On the Road

Chuck Ginnever

Chuck Ginnever

Emily Mason, Wolf Kahn

Emily Mason, Wolf Kahn

I’m back at home base now after several weeks away traveling through New England giving talks and readings from Eye of the Sixties. At the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center I discovered the audience included artists who’d known Dick in New York in the fifties and sixties, and whom I’d interviewed when researching the book. It was pleasure to catch Chuck Ginnever, Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason smiling as they heard me read passages based on information they had shared with me.

Dick would have known how to do these painted designs!

Dick would have known how to do these painted designs!

For my reading at the AMP Gallery I returned to Provincetown, Dick’s favorite place in the world. There I read a section about his first visit to town in 1948, when he’d worked as an apprentice to the decorator Peter Hunt. “Did you know that Hunt’s atelier was adjacent to where we are now?” someone piped up from the audience. No, I didn’t! After the reading friends and I walked down that narrow court, the location of Ciro & Sal's Italian restaurant, where one summer Dick waited tables. We celebrated Dick over dinner. Was it only the wind that prompted the candles to flicker?

Ciro and Sal's today

Ciro and Sal's today