Nude Paintings and expensive hair-cuts

{In this memoir installation - the author moves out of the house for good, falls for an older woman, gets a $76 haircut and discovers the buildings full of eccentric artists that live blocks away from his childhood favorite haunt: The Children's Museum.}

The fall of 1998 found me living in my first apartment. This was after sharing an attic room with my younger brother and putting up with his straight edge phase's devotion to hard-core screamfest music during my first year back at home following college. (Although artistically we could agree on All in the Family re-runs. We played a deconstructive game, fueled by various imbibed substances, where we tried to guess - based on how far into the series the episode was - if the actors knew that they were famous, iconic.)

It wasn't an apartment actually - it was a room in an old Victorian house in Newton Centre that used to be a commune of sorts in the 70's. The house was owned by the survivng couple of the commune - a husband who was a Mason who looked like he could bench-press me (he was one of the Classified Section's Service Directory profiles) and his teacher wife. I shared a bathroom up in the attic, probably former servant quarters, with an older gentleman who was studying theology at Harvard Extension School and had numerous stuffed birds in his room. For the first 2 weeks in the room - I did not even have a bed - I slept on a rudimentary foam flip chair as I tried to get to sleep to the blue and gray crashing waves of informerical pixels against the slanted ceiling.

I was 25 and somewhat impressionable and I was working at the local community newspaper conglomerate. I was toiling away in the mind-numbingly-boring-world-of-classified-section-production and trying to stay awake in my endless series of 12-8 shifts where I acted as the human Craigslist for eastern Massachusetts.

The paper hired a number of temps at the time to make up ads and lay out sections. The design department, although a mere 15 feet away from our cluster of short cubes in the newsroom in the industrial park in Needham, seemed unreachable at the time because I did not have the necessary confidence - even though I had worked designing my college newpaper for 4 years prior.

One of the temps caught my eye and we became fluorescent newsroom chums. She was older, about 32 or so, the age I am now as I type this. She just temped at the paper so she could support her fine art career. She had a big studio in the Fort Point Channel, that - at the time rented for only $700.

I was somewhat new to search engines at the time - and one night I innocently typed her name into AltaVista or whatever search engine was popular at the time, on my then new blueberry iMac 333 mHz. (I didn't own a desk at the time either so I propped it up on the box it came in.) On my second returned link - I clicked upon a huge painting she had made of herself, nude - replete with subtle stylish swirls of orange and purple. It wasn't photo-realistic - but I could definetely tell that it was based on looking in the mirror. Young and unable to play it cool at the time - I somehow managed to work into the cube converstaion that I had "stumbled" across the painting whilst on the internet, imagine that.

"Hey, the Fort Point Channel Open Studios are coming up and I am going to be showing my new work," she said, oblivious to my painting discovery.

"That sounds cool," I said, and followed the angle of her black hair to the drab newsroom beige carpet.

"Maybe you would like to get innvolved and volunteer. My friend is coordinating people - you'll get some free goodies for your efforts," she said, probably sensing that I would fell a tree for her art materials if she asked.

I signed up that day and my mind was racing with visions of Martin Scorsese's contribution to the film NY Stories swirling in my over-caffeinated head. This was in the days before I had any sense of health and I put back about 4 Cokes a shift.

The day before I was to volunteer, she was having a preview party at her loft and she had invited several people from work, along with me. It was also to serve as a good-bye to the loft/studio because somebody was buying it. The funny thing was that - the person displacing her was another artist temp in the newsroom.

So, on the day of the party - I did my first ridiculous thing by going to Vidal Sasoon on Newbury Street and getting a $76 dollar hair-cut from the top stylist there. I had mentioned to my crushee that I liked her hair and she relayed who her stylist was. So that is how I ended up in the 2nd floor hair studio sipping a coffee that Saturday morning at 8:30 am and going to the changing room to slip into a decadent smock.

When the top stylist, who was used to coiffing the hair of local sportscasters, politicians and executives asked me "what I did" ... I sheepishly muttered something about being "in publishing". But truthfully, she was very nice and even encouraged me to go to the Vidal Sasoon academy because I had a lot of intersting thoughts about hair. My new 'do was this sort of stylized art school thingee where the front pieces hung downpast my cheeks and it tapered back. (One woman on the orange line actually stopped to aske me where I got my hair-cut, so I guess it was not all for naught.)

