I had seen parts of the earlier episodes in the 1980s, on PBS, touted as a must-view. But waiting every seven years for the next installment? My life got in the way. Now ready for the long haul (as I nestled into my sofa with my iPad and an aging cat), I was primed for a more immersive experience. Now I was also observing myself, from a perspective that, after a recent birthday, could be titled 73 Up.

The kids in the original 7 Up are both idiosyncratically and predictably adorable. They are interviewed singly, and/or in duos or trios of their “own kind,” and also filmed in group settings as they meet for the first time. They dance unselfconsciously to an early Beatles-inspired record, while the boys surreptitiously jab and dodge each other. They visit the London Zoo, reacting with excitement and fear to both the scary polar bear and the idea of mixing it up with “different” kids their own age, with emotions and prejudices they’ve already begun to be carefully taught. They stick to their own classmates when in the playground.

The camera, with each successive episode, repeats the same selected shots of the children to be further explored or referred to as the series—and they—age. The last episode to be directed by Michael Apted before he died was 63 Up (2019). Along the way of this remarkable cultural achievement are many heart-tugs, some genuine surprises, some predictable banality. Yet the original premise largely holds up. The Aristotle (or Jesuit—your choice) quote serves as a highlighter at the beginning and end of each program: Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.

I am irresistibly drawn to documentations of the past. Especially ones whose timeline I overlap. What was going on that I missed and can realize only in hindsight? I fill in puzzle pieces to my own life. Right now I’m only four years older than these “kids.” They nudge me to reflect on who I was at 7. At 14. And 21, and 28, and 35, 42, 49, 56 . . . and then 63. All that math!! But me at seven? Oh yes. I’m still that girl.

By age seven, I had adjusted. Three years earlier, my father was hoisting me up to a ledge of cinderblocks, then guiding my hand as we slathered a layer of cement, building our 1950s dream home. Or, he walked while I toddled (sporting my new sundress sewn by my mom) down the sidewalk of Lucknow Road and beamed as he greeted the neighbors. And he proudly shared my artwork. (I inherited my mom’s artistic genes, but Daddy could have been my agent.) I was on a pedestal, first-born and heading into The New Frontier, on my daddy’s lap and with my mommy in the passenger seat, pointing out all the pretty views.

My first-grade teacher, on the first day of school, passed out mimeographed sheets for us to fill in. Name, address, phone number (CEDAR-45804! I still remember it.) Mother’s name. “Does anyone not have a mother?” We snuck a peek around. No hands went up. But I knew what was coming next. All eyes turned to me and a chubby, forlorn-looking boy, our obedient arms tentatively inching up into the air. I learned how to spell D-E-C-E-A-S-E-D. I also learned that my nature to achieve goals, as my father clearly prepared me for, now came with a yoke.

A few years later I was voted both “Most Bashful” and “Most Likely to Succeed” in junior high school. What a weird combo. Those labels assigned to kids in their formative years were designed to uplift, but just like Maidenform bra ads at the time (that I still couldn’t fill) they lifted some and separated others. To even have your name in the running as “Most Popular” presented a conflict. We all wanted to be recognized, but for girls, these spotlights also reflected increasingly sexist and demeaning Miss America contests. Boys were roped in as well. One of each sex (of course, it was that easy back then) for each category. The spotlight was one I often dodged, even as I sought it. By high school graduation, I was happy to just get out, though I think I did get some kind of mention. Not the top art award, but no matter (well . . . just a little!). I had a full scholarship to attend Parsons School of Design. I was New-York-City-bound! (Daddy would be so proud! Mom was too, but mostly worried.)

“Most likely to succeed”? I managed to achieve many of my career goals, and I attribute that to all that was incubating in the 7-year-old me. Both the hope and the hurt. At 73, my definition of success has changed. So has my understanding of the word “bashful.” In some lights, I might still be seen as both. Just as I was at seven.

I look forward to the culmination of the Up series, due out later this year. It will be 70 Up, and helmed by a new director who seems perfect to fill Michael Apted’s shoes. The dynamic between him and the “kids” remains to be seen. Still, I’ll be watching.

Here it is, it’s summertime* . . . (asterisks lead to a Bert Sommer song). It’s been over 6 years since I started this labor of love (a Covid-19 project). Add 2 more if you start at the very beginning. And later this summer I’m kicking this bird out of the nest. As formatting is finessed, I realize I have only a very loose grassroots marketing plan. So I thought I would start here, sharing my author’s note.

Author’s Note

I first visited the Museum at Bethel Woods, better known as the Woodstock Museum, on a frigid day that hung from 2017 by an icicle. The 50th anniversary would be in a couple of years and I wanted to beat the crowds (and to see what I’d missed). I recalled the music and the media aftermath—it was all burned into the collective memory of kids like me growing up in the ’60s. Sure, we knew all about Woodstock . . . or did we?

