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.

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.

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

copyright Sharon Watts