Happy Hump Day

Steven Alan Fall 2013 : Big Girl's Blouses

I'm seriously thinking of making some changes at The Trad

A Connoisseur of Impending Doom

I'd get off at Wall Street even though Bowling Green was closer to the park service work boat.  One reason was an addiction to the balls-to-wall energy on Wall Street.  People moving with an expressed purpose, laser focused determination and guts full of cranky anxiety. You know, how most of us commute home.  In 1985, working women wore little silk blossom ties with navy flannel suits and white leather running shoes, their heels sticking out of LL Bean canvas totes. I wonder where they all went.

The other reason was food. There was a Greek coffee stand run by George. There's always a guy named George in a Greek coffee stand.  A regular coffee, three fast spoons of sugar, and too much cream.  Like melted Hagen Daaz coffee ice cream... only sweeter.

If I was flush, there was a small diner in an office building on Broad Street where two, huge breasted Puerto Rican waitresses, in turtlenecks and rainbow clip-on suspenders, served the only grits south of 125th Street.

The soundtrack came from Madonna's, Like A Virgin on a beat up Radio Shack walkman.  WNBC's,  Don Imus thought she sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium.  Young suits on park benches snorted cocaine with the Journal or NY Post on their lap and Ray Bans covering their eyes. But mostly I remember him and the smell.  A ripe and rotting  BO. 

He was tucked half way into a bright blue sleeping bag at the end of a park bench.  Long silver hair streaked in black fell onto a long grey beard that fell onto a signal yellow shirt. He looked up and pointed at me like he was gonna hit a fly ball my direction.  But he didn't. Instead, he yelled, "This could happen to you!" Fellow pedestrians peel away as his eyes lock on me. Too lazy to detour, I approach the bench as he follows me with his pointing finger, extended for emphasis, by a long yellow nail with a thick black crescent of crud underneath.

"Yeah, you.  Fucking, Stacy Keach! This could happen to you!"

I walk by looking straight ahead.  "Fuck you, Stacy Keach!  Fuck  youuuuuu..." slowly ebbs away under Minnie Mouse's, Dress You Up.  "Stacy Keach?" I wondered. I don't look like Stacy Keach.  Don't get me wrong.  I like Stacy Keach.  He's amazing in 'The Traveling Executioner' and 'Doc.'  27 years later I still don't get Stacy Keach -- That it could happen to me?  A day doesn't go by that I know it can and probably will.

No Idea Why...

Chapel Hill, NC 1977

... I'm just in a good mood today.

An Afternoon with Alice at The Carlyle

All photos by Alice Olive (click to enlarge)

Friday afternoon just before 6PM. A second floor ballroom in the Carlyle Hotel with an iced G&T and Alice Olive. We look around. Costume jewelery designer, Lisa Salzer of Lulu Frost is footing the bill and the room as she grips and grins the crowd under a beautiful short shock of white hair that takes me back to Sydney in 1987.

I tell Alice the pictures I want. Only a certain cool blonde and a Islay single malt redhead. I recall a favorite bumper sticker in London, "Warning! I Brake for Blondes but Back Up for Redheads." I stand alone by an unused kitchen entrance and watch Alice shoot the room with a memory card clenched between her teeth and an extra lens in the crook of an arm.

No one sees like Alice Olive. In a world of self professed photographers, whose only pictures are ripped off cliches of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman & James Dean pasted on Tumblers with hackneyed Gore Vidal quotes (What is with these guys?) -- Miss Olive is the real deal.

After the show, we step off an elevator and into the lobby. A woman in a hat, in front of an 18th Century painting, stops me cold. I ask if Alice can take her picture. She agrees. I tell Alice what I want. Alice shoots it the way she wants which... if you see like Alice -- is the way it should be. But I crop it anyway...

Women of 1987: Smarter Than Our Phones

An '86 hit sung for Princess Diana in '89

They all made more money. The account executive at Edelman. The FBI agent who wiretapped Mafia thugs. The divorcee with a dress shop. The MBA accountant. The MBA brand manager. And that red head from Shearson Lehman.

They dressed conservatively. That is, for work: Brooks Brothers. Anne Taylor. Laura Ashley. At night, they took off the floppy paisley tie, slipped off their slip-ons and, under a restaurant table, gently placed their stocking feet on your crotch.

They always seemed to live on the Upper East Side. Some had a car service. Others had an answering service. They all drank white wine and took their ear ring off when they answered the phone. I see their ghosts on the street and in the bars.

The clubs? They're all gone. Except for Sounds of Brazil. Years ago I brought my ex-wife to NYC on a business trip. I asked the concierge at the Markham Hotel, a plump and fast talking woman from, I'm guessing Queens, if SOBs was still open.

I tell her I went there when I was single and lived in Chelsea. I tell her how I'd drink a couple shots of 151 rum at the bar, order a Brahma beer and take it out on the packed dance floor and gyrate by myself to Samba. She looked at me, cocked her head and said, "Honey, you don't want to take your wife to no club you went to when you was single. What the Hell's wrong with you?" What, indeed.