Today it’s fairly common knowledge that the festival was held not in the artsy town of Woodstock, but in the Borscht Belt’s White Lake, New York. More specifically, on the farm of a man named Max Yasgur. As soon as the fence gates opened, the entrance was flooded by a horde of all-American kids who peacefully surged through and settled in. A cow pasture would be their terra firma even when all had turned into a sea of mud.

Downstairs, next to the museum restrooms, was a photo gallery with set lists of all the musicians who’d performed over that three-day weekend in August 1969 (to which Monday would be soldered via Jimi Hendrix’s searing version of the national anthem). I realized I didn’t know half of them. How could that be? I was a card-carrying Baby Boomer! As soon as I got home I borrowed a book on Woodstock from my local library and, using my iPad’s YouTube app, decided to look up each performer in order of appearance.

The West Coast band Sweetwater had been tapped to christen the airwaves of the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition,” but they were stuck in traffic. Richie Havens was finally convinced to kick it off, and he did so in style. The unknown Bert Sommer took the stage later that Friday evening. Beneath his double-page spread in my reference book was a teaser: “Yeah I got a standing ovation . . . on their way to the bathrooms!”

Curiosity piqued, I entered Bert Sommer in the Google search bar. A song titled Jennifer* was all that popped up, a three-minute clip on YouTube that had managed to survive his omission from both the 1970 Woodstock documentary and its soundtrack. Hair billowing, the androgynous boy smiles and ducks under the whirring blades of a helicopter that has just delivered him to the stage site. The camera zooms in on his closed eyes while he strums an acoustic guitar:

Jennifer’s heaven, for Jenny I’d stay

Skin shining white as a dove

Nice, I thought, a sweetly sincere tune from an adorable hippie right out of central casting. Vocally, however, what came next was a full-throttle grip and release:

Whoa, I’m lost in a maze

Counting the ways that she smiles

Time is slipping away
Lost in the arms of her love
So gentle and wild

Whoa indeed. Hitting replay again and again, I couldn’t shake a feeling of astral connection. Why wasn’t he a Woodstock legend? Where was he now? I wanted to piece together who Bert Sommer was—and what had happened.

*****

In 2024 I published a Zine for the 55th Woodstock anniversary:

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book on Bert Sommer—his music, life, and times. Here I focus primarily on Woodstock, but as my research bears out, Bert led a vivid and musically productive life both in the years before and following that iconic weekend. He made an impact on everyone whose path he crossed, and many have shared their stories with me. What occurred—or didn’t—immediately following Woodstock determined so much of his life trajectory.

copyright Sharon Watts 2026

Here she comes . . . Miss America!

Ready for our close-up in red maple tiara

suburban carpet of crabgrass rolls out to 15th Street

and beyond the deckled edges of 1961.

Coty’s Muguets des Bois wafts across the New Frontier as

we dive into thick cardboard boxes soft with cellar-dampness

past scary giant water bugs, daddy long-legs (hey daddy-o! I don’t wanna go . . . )

We are playing dress-up. Blanket-y shawls and sashes and lady-purses musty with

embroidered cotton hankies and maybe a lost quarter

are divvied up.

I recognize my younger sister and her pals (all but one) but

Mom with great foresight wrote in fountain pen

on the back: Dianne, Kay, Debbie, Lisa, Fran

for that day—today—60 odd years later.

60

odd

years.

I peel away layers that once began with

anticipation and patent leather in

the womb of a cardboard box.

Still searching.

We couldn’t help but snicker when the Life-Alert ad first hit the airwaves in 1987. Sure, this could be our granny, but the cheesy production and bad acting quickly greased its way into parody and lexicon.

Forty years later, the meme has taken an ironic bend. Who my age hasn’t fallen, and with various consequences? We are bombarded with health and aging articles that include a dire warning: Once you break a hip, your mosh pit days are truly over.

Black ice. Fiddling with a phone. Stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk. Or, in my recent case, trotting an empty garbage bin with the lid open, only to have it surge forward, flip over, konk me on the head and bring me to my knees as blood gushed from my eyebrow. (If I hadn’t been wearing my glasses I’d surely have lost an eye. Instead I have a crack in my head that will never mend.)

And don’t get me started on stairs.

I live in a 1900 two-story house that I am committed to inhabiting until they take me out feet first. (Lately all my friends are engaging in this type of conversation. What if?? These days we’re thinking about Wills, not the will to party like it’s 1999.)

