What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [74]
Of course, Loretta never got into the restaurant business to make a killing. “My father used to say, you reap what you sow. I think of that each week when I go to the bank to make a deposit. I take out twenty dollars to give to someone who really needs it. At my age, what difference does it make, as long as I have enough money to eat? I don’t want to travel. I don’t need to shop. I’m very content with what I’m doing every day. I enjoy people saying to me, ‘It was a good meal.’ I have people who travel twenty miles each way several times a week. They come because they feel comfortable here, for the fellowship. I guess that’s what I’m here for. And I’m going to keep coming in here until I don’t have the strength to make pies anymore.”
Few ever thought otherwise. “She’s someone who doesn’t feel good about herself unless she’s working,” said Tracy, who has an undergraduate degree in professional writing but waitresses at the diner and cares for her two-year-old daughter. Customers often point out that the pretty, expressive redhead is a young clone of the grandmother she idolizes. “Grandma has touched a lot of people through her strength and her faith. This isn’t just a place where people only get good food. People feed off the feeling of the place and her good advice. She’s everyone’s grandma. But she’s not that grandma who sits in the corner. I tease her all the time,” she said, glancing at Loretta talking to a couple of middle-aged men at the counter. “She gets hit on in this restaurant more than I do.”
NAOMI WILZIG
Erotic Woman
“Until I began collecting, I had lived . . .
in a narrow and suffocating world.
I became my own pioneer.”
Naomi Wilzig was in midlife when she took an imaginative approach to declaring her independence from her husband, a powerful New Jersey banker. To protect her husband’s sense of decorum, she had not yet told friends or her rabbi up north that she was living in a clothing optional community. She had, however, confided to her playboy son, who had taken to calling himself “Sir Ivan.” He was already aware that, to make up for the absence of her children and grandchildren, she was spending a great deal of time antiquing to fill her days. It was not, therefore, that bizarre when he phoned one day and asked, “Ma, do me a favor, find me a piece of erotic art for my apartment.” He figured she was now worldly enough and that she could easily find what he wanted while shopping for antiques. The problem was that despite her new nudist environs, Naomi, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, did not have a clue about erotic art. “What is it?” she asked.
Ivan was as dumbfounded by the paradox of her not knowing as she was by his request. “Really, you don’t know what erotic art is?”
“No,” she said.
Ivan tried to explain. He was not interested in pornography. “I want something unique, provocative, creative, mysterious, and sexy,” he said.
If still unsure about precisely what erotic art was, Naomi was certain about one thing—why her son wanted it. “He wanted something to turn the girls on. He didn’t say that, but I understood the inference, bachelor that he was and still is,” Naomi said, with a throaty laugh one day in her office in the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami’s South Beach, which she opened in 2005, when she was seventy and after a fifteen-year journey that began with her son’s request.
Newspaper headlines trumpeted the museum’s opening with variations on a salacious and misleading one that ran in the National Examiner: GRANNY PROVES YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD FOR PORNO! The museum, as widely reported in news reports around the world, housed much of Naomi’s extensive personal collection of four thousand objects of erotic art, valued at $10 million.
Naomi, a zaftig,five-foot-three woman with deeply tanned olive skin, began her quest timidly. She may have declared