Mackay Elementary School

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I have been teaching virtual drawing classes seven days a week all summer. Each time I teach foundation drawing I like to do a demo in two point perspective by drawing a building. I always encourage the students to draw their own home or a place they go to often. To keep the assignment interesting for myself I always draw a new building from my past using google maps as a reference.

After 1972, I moved to Tenafly, New Jersey and transferred to Mackay Middle School. I remember that in one class I was encouraged to make use of my drawing skills to make political cartoons. I remember drawing Nixon and Kissinger in class. It might seem a bit odd for a 10 to 13 year old to have an interest in producing political cartoons, but I enjoyed interpreting the news of the day. My dad had a subscription to the New York Times and he taught me how to scan the headlines to find the articles I wanted to read. This is a habit that persists to this day.

It is funny that it took many years before I came back around to the interest that I had back in middle school. Though my COVID series has slowed down due to the summer work load, I continue to create illustrations that some might consider political cartoons. I consider them my explorations of the theater of the absurd.

This school and the high school were close enough to the Knickerbocker home so that I walked there and back. I never took a bus to school.

Knickerbocker

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After my mother died when I was ten years old, my father quickly re-married and we moved to 363 Knickerbocker Road Tenafly, New Jersey. It was a Brady Bunch type of situation with two families quickly merging. Sons and daughters in both families were of the marrying age so not every sibling moved into the new house.

One of my older brothers stayed in the basement of our former home in Dumont, New Jersey. That home was rented out and the renters completely demolished the place from what I heard. One of my older step sisters was having a shouting match with her mom the first week we moved in. Shortly after she moved to California. All told, there were ten brother and sisters including myself. I don’t think all ten ever lived in the home together. If I remember right, an older step sister lived inn the attic while my step brother, who was just about my age, and I shared a bunk bed. My younger sister had her own bedroom.

There was another bedroom at the top of the stairs and an older sibling must have been there. I took that bedroom while I was going to the School of Visual Arts in NYC. After commuting to college each day by bus, and working at a mail sorting facility to pay for it, I had a bit of a meltdown and had to leave home. I bought a tent, panniers, a sleeping bag and a bike and started camping in the back yard to test out the tent.

In the middle of winter, I left to bike across the country. My older brother had gotten a job out in Seattle and that became my final destination. This was my way to leave the nest and take flight. It wasn’t an easy flight, but now every choice was my own. If I could make it across the country I could accomplish anything I set my mind to.

Purple Rain

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In March of 2019 John Hurst celebrated his 50th birthday along with his twin sister Alecia at the Abbey (100 S Eola Drive, Suite 100, Orlando, Florida 32801). The party was actually a surprise orchestrated by John wife Chimene Pindar Hurst. As she said, “
I have done what any self-respecting wife of John would do, and hired
an amazing Prince impersonator (Sir Jac) with his full band, horn section, sexy
backup dancers, the whole shebang. We have seen him perform and it’s
really fun. I booked The Abbey (100 S Eola Dr #100, Orlando, FL 32801) for the night, a cool venue around the
corner from us where they will play and we can do it up all night! Full
bar, projector, stage, [and a] great sound system.”

When Pam and I arrived there was a thong around John and the venue was packed. I decided to slip through the crowd and find a seat on the sidelines with a view of the stage. I sketched the stage as the band set up. Once they began to perform I placed each performer into the scene in turn. One of the back up performers was a performer and model I had sketched at other events. She had a great voice but was limited in her dancing moves by a pair of very high platform shoes. The prince impersonator (Joey Colon) himself was full of energy. He performed non stop for the duration of the evening. He has been performing as Prince in The U.S.A. for over 10 years. There is an uncanny resemblance, with every body movement sound being like the Purple Legend.

Orlando seems to be a hub for impersonators perhaps because of the theme parks. Anyway the band was great and I tried to capture a fraction of the high energy performance. AS they performed Purple Rain, I covered the sketch in Purple washes. John found me hard at work and introduced me to his twin sister. Back in high school in Tenafly, New Jersey, I studied American History with John’s dad. As extra credit for that class I built a scale model of a dutch settlement home out of sandstone blocks that I cut using a tile saw. When John and I worked together at Disney we discovered that one degree of separation. The world is a small place.

John really is a Prince fanatic. John resisted social media for the longest time. After the party I began noticing that he posts some Prince related trivia every day on Twitter. He was on the dance floor throughout the night and when he was asked to get on stage. He held his own playing guitar and singing. John works for the animation industry as a storyboard artist but he might have missed his calling as a rock and roll star. The birthday cake was shaped as a purple frosted guitar. Drinks flowed and by the end of the evening Pam and I were dancing as well. It was a fun night and I got to see a side of John that I had never seen before.