I am a whisker over 100 pounds, fairly agile (when I don’t have inflammation in my right knee) and run up and down my staircase dozens of times a day (forgetting what I was going for, usually). OK, I don’t run any more, I even hold the railing—but there is still the possibility to slip, or trip on my shoe laces or my geriatric cat and tumble down into a Pick-Up-Sticks pile with a broken neck. My cat Mi-ro will be fine for a few days—and this I also semi-joke about to my friends. For years I’ve been making an analogy to Martin Balsam falling down the stairs in the film Psycho. In my clap-trap penchant for movie trivia, I thought his detective character trips over a cat meandering through his legs on the staircase. But no! When I Google this scene I discover that he’s in fact knifed by crazy Norman Bates, with a close-up that clearly was blocked from my memory, as Hitchcock’s camera follows a shocked and blood-spattered Balsam careening topsy-turvy down the staircase. Another Hitchcock classic, The Birds, allows me to imagine Mi-ro, now alone with Mommy’s corpse for a few days, the tidbit of my eyeballs being the appetizer for survival’s main course. Both of these films seared their way into my childhood psyche with the shriek of a Bernard Hermann score, forming a morbid yet oddly comforting, and all too plausible, scenario.

Just about the time the medical alert ads were airing, I was learning how to fall. And get up. In my mid-30s, newly separated from my husband, I had moved out of SoHo and into a somewhat dicy part of Brooklyn. I was a pioneer again, much like when I first moved to New York in 1971 (but not quite so naive). Ready to take on another challenge, I started training in karate. I had never finished even one aerobics class without exiting in near tears; my self-esteem and physical coordination had somehow entangled in childhood. I am not blaming Alfred Hitchcock.

Sensei Gil demonstrated how to prep for contact with the dojo floor, normally after being swept by your opponent. First you make contact with the fleshy part of your forearm (either the one favored, if you think that fast, or whichever is first to meet the ground). A micro-second later you slap the floor with that arm’s palm, which might not propel you back to a standing position like in a cartoon, but somehow lessens the shock. I was the one being swept more often than not, so this was a lesson that served me well both in the dojo and later in life. These days, when I find myself mid-air, my mind enters a sort of begrudging Zen state: “Oh, here I go again.” I don’t panic. And, so far, I pick myself up—sheepish and grateful that I am still able to do so.

Will I be one of those stubborn senior citizens who refuses to wear a medic-alert gadget? I am thinking Yes.

If I can’t donate my body to science, at least my cat will benefit. We’ll call it Science Diet Lite.

Walking down Broadway as part of the throngs at the No Kings March allowed me to gaze up into a nearly unrecognizable skyscape. When I moved to Hell’s Kitchen in September 1971, into a YWCA on 8th Ave. and 50th Street, I was fresh out of high school, accepted into Parsons School of Design as a fashion major. Eager, arms open to the experience, I accepted it all. And “all” accepted me.

Later, starting in the 1990s, Times Square was cleaned up, or so they say. But really, a different kind of pornography moved in—corporate porn—with chrome and glass shoulders muscling aside nearly every quirky tourist business and distinctive landmark that made Times Square Times Square.

Now here we were in 2026, our banners reflecting the pornography that’s infiltrated our democracy. It makes my era back in the day seems so innocent. (It wasn’t, when you dissect it. But it was of its time.)

From my work-in-progress memoir:

Wow! New York! Just like I pictured it! Skyscapers . . . ’n everythang!

— Stevie Wonder (Living For the City)

How easily I plugged into that throbbing street energy, and with it, the tactile seediness. My suburban backdrop faded into history—bland Colonial and ranch houses (reflecting even blander life prospects), slow trawls through the local hangout, McDonalds (required first stop with a newly acquired drivers license), unrequited crushes on boys (both squeaky clean jocks and the shadier rebels without a cause)—all just an out-of-town tryout for the stage set before me.

My turf. Irish bars with wafts from steam table fare and stale beer snaking over the sidewalks, pawnshops beckoning with diamond rings and musical instruments long abandoned by desperate owners, shoeshine men stationed on high-traffic corners with stained fingers whipping the rag, over and over, and tired hookers tucked into sooty SRO doorways trying to meet nightly quotas for their pimps, who, like cockroaches, were rarely seen in the light of day. Enveloping, even nurturing—while soaring above it all—was that ever-seductive siren, the Broadway theater world: the heart of the sexy beast beating deep behind velvet curtains.

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway

They say there’s always magic in the air

With my modest monthly allowance, I somehow managed to see almost every play that came to life within the neon trapezoid that encompassed New York’s theater district. Balcony seats in 1971 cost $7, yet I had another, still more frugal ploy. I would arrive at intermission break, mingle with the crowd outside, then enter with them for the second act. Making my way up to the rear balcony, I discreetly nestled on the aisle steps, unreported by the paying seat holders and unnoticed by the usherettes in their prim white collars and black cardigans. By now their flashlights were off and they were clustered in the ladies’ lounge, puffing on cigarettes or catching up on gossip. By now, they were far too jaded to the magic happening on stage.