And then en route to the work and later the party, I stopped at Banana Republic because I felt determined to blow my entire meager paycheck in preparation for my life-altering artistic ephiany that awaited me near the Children's Museum. I bought this orange irridescent shirt, khakis, and some green socks.

The party, and volunteering came and went. I restrained myself from saving up money and paying $400 for a 2"x2" block of wood with different layers of dark wax and blurry star like shapes and ovals etched into it. (Who knows - perhaps it is worth a lot these days.) I saw the huge nude picture AltaVista had lead me to peaking out of a storage area and I think it was at that moment that I realized how surreal the internet was going to be at times.

The second silly thing I did was on the following day, I went back to the final day of the Open Studios after my shift of volunteering - with a hilariously (in retrospect - but at the time earnestly) over-wrought poem that eulogized her soon to be vacated studio. It personified the floorboards and imagined the great creative sparks they bore witness to. Uggh, that was as desperate as when I soaked elaborately folded notes with Polo cologne and passed them to my fellow ex-Odyssey of the Minder with the long bouncy black hair in Science class in 9th grade - the cologne making the note illegible and causing the recipient to quietely gag.

Life went on in 98* - nothing came of my obsession and I went about the routine of my life. I even visited an old school Barber on Mass Ave in Central Square and erased my work of art hair-do with an $8 job that I think was done with rusty garden shears and some Pomade from WWII.

Cut to some years in the future - I found myself in the same Fort Point Channel studio that I had memoralized in my hyperbolic prose a few years back. It was September of 2002.

I had already switched jobs a few times - but the other artist/temp had moved in and was showing his artwork along with his wife's video installation of projected gray and blue dancing pixellated images.

It was at that open house that I got a tip that led me to applying for a production/design job at a local tech publisher.
I landed that job, fled the online start-up, and stayed there for 5 months or so before experiencing my first (and only so far) downsizing due to the economy. But the layoff actually turned out to be a blessing that served as a catalyst for me to aggressively job search, beef up my Photoshop and Illustraor skills and obsessively work extra hours building my portfolio until I landed my latest job, about a year and a half ago, in a large book publisher's design department.

So, in a way - perhaps the studio did somehow hear my poem and cosmically put a series of actions in place to thank me for memoralizing it. These days - the property values of buildings in the Fort Point Channel are through the roof. But, I heard from the artist that bought this infamous, to me at least, studio (who I ran into at the Boston Public Library last spring at a Milton Glaser lecture) that he is unable to sell his unit for a large profit because there were specials rules set up when it was zoned as artist condos/studios about reselling.

And then, about a month after I ran into the guy at the Library - I saw a feature on the New York Times web site about the artist I had a crush on back in the day. It was a feature in the real estate section about how people found their NYC apartments. It turns out the artist had moved to Greenwich Village in 2000 or so and found a great deal on a large place - but it turned out to be over a bitterly noisy music club and she could not get to sleep until 4 am every night. She had opened up her own graphic design studio and was somehow able to break her lease and find a $2,000 a month 1 br with a lot of natural light on another street in the Village.

As I clicked through the photo gallery - I thought about the series of events of the past 7 years, and what a small world it can be, and how we are all connected - and then I reached the final photo and I think I recognized the purple and orange foot in the corner of the large painting in the background. I stepped away from the computer and walked into the dining room of my Arlington apartment. My wife was reading a book on the sectional and the Bombat cat was keeping her company. The sun was coming through the orange, purple and red irridescent panels of the window treatment and glinting off of Vynnie's sleek coat.


end notes:

Notable events from the fall of 1998 from the Wikipedia:

September 7 - Google, Inc. is founded.

September 8 - St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire breaks baseball's single season homerun record, formerly held by Roger Maris. McGwire hits #62 at Busch Stadium in the fourth inning off of Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Traschle

October 6 - Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming college student, is found tied to a fence, the victim of a gay-bashing. He dies on Monday, October 12, becoming a symbol of victims of gay-bashing and sparking public reflection on homophobia.

November 5 - Lewinsky scandal: As part of the impeachment inquiry, House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde sends a list of 81 questions to US President Bill Clinton

November 5 - The journal Nature publishes a genetic study showing compelling evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered his slave Sally Hemings' son Eston Hemings Jefferson