a warm and fuzzy feeling

Over twenty years ago Michael and I lived in an unheated storefront on South St. in Philadelphia. He waited tables moonlighting as a rock star, and I was a sign painter moonlighting as the follow spot operator for nightly performances of an idiotic but once popular musical called "Let My People Come" ( which featured live and playfully presented nude scenes {"Oh! Calcutta" for the cabaret crowd}). Here for a short time we ran a gallery/theater called 'plague', living in the back room and hosting weekend performances [limping] the gamut from really[!] loud music to un-metered (often pornographic in it's presentation) poetry. We subsisted on beer and jello, and the occasional deli platter which we provided for the [cough] talent. The street facade had been sculpted to resemble a cave entrance. The place was unwittingly a 'camera obscura'; with the door to our living space closed (and through the hole where a doorknob used to be) the inverted image of people passing by (some stopping to peer in) the front window would appear on the back wall. This was [redundantly] our only views to the outdoors. We slept till two or three in the afternoon (on a bear trap of a sofa bed), so it was perfect for that. At Christmastime we made the unpleasant discovery of soiled bathroom tissue and, well, soil coming up through our shower drain. Okay, it wasn't so much a shower as it was a bit of crude plumbing above an open sewage line for a toilet. Unpleasant?- oh yes, but a complete surprise?- er, no. We began taking our showers at the apartment of the kindly G. girls, sisters who waitressed (moonlighting as fine artists) and were enviably outfitted with designated rooms for cooking, bathing, and sleeping. We were all a bit challenged for cash and would pool our resources to share a hot meal [and cold beer]. They were able to afford a live Christmas tree- with not enough left over to buy ornaments. We were able to contribute a few logs which masked a red light bulb- but no fireplace. Together we filled a few home-spun evenings cutting things out of paper, wiring together broken glass from the street, tying on found objects, and managed to create a breath-takingly beautiful 'outsider' tree. On Christmas Eve the G. girls went off to be with their family in CT. Michael's sister came into the city to bring us home to the suburbs with her for the holiday, arriving in a full length white fur coat and matching fur hat, with a Lhasa Apsa tucked under one arm. That's the picture- a light snow falling on her, standing out on the cracked pavement in high heels in front of a cave, waiting for us to retrieve anything we really cared about from our squalid, everything-for-art, stench-filled, inverter of images.