The first play I remember sneaking into was Jesus Christ Superstar. I already knew the lengthy 1970 Webber-Rice soundtrack by heart, had blasted it on our family’s stereo console, mincing along with King Herod:

So you are the Christ, you’re the great Jesus Christ?

Let me know that you’re no fool

Walk across my swimming pool

Here it was on stage in full, bizarre, glam rock excess, putting in the limelight my crush dilemma from the past. In one corner: Jesus Christ, representing the highly desirable and parentally approved high school jocks. In the other, Judas Iscariot, pinch-hitting for all the doubters, the questioners, the misunderstood (and, of course, sexy) James Deans.

At the crowded stage door, I waited for Jesus, careful not to clutch too tightly and bend that week’s Time magazine, its cover featuring this golden creature I was about to ask for an autograph. More nervous anticipating a Broadway stage actor than I would have been with a true messiah, I threaded after Jesus into a nearby bar.

Timidly approaching him, I asked, “Would you mind signing this?”

“Be Sweet,” he wrote on his visage, with my Flair pen. Thus blessed, I headed back to the Y, leaving him on his barstool with whatever libations liberated him from the shackles of being the Son of God.

On the darker side, Ben Vereen was a hypnotizing Judas, and I would have kissed his betraying lips and followed him anywhere. In fact, I’d only have to trot around the corner and down to 45th Street to the Imperial Theater where he next starred in Pippin. As The Leading Player, he had plenty of “Magic To Do” in the opening number. This was my introduction to Bob Fosse, who would put his stylistic stamp on much of the decade with trailblazing choreography and cynical, deadpan delivery, topped off by a rakishly angled bowler hat. While The Company’s silhouetted and seductively waving hands pressed me back into my seat, I had no choice but to allow the genius production numbers to ooze all around me. Kicking my Army Navy bag underneath me, I forgot the forgettable plot and focused on those mesmerizing, thrust-forward hips, the R-rated pantomime, the beckoning suggestiveness that seemed to correspond with my arrival to the city. I was a sponge, soaking up every drop.

copyright Sharon Watts

Jeff “Jesus” Fenholt had an interesting life, I guess you could say. Or sad. Soon after I “met” him he became a constant companion to Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, ensuing with the familiar American trajectory of addiction to born-again Christian.

I shuffle through files on my iMac, trying to stay on point. I find that organizing anything—from spice racks to family photos to my entire life’s creative output—can careen from self-soothing to crazy-making with one little twist of a brain wire. Sharing a comfy ReStore desk chair with my elderly cat, I often stop to read Anne Lamott when she comes up on my Facebook feed. How is Anne faring these days? I see she was gut-punched by the recent César Chávez revelations. I commiserate, and am relieved that she can still squeeze some lemonade out of this Grape Kool-Aid addled country.

I wrote the following in December, 2009. I don’t think that I could write with such a cloak of innocent nostalgia these days. So, captured in aspic:

Anne Lamott I am not. But I feel a sort of sisterhood-snag as I read her writing, a knit and purl of similar sensibilities. Not a media junkie, I have limited awareness of who’s out there—who’s hot, hip, happening, reviewed, revered, blogged about, or given a shout-out. Apparently Anne predates Twitter, and that’s comforting.

I am sort of feeling my way along my life, at this stage. When I discover an Anne Lamott, I am delighted to find a fellow traveler on a similar path. If we met each other, I’m sure we’d share our trail mix and views of our Higher Powers. I happened upon a book of her essays at the local library. Not putting much effort into the choice, I just glanced at the cover and thought, Okay. I never pore over the shelves. The atmosphere is always slightly depressing, and the recently scrubbed carpets yield a funky, semi-toxic odor that does not encourage lingering. Yet all of my reading material is outsourced from the library; I no longer have the need to own, nor the shelf space, nor the disposable income.

As I write this, I am surrounded by shawls and scarves and handbags and hats, a Holy Pageant of Accessories. Street traffic is slow despite the advent of the Christmas season. I live in a small town with an actual Main Street, but the locals are at work or unemployed, and the weekenders won’t descend until a Second Saturday—or at any rate, closer to the actual holiday. Having something to read while tending my friend Jacqueline’s shop is a necessity to endure the tedium. And the book I’ve grabbed is Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. By Anne Lamott.

Her wit is right there at the portal; like a good hostess, she ushers me in. But I’m not sure I want tips on how to write, either served up like hors d’oeurves or as a main course—a stuffed goose of preaching what you practice. I’ve journaled off and on over the years, but never with more guidance than my internal compass do I record my observations about very ordinary things. I’ve never had writer’s block because I have never called myself a writer. I’m just feeling my way along, in all senses.

