MACY’S WINDOWS

It was 1985, New York City.

I was looking for a way to advertise my show across town in the East Village. I was walking by Macy’s and I thought, why not hang my paintings in the windows with the mannequins?

So I found out who was in charge of the window displays, and I went to meet her with a binder of slides of my work.

She responded to my charcoal drawings, more so than to my paintings. She asked if I could do them large scale, 4 and 6 feet in length?

It was something like 2 months later that my drawings were hanging in the windows all along 34th Street.

It was a year or two after that, that I had a drawing show in the East Village. I was approached by a woman at the opening who asked me if I was the artist who did the show in Macy’s windows?

She said that she was a switchboard operator there at the time, and they were inundated with calls asking who did the drawings in the windows?

There were small cards in each window listing my name and gallery affiliation, but it was all the people in the cars and taxi’s who were calling! They couldn’t see the small signs!

Of course, I’m sure, the switchboard people contacted the window person, but they were not given the information.

The window person ended up stealing my binder of slides (she said she lost it) and I heard they reproduced big drawings of similar style for a display inside the store (I didn’t see it) and I bet they drew them by projecting my slides and copying them.

These things happen.

But it was a hell of a great show none-the-less, and I got a ton of publicity out of it.

An advertising company bought a few of the drawings and they invited me to their holiday party. It was a Las Vegas theme where they handed you a pile of chips when you arrived. I’m not really one for parties. I only went because the guy had bought my drawings, but I stayed a little while, won a little, lost a little, decided to leave, and on my way out the door I put my entire stack on one number on the roulette wheel.

It hit.

Everybody looked at me, kind of freaked out, but I just laughed and left.

That was what my life was like back then.

I had just come off my proverbial 7 years in the desert (literally, for the New Mexico portion of my quest), and it was like everything I touched, turned to gold.

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