It’s funny the things that spark a great memory: a smell, a song, the wearing of a coat… The Michigan weather has been (to put it mildly) a challenge since I arrived here five weeks ago. I have dug my car out of two feet of snow, waded through slush, experienced a false spring, determined that a series of wavy lines on my weather AP means “fog” and now we are getting rain. I look at the weather on my phone every day before I go out, to see what force majeure I am to endure and today there was a cloud with slash marks coming out of it and the number 47.
What to do? The good news is that I have been able to wear all my “big girl clothes” since I arrived – wool blazers and pencil skirts and car coats and closed toe shoes. Although the years of wearing flip-flops and barefooting have had me, on many a morning, sitting on my tuffet like Drizella with the glass slipper – trying to force pumps onto my huge feet …
This morning I got out the Costume National, full-length leather coat I bought at Bergdorf’s and thought, “Why not on a rainy, chilly day?” I was flooded with a memory from several years ago when the art guys and Kim and I went to New York. I remember one of them saying to Kim, “I have never seen Marilyn this drunk before.” And she said, “That’s saying something.”
We were in New York for the Armory Show (Kim and I never took salaries as gallerists, but we went on some great trips…). I had sneaked off to the shops while the others looked at “art” – neon musings with visible extension cords and giant, appropriated photos of porno from the internet – and we were all meeting in King Cole’s Bar afterwards.
There is a story about my coat. I found it on the sale rack, off-season and like 90% off, because Madonna had bought it, changed her mind and brought it back a year later and what were Bergdorf’s going to do, tell Madge she couldn’t do that? So I was totally full of myself and three sheets to the wind when I arrived at the bar. I did a little, hop/skip, catwalk, fractured, full Dior turn in the middle of the bar and shouted, “Hello? 90 % OFF!!” And the whole room went nuts – a standing ovation and some woman leaned over to Kim and said, “What did she pay for that?”
And then we bought rounds for the art guys and the money I saved on the coat was negligible, because King Cole’s Bar is probably the most expensive neighborhood pub in the world…
That’s what went through my head this morning as I put on the coat…