Tentatively, I pluck through the early pages. Anne offers workshops, and one exercise is to write about school lunch. So I pretend I am her student, just for the rest of the day, as I sit in an empty shop with nothing else to do.

I remember the actual lunch boxes we carried to grade school. They were metal, and while some had licensed TV characters on them, most reflected generic boy and girl motifs: cowboys and spacemen, kittens and flowers. Mine was pretty, with roses and ribbons, pink and white, of course. And a matching thermos that attached with a metal clip so it wouldn’t roll around and break, its shards of glass mixing into the milk (every mother’s fear, especially mine). She would pack me a sandwich, white Sunbeam bread with mayo and Lebanon bologna (pronounced “Leb’nin baloney”). Or Dutch loaf. All “mystery meat,” over-processed from local slaughterhouses that dotted the Pennsylvania Dutch farmland mat that framed our modest yet picture-perfect suburbia. Carrot sticks were uniformly cut into square-sided logs, the peeler scraping away any identifying feature of it being an organic, living vegetable. (So far, my descriptions are simpatico with Anne’s. We are both of the Eisenhower-JFK era.) And an apple, waxed and tasteless. Cookies were a couple of Keebler’s Chips Ahoy, or more likely the Brand X sno-balls: unnaturally pink, spongey marshmallow blobs, dusted with desiccated coconut and perched near the cash register at Weis Market as an impulse purchase for harried moms with whiny little girls in tow. (Who, me?)

In junior high it became un-cool to pack a lunch. The weekly cafeteria menus varied imperceptibly, with Friday offering fish (a nod to the Catholics, though I wasn’t sure I knew any). I hated fish, so on that day I would pack my lunch, discreetly eating it in that cavernous room where young psyches were dissected like frogs on a daily basis by their peers.

Grilled cheese sandwiches were religiously burnt on one side and raw on the other. The cafeteria ladies didn’t bother to butter the side that would never touch the grill, all their energy spent wisely on policing that assembly line. Hamburgers were popular, of course. They arrived thin, flat, and grey on the white bun, and I immediately doused them with a big squirt of ketchup. The side dish was an institutionalized brand of Tater Tots rechristened on our menu as “potato gems.” I would eat mine and anyone else’s at my table. The little glutenous lumps swimming in a soup of ketchup were my favorite; in fact, that condiment was its own food group in my diet. I beat Reagan to the punch with that call.

At one point our school started offering two of every sandwich—in the mid-60s we truly did live in the land of plenty. One day I ate both of my hamburgers and still had room for one more. Jeff McNally gallantly offered me his. An hour or so later, I found myself feeling not-quite-right in Mr. Smith’s math class. Good girl that I was, I raised my hand to be excused, but wasn’t called on in time to prevent the inevitable. Like Vesuvius, I spouted undigested hamburger that trapped my algebraic equations awaiting their grading. Horrified, I bolted to the door and ran down the hall, puking endlessly and unladylike, all the way to the girls’ restroom.

That morning I had put on a new tan and white seersucker suit which made me feel very chic and grown-up. By afternoon, its fitted jacket and pencil-slim skirt had stains that were never removed. Neither, completely, was the mortification of being the reason for: “MAY DAY!” over the school loudspeaker.

And so, that is my first, and, most likely, last draft for the “School Lunch Exercise” in Anne Lamott’s workshop. “Just get it down,” she advises. (Too bad I couldn’t just keep it down.)

The UPS delivery man has dropped off four boxes, so it looks like I will be simulating a shopkeeper instead of a writer for the remains of the day.

If memory serves (an idiomatic expression of an intro almost as porous as my bones), this is the time of year I would head to Fifth Avenue to snag the final classic cashmere sweater for mere peanuts, stashed in a corner bin behind the herald of Spring store displays.

Instead I wake up, stretch a chilly arm over my geriatric cat to grab a jewel-toned cardigan hanging on a peg by a silken threaded label. Its moth holes are mere punctuation: insults to injury. I shrug on my “bed jacket” and start to write ankle-alphabets in the air (recommended by a massage therapist in Maui to keep my limbs limber). I plan my day, dreading what fresh hell awaits. Instead of doom-scrolling, I find myself pondering Lord & Taylor. I had written about the flagship store when lament had a healthy perspective not yet blown to smithereens by epic rage. Mine. Archiving is my retaliation.

I wanted to save Lord & Taylor way back in 2019, when I wrote this:

Learning of the imminent closing of Lord and Taylor’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue caught me off guard at a time when nearly all of my touchstones have vaporized. In their places: banks, banks, and more banks, or other chains of non-distinction—all courtesy of the plague of hyper-gentrification and development. Like every generation before me (and so it will continue after I am gone), I am trying to grasp the concept that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus first coined: The only thing that is constant is Change. And yet, even Peter Stuyvesant must be reeling in his grave.

