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Combating Dailyness
An Excerpt from Milking the Moon: A Southener's Story of Life on This Planet by Eugene Walter
Originally posted in
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whimwhamJean Garrigue and I used to love to go to the Museum of Modern Art garden on Sunday afternoons. They had all these little tables under the trees, looking very European...We used to go there and sip gin and tonic and watch the students and professors who had come to New York for summer courses. They would always be looking sort of expectant, hoping they would see Picasso in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. And I said to Jean one day, "You know, really it's so sad, these children from the provinces. They come here in August when everybody's left New York and nothing is happening." So I said, "Let's do something for them." It's because I'm a poet. When you say the word poet, there are people who think of something pale, think of something slightly mad. But the old Greek word for poet means somebody who makes things, or makes things happen. I make things happen.
This really was the first "happening." It wasn't called a happening. Other people later began to do this all over America, and they were called happenings.
***
I had chosen my friend from Mobile Edith Zelnicker's birthday. I wrote to her and her husband and said "I'm having a little party for you. You and Edwin come to the Museum of Modern Art and you'll see a little pink crepe-paper flower. That's your table." They thought I was just doing something silly like I might always do. That I would come dressed as Santa Clause in August or something like that. They came nervously and sat at the table indicated...
What happened was, at precisely three o'clock, a very beautiful little boy, about ten years old, wearing a rather odd sort of blue hussar jacket and blue short pants, came into the middle of the garden, lifted his toy trumpet, played a fanfare and then ran. That was the only sound we made. So everybody was looking. The I appeared. I was the Very Sick Poet. My hair was black, done with Kiwi shoe polish, and my face was dead white with black eyebrows and shadows under my eyes. I carried a large aspirin bottle and a bouquet of dead white roses. I was dressed in Southern white linen suit with a flowing tie. My jacket pocket was full of diamond flitters-sequin dust. With this I made a little path behind me. Then Jean Garrigue came in as the Witch of Christopher Street. She was no longer blonde. I had died her hair black and added ostrich plumes to her natural curls. She wore black to the floor and this fringed black cape with sequins. She carried a basket of four kittens wearing tiny little ballet skirts and came precisely on my path of sequin dust.
I went to the central table where some tourists were sitting. I put my aspirin down and my dead white roses and in my best Boris Karloff voice I said, “I’m terribly sorry; this table is taken." They got up and ran. So I sat down, and Jean Garrigue came and sat opposite me. Turned the kittens in their ballet skirts loose under the table. We sat and talked in total gibberish. The Filipino boys running the drink booth were so enchanted they brought us drinks on the house right away. The soft drink people went to the armed guard and said, "They can't do this here. They can't do this here." The delightful German refugee guard who was always there said, "Well, they bought their admission tickets...."
When Garrigue and I stopped our conversation suddenly, raised our champagne glasses and clinked them, that's the moment when Robert DeVries got up from the table in the corner and hung several globes of colored paper in the trees and started blowing soap bubbles. He was dressed in a proper double-breasted suit white shirt, and necktie, looking as though he might be a young Wall Street lawyer. When he started blowing bubbles, that was the signal for all our cohorts dressed as ordinary citizens throughout the garden to do the same. Suddenly there were globes of colored paper in every tree and the whole garden was full of soap bubbles.
Everybody was in silent awe. I looked up and the whole glass wall of the second floor was smashed noses looking into the garden. Nobody was looking at the pictures by then.
Jean Garrigue and I sat there and resumed our conversation in an unknown language. People were gathered around staring at us, but we didn't notice anybody. Then this woman in a raincoat with a hood appeared, staring at us. She was very pale with long green hair and a kind of mermaid's costume. This was Ann Troxel. I had copied the Graham Sutherland painting of a chartreuse, red, and white beetle. She was carrying it like a baby and rocking it and staring at us. Then the crowd was staring at her. Marie Donnet floated in like a dream figure in a bright red dress of chiffon to the ground and evening makeup, with rhinestone earrings to her knees and a cigarette holder three feet long.
At that moment Jose Garcia Villa was supposed to come in the back door with purple hair, an old-fashioned movie camera and start filming us and then pull endless yards of tinsel out of the camera and throw it around. But he lost his nerve...
By this time, the crowd was going mad, trying to talk to us, asking us "What does it mean? Who are you? What does it mean?” The one guy I remember in the crowd—all the effort was worth it if it was only for him, this little fat man. He had to have been from somewhere way off. He was climbing onto his table and snapping pictures and shouting, “I just happened to have my camera! I just happened to have my camera!”…For once in his life, he had his camera when he needed it.
At a given moment we all got up, went through the garden, and handed out miniature French playing cards. Everybody got a playing card. People said, “Oh, they are advertising something.” But our message was, the moral of the whole thing was, “You too can play.”
Then we all slowly congregated at the back door as planned; taxis were waiting that had been called in advance. Josephine Herbst gathered up the kittens. Somebody in the museum had called the New York Times and there was a Times reporter who was tugging at me, saying, “What is all this? Who are you all?” Again, in my best Boris Karloff voice I said, “We’re the Apparition Group.” He said, “What does it mean? What’s it all about?” I said, “We are combating dailyness.” Got in a taxi and was whisked off.
July 26 2007, 05:12:25 UTC 4 years ago