IT WAS HER NEW YORK: "Draw!" Dana Commanded and Art Burst Onto The Wall

Monday, January 13, 2014

"Draw!" Dana Commanded and Art Burst Onto The Wall

Starting the new years right, a visit to Dana was in order.

She had been doing some house cleaning. Tucked away in the corner of a top shelf of a closet needed for other things was wallpaper.

Not just any wallpaper, but the paper that had lived on the walls of the bathroom in their home on Grand Street. That had been their home before they moved to Coop City and before Dana moved back to Grand Street and George went into hospice.

It was from a home when her kids were still kids and aging wasn't something to worry about.

Our bathroom down the street in our Grand Street apartment was plain, functional and not to be dawdled in. But this bathroom, happily snuck into during passover sedars and various gatherings, offered a story book adventure into baths and faucets and something more wonderful than perfunctory teeth brushing.

When the decree came for Dana to move the family to Coop City, she ordered everyone to go into the bathroom with pens and paint and markers and crayons and have a ball on the walls that had been kept so pristine.

Everybody came - neighbors, friends, kids, adults - and they scrawled and painted and drew and wrote and before long the declaration, "I want to be an Oscar Meyer Weiner" along with a devastating femme fatale filled the wall.

There was no way Dana could leave it behind. The wall was carefully stripped and and the paper rolled up and packed away. And then as one move flowed into another, it came along, tucked away with posters and old paintings.