Before I start: my wonderful Harry is back again! READ

And Bob Rosen makes my day. Hooray for jazz!



After a bit of a breakdown last night and a bout of insomnia that lasted until four-thirty, I had a wonderful day today. School is dull, and I don't especially like any of my classes, but as long as I have myself and my own self-respect, what I do in the mornings is secondary.

I had a last-period free, so I packed up my camera, stripped off my pijama pants (my last class was modern dance), tucked my hair into my three-dollar hat, donned my hobo bag, hand warmers, suede boots, bracelets and black suede jacket ($E10 in Austria last summer) and went off into the East Village with the intent of finishing my roll of film before my dentist appointment.

I asked a man for a photograph and ended up talking to him for half an hour, and he turned out to be a die-hard Grateful Dead fan. Then I stopped into one of my favorite thrift shops and got in a conversation with the owner, who recognizes me by now. He turned out to be a literary type with a preference for Africa books, and we talked about V. S. Naipaul and Thomas Pynchon for a while before he let me have a tiny teapot, Indian painted box and silver necklace for six dollars. I took a few more photos and wound up in a fabric store, where the owner immediately took a liking to me because he'd once had a career as a black-and-white photographic journalist in India the '70s. I only talked to him a little bit, because I couldn't understand him very well through his Indian accent, but he was sweet and pulled out extra fabrics for me.

At that point I'd shot half of my roll but had to go to the dentist. I decided to take a bus instead of a subway and ended up talking to a sixty-year-old woman over a baby we were admiring. She turned around and introduced me to her mother, who was almost a hundred. It turned out that her mother had been a flapper in the '20s and '30s. It was incredible. The woman's mother wore an elegant black fur coat with a wide, off-the-shoulder neck--more of a giant wrap than a coat--and a skin-tight red hat with long, elegant earrings and a matching violently-red clutch and lipstick. Under her elegant clothes, every inch of her face was a wrinkle. She gave the impression of being very clean as well. She pointed out features of New York that had changed or were the same as they were in her time, and I leaned in to catch every word until she finally got off, apologizing for having to leave so soon.

Then they shot novocaine into half of my face and I ran to the F-V in the cold, camera buising my chest, and had just begun to feel again by the time I got home.

I feel wonderful and inspired and alive and proud to be part of this city. I just wish there'd been enough light for me to take a picture of that woman.