Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [77]
Standing on the edge of the bathtub so I could see my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, I felt bohemian yet fetching, stylish yet gutsy. I was an artist but still a girl.
I took the bus over to the condo complex where Mr. Internationally Famous was living for the summer. There I learned that an amazing piece of synchronicity had occurred. Joining us that evening was the other famous visiting art professor, who, unbelievably, was also mentoring a girl genius from his class! What a coincidence: two future art world heavyweights, both teenage girls, both being mentored by Internationally Famous Art Professors at the same place and time! What were the chances?
As I entered the completely silent room, the second professor and his mentee were on the couch, sipping glasses of white wine. Everyone was gracious and friendly, but it all felt awkward right away. For brilliant men who spent their free time supervising the hanging of their work in world-class museums, neither had anything much to say tonight.
While my professor went off to fetch me a glass of wine, I strolled around the mostly empty room, looking for things to examine. Unfortunately, the shelves of the temporary residence were empty and the walls uncomfortably bare.
The next time I tuned back in to the conversation, the other art professor was saying something on the topic of the orgies he claimed were everywhere in Berkeley that summer. This came as a big surprise to me. Not only had I never seen hide nor hair of an orgy, I couldn’t recall the topic ever being mentioned. But I quickly tamped down my embarrassment by telling myself that anything either of these brilliant guys might say was just more grist for the mill that fed their art. Since I had nothing at all to add, except my stupid discomfort, I feigned interest in the view of the rest of the apartment house from the concrete patio instead.
Soon it was time for us to leave, so we all got in my teacher’s VW Bug and drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. Our dinner destination was a Basque family-style restaurant in the North Beach section, just down the block from the Condor and a couple of other very famous topless-dancer bars. The whole neighborhood was lit with three-story neon signs of naked girls with flashing lightbulbs for nipples.
Inside the restaurant, the four of us joined a long table full of other diners. That was fine with me, since I was still having trouble thinking of things to say. I knew nothing about Victorian erotica, another topic that kept surfacing, but then again … I was an interloper, a student, a neophyte. I was there to learn. My opinions were beside the point.
After dinner, the four of us walked up the block to see a show by Charles Pierce, an internationally famous female impersonator. International fame seemed to be everywhere that night. Mr. Pierce was performing in a small club with an ornate, gilded stage that had many rows of folding metal chairs set up in front of it. He opened with his impression of Bette Davis doing Scarlett O’Hara on a swing covered in plastic flowers. The mostly gay male audience began to swoon. This was my first female-impersonation show, though I definitely knew all about them, because I had been living for years in the Bay Area. Drag shows were as key to the local economy as crab fishermen and mime troupes. The idea of a man pretending to be a woman didn’t seem that weird to me, though I was also embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t sure why the idea of a man in a dress and a wig was supposed to be so awe-inspiring. Then it dawned on me: maybe this was my Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge moment! Seeing it through an art student lens, I realized that I might right now be in the midst of the new avant-garde … the very people who were blazing the trails through the future of art history! Maybe I would find my place among them as one of the very few female artists who knew her way around