.

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

I was eighteen, and ready for the ’70s. On my own.”

That was to be my opening paragraph. Now it’s tucked a bit further into the story. I lost count—nine drafts so far? Ten? All I know is that I now label it Latest Draft.

I wanted to move to NYC so badly in 1970 that when I saw Midnight Cowboy, I thought I could even live in the same kind of squatter’s squalor as Ratso Rizzo. Just how deep was the hue in those rose-colored glasses I had on? I suppose I was just making a point.

What propelled me out of my home environment is something I explore in my writing. At the same time I was planning my escape, I would archive all I was leaving behind, with my Instamatic camera and my innate sense that I would want to remember everything, eventually. That day has come.

me & my olivetti