DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?

 


   

WITH AUNT LOUISE, SILVERSPRINGS FLORIDA 1950

This is the first family vacation that I remember......being constantly carsick, throwing up repeatedly on the way to Daytona Beach in the un-airconditioned vehicle full of Mother, Grandmother, Grandfather, Aunt Louise, Uncle Paul and Me......Then facing my fears of the wild ocean and my salt-intolerance; abhorrence of bright light;  then-undiagnosed near-sightedness;  sensitivity to just about any and everything; inablity to sleep on rough, starched hotel sheets;  heat stroke; and pavement-blistered feet, burned through my cheap rubber flip-flops; terror of fish in general;  and up-chucking intolerance of  stinky Florida tap water.........I seemed a real  gardenia, yet Aunt Louise really loved her "sensitive nephew"!  She was always so kind, generous and understanding and I felt accepted and understood rather than like the hapless neurotic and compulsive kid breaking out in  rashes to critical glance and judgmental tone.

BASIC BLACK

1970.....I had acquired an old 1930's silk velvet dressing gown and an old  black silk French cloche with black maribou feather trim......and fancied myself as a Russian expatriate  artist living in Paris....This was what I called "the year of costuming" as I seldom appeared "out of one costume or another".....favorite outfit?.....peculiarly enough, it was a pair of red,yellow, black and green skin-tight bellbottom trousers worn with a long-sleeved "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club skin-hugging cotton sweater" over which I wore a sweater vest in identical colors, bearing the "Ritz Cracker" Logo......completed by a pair of yellow, red and black tennis shoes and a beret......the era of "Cosmic Drag"...A friend was so wild about this outfit that I eventually gave it to him, and he wore it incessantly for yet another year, although it was then terribly outre and ill-suited for the new "Disco" look!   [second skin NIKNIK shirts with crotch-squeezing doubleknit bells] The dressing gown became my formal dress attire.....Oddly enough, I never considered my outfits to be particularly unusual, as  even more daring friends like Woody Brooks would, with little self-consciousness,  appear in a Folies Bergere outfit, wearing a 3-Ft. white Marie Antoinette Wig surmounted by a giant white bird cage filled with white doves, which he would release at  fashionable nightclubs {gay bars} to spectacular audience reactions.......When I saw PARTY MONSTER,  it brought back memories of these days of high fashion excesses.....