Lord & Taylor exuded a dated yet genteel perfumed whiff to a gritty time and place when I arrived in 1971—an elegant, big-box Gibson-era building, looming between moneyed Murray Hill and the greased wheels of the garment district. The department store was seamed to the latter by streets chock-a-block with millinery, ribbons, buttons, and notions. Mecca, for a young fashion student like me.

Early shoppers were admitted inside the golden entrance before the store officially opened. An attendant would serve complimentary coffee in white china cups and saucers, and we sipped and waited. How civilized! How divine! And how totally anachronistic to the era. Outside we were in the trenches, while inside we were coddled and soothed before making our way to cosmetics, ladies’ handbags, and lingerie. (“We” were mostly all women.) The carnage in Vietnam continued, but Katherine Gibbs was still churning out future executive secretaries who joined forces with Grace Kelly wannabes to pillage the neatly stacked cashmere cardigans during after-holiday sales. (In the 1980s, when bohemian trends circled back to the privileged, preppy look, I would be one of them.)

During the post-WWII era, the golden age of fashion illustration was represented by Lord & Taylor’s Dorothy Hood, who established the scripted logo and the American Beauty rose—and the advertising look that would reign for decades. The torch had been passed to Fred Greenhill by the time I was attending his alma mater, Parsons School of Design. We all could appreciate Fred as fashion royalty, even as we hung Peter Max posters in our tenement railroad flats.

In 1978, I was a newlywed and had my fashion illustration debut in The New York Times: a quarter-page ad (black and white, of course) featuring a scarf, for Lord & Taylor’s kissing-cousin-in-shopping-civility, B. Altman. Then a steadier gig presented itself. I landed a job as a Lord & Taylor layout artist. I would soon learn that this was an unchallenging and somewhat thankless “full-time freelance” (i.e. punch a clock, but no benefits) position, as the layouts were basically stagnant and repetitive, dictated by the creative art director. Fred Greenhill paid them little mind, I’m sure; he drew whatever he wanted and we arranged the iconic Lord & Taylor logo to accommodate the fashion figure and copy.

“We” were the six or so layout artists in the advertising bullpen. Frank, Sr. was the elder statesman who maintained the look of the logo, which fluctuated as a loose cursive cloud above the entire history of the store. Frank, Jr. was the only other male—small, wiry, and ironic. He waved around the latest Elvis Costello album from Disc-o-mat, bought during lunch break, and waxed poetic on “Lipstick Vogue.”

I discovered the delightful nearby eatery, Mary Elizabeth’s, a tearoom that had counter service. On my first visit I ordered the cheddar and tomato sandwich (all chopped up together) and only strayed once from that choice, to watercress and cream cheese. When I tried to duplicate my favorite spread in my new Cuisinart food processer, a wedding gift, I ended up with cheddar and tomato mush. More reason to sit at that counter and savor my lunch hour with the neighborhood clientele.

Within a year, I became acutely aware of how much time I wasted in that eight-hour day by virtue of being shackled to a tracing pad, turning out layouts, then pacing, waiting for more to do. I could have compressed my output into one quarter of any given day. Nor was I interested in store politics or office gossip, or eating tunafish sandwiches in an employee cafeteria. Most importantly, I wanted my art to be both final and in full view. I wanted to be in The New York Times.

One evening my fellow bullpen pals and I were informed that we needed to stay past 6:00 and look productive for a visit from someone higher-up than the art department. There was no deadline to meet, nothing to do in advance. It was all for show. Normally I would have complied. It was in my DNA: to please.

Nope, I decided. I don’t get paid enough, and I am not in the actors’ union. Plus, I was technically a freelancer. Lauri R. and I put on our coats and left. We were done. For the day, and, it turned out, forever. Fired. That’s when I found out I was entitled to unemployment benefits. The term “full-time freelance” glared in full oxymoronic splendor in the eyes of New York State, and I learned through the grapevine that a new precedent was set for the treatment of future fashion layout artists. That wasn’t my intent, but I have to say it felt satisfying.

From then on, I would use my time and talents as I saw fit. I worked from home (mostly) and had my art published in newspapers and books and magazines. I even had a weekly assignment illustrating the Tuesday Style section “By Design” column in The New York Times. I had made it!

In the coming years, under new Lord & Taylor art direction, I would be hired to do illustrated banners for the main floor, and my own creative calligraphy would be used in full-page store ads. I would never be a Dorothy Hood or Fred Greenhill for Lord & Taylor, but I took pleasure in knowing I had reconciled my relationship with this grande dame of a department store, who was midwife to my becoming the fashion illustrator I eventually grew to be.

