Sunday, June 30, 2013

Special Encore For A Special Pride Day

Posted while Florence was declining, I was in touch with the woman she had been in love with, involved with and in war with since they were teenagers. Today, with gay marriage now legal in New York State and honored by the highest court of our country, I wonder what their life would have been like if only the world had loved their love as they had.

**
THE LIONESSES RULE THE PRIDE


1982
All the other gay seniors rode. In the convertible, on the bus, in wheelchairs.

But not Florence.

She walked.

She was in her 60s. She had waited her entire life to walk down a street as who she really was. And she wasn't going to give up that walk for anybody or anything.

Sunday Memories: Behind The Veil


There's paint-coated glass all over the place, sometimes so thick that most of the 1900's versions of air conditioners no longer shut...


... or even open.

Some glass doors are shellacked with personal statements of colors that were quite popular for about two years during different decades...


Once upon a time this home had been filled with only one family living in the light and air, flowing and swirling from windows though clear, open transoms, around walls, past translucent doors of rooms.  Maybe the bedroom Bernard Hermann grew up in, or the practice studio Sidor Belarsk stepped into to begin the daily work of scales.  

When hard times hit the neighborhood so many apartments in the building and in the neighborhood became S.R.O.s. 

And the winding hallway beneath those open transoms and along those glass doors became a tunnel past the warren of small rooms, filled with strangers behind opaque glass walls made of cheap paint.

 **
Related Posts:
 
Sunday Memories: What The Stork Brought

Oscars, Opera and Orson Welles at Onyx Court
Oscars, Opera and Orson Welles At Onxy Court