Historical Accuracy

OCTOBER 23, 2009

I had a meeting in the afternoon which didn’t leave me time to run home before the artists preview so I killed time at another recently refurbished New York institution, Washington Square Park, where I nearly got me feet doused with dingy hotdog water when the vendor near the bench I was relaxing in dumped a bin of lukewarm gray slop onto the ground and watched it rush toward my feet like a broken dam. “Suh, suh!” he started yelling in a hard-to-pin-down accent. But I was way ahead of him, I saw it coming from the corner of my eye just in time to lift my feet and let the water rush under my soles. “Solly, suh,” he said, bowing at me, “Solly, solly.”

“It’s okay,” I said, and moved my seat further from the hot dog vendor and closer to a folksinger and a bongo drummer alternating between The Beatles and Bob Marley. I can’t deny they had talent, but they were still annoying, and so, even though I knew I’d be early, I caught the subway uptown to Lincoln Center.

I wasn’t early. It’s been a long time since I’ve been up that way, and I got on the wrong train. Deborah was working in Brooklyn and figured she’d be late. As it was, I was only five minutes ahead of her.

The Lincoln Center courtyard was crawling with tourists, swarming around the fountain, posing for pictures. I walked past and went inside the theater where, not surprisingly, there was even more posing going on. Even more than to be expected at an art opening. Because, along one wall of the large, ballroom-like promenade was a camera set up in front of a cloth backdrop. Guests were encouraged to get creative with a rack outfits from the New York City Opera’s costume archive and have their picture taken dressed as Don Giovanni or Madame Butterfly, or just some vaguely recognizable character from some unnamed opera. The camera was connected to a laptop which was, in turn, hooked up to a printer that was churning out postcard-size prints for people to take away. A small crowd anxiously waited at the mouth of the printer for their photos to come out, squealing with laughter when they did.

E.V.’s husband, Ted (Who, incidentally is coming out with anothercookbook with his brother Matt next month.) was wearing a pale blue three-quarter length quasi-military silk overcoat over his otherwise subdued, modern apparel. We said hello and he showed us his pictures, then and encouraged us to go for it.

Deborah picked out a large silk kimono that was so large she may as well have been wearing a big, white, sleeping bag. She exchanged it for a leather swashbuckler coat that fit surprisingly well. So well, in fact that she instantly began trying to formulate a plan for leaving with it. Women, mostly, flocked the racks, digging through the costumes, tossing things in the air like a cartoon-cliche of a Bloomingdale’s sale. Well-honed skills which I was in no position to challenge. I simply picked up some kind of crown and veil combo that would only stay perched on my head if I held perfectly still.

Two guys dressed in Medieval velvet and colored tights were cruising the party in messy black wigs and sloppy white makeup. I thought I recognized one of them, but his bruisy makeup made it hard to tell. I waved to him and waited for a glimmer of recognition on his end, but there was none. Wrong guy, I guess. But later on in the evening, when I overheard him talking, I recognized his voice and knew it was him. “Charlie?” I said.

“Jamie? Hi, sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”

“Me?” I said, “What about you? I was trying to decide if that was you or not, but then you didn’t seem to recognize me, so I figured it wasn’t.”

“I’m not wearing my glasses,” he explained. “I can’t see a thing!”

Charlie is a good friend of E.V.’s, and Deborah asked if he had helped with the project. “No,” he said. “I did go to the warehouse with her one day, but mainly just to see if I could take anything for myself. I got all excited and made a big pile of things I wanted — I thought it was all coming back to E.V.’s studio. I was so upset when I found out we had to leave it there. Oh well.”

“What were you going to do with it?” said Deborah.

“Wear it!”

We talked about his outfit and the necklace he made especially for the occasion which consisted of bent silverware, shards of decorative plaster plates, heavy-duty chain, and assorted other who-knows-whats-its.

“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.

He nodded through the crowd toward his similarly dressed friend, Gary. ” We’re the princes in the Tower,” he said. “Edward the V, and his brother Richard, the Duke of York. You know, from the 1400s.”

He responded to the blank stares Deborah and I gave him by telling us the story of two young princes who were supposed to have died in the Tower of London while imprisoned there by their uncle Richard III. “Shakespeare wrote about it.”

“Is it an opera, too?” I asked.

“No,” he laughed. “We wanted to dress up, but we decided to go for historical accuracy over campy melodrama.”

“If you say so.”

He told us that he’s been designing jewelry lately, and said that his friend Gary had recently opened a store in TriBeCa where he was selling some of it. “I’m having so much fun,” he said.

“Gary?” I said. “Gary Graham?”

“Yes, said Charlie, “Do you know Gary?”

“Sure I do,” I said, “Through you!”

I’d met Gary a long time ago, and I hadn’t seen him in years, but if he hadn’t been dressed as a Medieval zombie, I’m sure I would’ve recognized him. I found him in the crowd, reintroduced myself, and brought him over to where Deborah and Charlie were talking. We examined the similarly over-the-top necklace that Charlie had made for Gary’s outfit. Gary lifted an oversized locket that was attached to a chain around his waist. Inside, behind a crystal of yellowing plastic, were what appeared to be several small, oddly shaped stones. “Check this out,” he said, shaking it like a rattle.”These are E.V.’s ex-boyfriend’s teeth.”

E.V. was there, listening in, and laughed — she even fondled the charm for a moment while I took a picture of it — but she was being pulled in so many directions that I didn’t get a chance to ask her what the story was, how she got so many of her ex-boyfriend’s teeth. There were too many to be merely wisdom teeth. I pictured E.V.’s ex-boyfriend wandering around somewhere, gumming the story to anyone who would listen.