By the millennium, I sadly realized that my city was no longer my muse. I had witnessed it turning into something glossy and predictable, almost a suburban mall. Lord & Taylor was still standing, if only literally (it would be declared a landmark in 2007, and not a moment too soon, with financial free fall just a year away). I was losing my own sense of direction as a middle-aged career illustrator, and headed up the Hudson to a small industrial town to pursue more personal art. The final slam of the door came on September 11, 2001.

A decade ago, Lord & Taylor offered one last, fraying grasp to my former self. “Rebranding” became the term of the hour. Everyone was doing it, shaking off the dust and damage. Or trying to. Ad campaigns were now conducted as internet popularity contests, and I succumbed to entering the Lord & Taylor logo contest. The American Beauty rose was to be given a facelift, and I found myself in the final rounds. In the not-so-recent past, a creative director would have commissioned the art, and paid well. Now we were in a world of thumbs-up clicks, and I just didn’t have the stomach for soliciting votes on social media. And “Think of the exposure you’ll get” didn’t pay the mortgage.

Nowadays, I mostly archive, organize, and downsize. Somewhere in my attic are those banners with my art that used to hang over the Fifth Avenue entrance—where once upon a time, I sat in Landlubber bellbottoms, rustling through my Army Navy bag, sipping coffee, waiting for the store to open.

I recently ventured back to Lord & Taylor’s liquidation sale. A sign by the elevators drew me in: Fixtures - 10th floor. I got off on what might have been the same floor where I had worked forty years before. Ghosts were everywhere—in mannequins, mirrors, and visual display detritus. Then I stopped at a table of white china cups and saucers packed in boxes. I couldn’t bear to buy even one set. After all, I am downsizing—everything but my memories.

*****

Later, 2026. I did buy a few things in the liquidation sale. Three glitter-covered Statues of Liberty (pink, turquoise, and white) that I gave to a few friends. I kept one, on proud display. It means more than ever these days.

(me in the center)

In 1964 I spent the most extended stretch of time away from home in all of my eleven years on the planet. I was in pre-teen geeky prime. A future girl detective and full-tilt Beatles fan.

Somehow I was convinced (or possibly even wanted) to attend a church camp. I am guessing now that it was for two weeks. The letters and postcard that I wrote (saved by my mom all these years) were all postmarked within the first several days of August, probably when I was at my most homesick.

Camp Michaux was nestled in the Pine Furnace area of Pennsylvania, under an hour’s drive from our suburban ranch house, but seemed light years away. This was as deep in the woods as I’d ever been. Packing my madras shorts, bathing suit, brand-new pocket knife, and Keds, I was ready for some outdoor adventure, maybe even a mystery, Trixie Belden-style.*

Other than the mysterious word “vespers” (we hiked up to Vespers Hill every evening at sunset), the churchy part of Camp Michaux had no special appeal, and even if it did, I was immediately faced with a worldly temptation—the camp lifeguard.

My Beatle poster-festooned bedroom had been traded in for spartan bunkbed barracks, while the fresh pine-scented mountain air did something to my inherent shyness. It evaporated. I worked up the nerve to approach him. He was perched up on the pedestal of a lifeguard stand, the sun a halo to a nice smiling face with dark sunglasses fringed by a modest mop top. “You look like Ringo!” The proof lies deep in a leatherette photo album: a piece of pink paper sandwiched between snapshots. John Hostetter, he wrote for me in pencil at my request, and I made sure it would never fade by tracing over it with a Bic pen.

John (“Ringo”) Hostetter gallantly accepted whatever pestering I administered, most likely just hanging around and giggling with my new female cohorts. At the end of two weeks, before heading back to my suburban pink bedroom, I presented my church camp crush with a gift: my craft project. A lanyard with a pendant that was a crosscut slice of a tree limb, with his name (John? Ringo? Possibly one on each side?) burnt into the wood’s flesh, then varnished for posterity. Once it was dry, I laced it onto a strip of cowhide and dangled my creation at arm’s length with pride.

John/Ringo accepted the gift graciously, without any laughter or patronization or condescension. Looking back, I realize how this episode in my life could have ended badly in all different directions. Instead, the pink piece of paper is a reminder to me of a tender time, where nothing emotionally damaging between an older teenage boy and an impressionable pre-teen girl happened. And that might make it all the more noteworthy.

Recently I decided to do a bit of internet detective work on John Hostetter. Incredibly, I found him. I was thrilled that he became an actor (had I helped to create that spark?) but, sadly, died in 2016. I scrutinized the Google images; the Beatle haircut had been replaced with a bald pate. But, this was unmistakably my lifeguard. He had a recurring role on the 1990s sit com Murphy Brown, as John, the stage manager. And he popped up a few weeks ago when I was watching an early episode of NYPD Blue.

