What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [82]
Great, except Naomi now owned $10 million worth of erotic art and had no museum to hold it and no permit for one. She quickly reviewed the papers that had been submitted to the city. She was startled to discover that her former partners were seeking a permit to open an adult business, which would have restricted the museum from being near other adult sites, schools, churches, and residences. The museum’s future looked doomed. “So the business is down the drain and I have more art than I can live with. I can’t even entertain in my house anymore because I’m afraid people will fall over the art and get hurt.” Naomi made a tactical decision. “I say, ‘Baloney with this. I’m not an adult business. I’m not going to sell dildos, porn, and vibrators. I’m an art museum.’ ”
At the zoning board meeting, she waited for five hours to be called as her dread mounted. The board was rejecting one application after another. When her turn came, Naomi requested permission to open her art museum in a building she had found in South Beach that had, coincidentally, formerly been used as a recording studio by one of hip-hop’s original bad boys, Luke Campbell, aka “Uncle Luke,” a former front man of 2 Live Crew and a pioneer in popularizing explicit sex as a musical theme. The board deliberated for five minutes and then unanimously approved a permit for the World Erotic Art Museum.
Still, Naomi had no idea how she would promote her unique business, so she called “Mr. Miami Beach,” as Michael Aller, the director of tourism and conventions and chief of protocol for the City of Miami Beach, is known in South Florida. Given the theme of her museum, Aller didn’t know quite what to expect as he waited for Naomi to arrive for an appointment. He was surprised and tickled when an attractive, older Jewish woman was ushered into his office and began to tell him the story of her collection. “Then she started to pull out of her bag the coffee table books of her collection. I was flabbergasted. I said, these are magnificent,” he said. “Eventually, we started to talk about food and she told me she was a good cook. I said that I adored sweet and sour cabbage. And she said, ‘You stay right here. I’ll be right back.’ And off she went to her apartment, and before I knew it she came back carrying a container with two pieces of sweet and sour stuffed cabbage. I was overwhelmed by her attitude. It reminded me of the Yiddish phrase: Esa ga zinta hate [Eat in good health]. I thanked her profusely. She said, ‘Wait until you taste my kugel.’ ”
Aller put Naomi in touch with Charlie Cinnamon, the “dean” of Miami Beach publicists, and he helped her mount a promotional campaign that has garnered her museum international attention. Among those who took interest in Naomi was Geoff Nicholson, the novelist who was himself collecting collectors for his book Sex Collectors . In it, he profiled people who collect and catalog sex objects, porn, illustrations, art and artifacts, from casts of rock stars’ genitals to Chinese lotus shoes.
Nicholson visited Naomi in her home before her collection was moved to the museum. Jet-lagged, he spent a sleepless night trying to catalog the art in the guest room alone. “The majority [of the art] would probably be more at home in the Kinsey Institute than in