I was happy to see he had become an artist, retired in Florida, and was married thirty-five years. He seemed to have led a well-rounded life, and was a genuinely nice guy. Then again, I knew that way back when.

Camp Michaux, I also discovered, had a history. Before leasing itself out to the United Church of Christ to teach girls how to create a swath in the brush with a pocketknife (as budding hormones teased us onto other paths in the wood), it had a darker role. During WWII it was a POW camp and interrogation site for German and Japanese soldiers and commanding officers. For me it will always be a magical coming of age setting, an oasis in murky water.

* Trixie Belden was a bit like Nancy Drew, only younger. I identified with her because her family didn’t have a lot of money, unlike her best friend Honey Wheeler.

With the first blink of her eyes, she was immediately aware of a dark scrim that needed to be clawed through. Jaw clenched—had she been grinding her teeth?—she said the Serenity Prayer by rote and tried to remember to take five long, deep breaths, hold them, and release even more slowly, before peeling herself out of the bed-magnet of a warm comforter and warmer cats tucked into her armpit and thighs.

She wanted to wake up earlier than this, with nothing but an internal alarm clock of impatient optimism to greet the first day of the rest of her life. Even now, in her seventh decade. Sometimes she bounded out of bed at 7:10, pouncing on the first step of her morning routine—a coconut oil pull. This Ayurvedic detox trick was added at a time when she had no health insurance—swishing a spoonful of organic coconut oil around her mouth for twenty minutes before spitting it out and delving into the project du jour.

Meditation would come later in the day, maybe, when she was flagging. That, or a glass of wine. She could accomplish a lot while still in her bathrobe. By noontime, maybe she had brushed her teeth, somewhere around the cups of coffee and peanut butter toast.

Today’s first cognizant thoughts insisted on capturing the wispy trail of a dream. She lay still, willing it to hover within reach. Yes. There was her ex-husband, and her later ex-fiancé, both closing doors behind them, entering a hallway. She faced them, farther down the hall. Larry rarely appeared in dreams—was it because he was still alive? Pat looked at her with an undecipherable expression. He had a short buzz cut, his cheeks ruddy. It was strange for her to see them both in the same dream.

Her Pat dreams were more frequent years ago, after the north tower pancaked, crushing his iron determination as he tried to calm the panicked, burnt people he had discovered somewhere around the 44th floor. She would often dream of planes roaring overhead, of wandering empty streets, searching smoldering buildings, poking her head into firehouses. Where is Pat? In one, his arms reached out to her, then crumbled into something granular. Sand. Or cinders. No sense could be made of this morning’s dream, but she held what she could, turning it over in her mind like a lozenge on her tongue, tasting it for meaning as it dissolved.

The bedroom blind was lifted to a gray day. She descended the staircase and headed toward the kitchen, the coconut oil routine, the cat food bowls. I must clear this dining room table she reprimanded herself for the fiftieth time in as many days. Working there in the morning was part of her new year promise. It faced east, toward the rising sun. But there was all kinds of crap—junk mail, odds and ends. And albums pulled out, scattered on top. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, and a Leonard Cohen she had tried in vain to like. Not the one with the famous blue raincoat.

A vast collection of vinyl had traveled with her all these years. “Some Girls” had been the recent title of a local art exhibit in a town that was starting to strike her as a bit smug. Curated by a friend, the show was all women—and yet she had not been asked. Not sour-grapes bitter, but not exactly resigned to being overlooked. Anonymity, on her terms, had always been a comfortable cloak. Sliding the album back onto the shelf next to Exile On Main Street, she noticed that Hot Rocks was missing.

Occasionally she rented her house to young, hip professionals from the city, all eager to spend the weekend somewhere different—if they chose to hike a mountain or kayak the river—or somewhere exactly the same, as they downed artisanal beer and hung out with like-minded lifestyle émigrés from Brooklyn. Not unlike the mobs of tourists in Times Square who traipsed in and out of corporate chain stores cloned from hometown malls, taking selfies of their authentic, safe, New York experience.

She knelt down and started with the As. Adam Ant. Alphaville. What was Let It Be doing in the middle of The Roches? And Tea for the Tillerman was way up next to the Kinks. Honky Chateau was missing its record altogether. No sticky fingers of strangers to blame, most likely a few mutant, aging brain cells slipped it into another sleeve.

Pulling out and looking at each record was a trigger to another time in her life—a chain reaction leading to a nearly forgotten outfit, a hair style, an art gig, a relationship—when she didn’t yet have dreams of billowing smoke and crumbling towers, and crumbling arms that could not protect her. She clutched her bathrobe closer.

copyright sharon watts 2016, 2025