My marriage shouts to be quiet. I’m digging my grave, although I tell people it’s the hole for the hot tub. Could be a deep well for wetting my thirst. She suggested it after I took down the lilting grape arbor, which produced a few handfuls of white seedless over the years. The grape arbor was built in place of a shed on our property. The sleeping shack intended for hoboes near the back alley was falling down. First I replaced the metal roof with green corrugated plastic, as a grow house for marijuana. Not enough light or expertise in growing dope, so that failed. I finally took down the walls, saved the barrel lids for posterity’s other projects, and erected a grape arbor, where no one sat since it was near the rear of our large property. Along the way, I popped the top on it to make a tree house for our son, which he enjoyed with his friends for a few years in his youth. The roofing nails I used were too long, so his homies probably suffered some punctured noggins. I removed the second level years back, long after he’d grown to be a man, and the arbor remained, little utilized. It came down last summer. The cedar posts had rotted, and the chain link barely held the structure together. Once it was down, Woman Rae suggested a hot tub, so her friends would visit during the winter, when the pool was covered. I didn’t want the swimming pool originally, but love the daily summer dunk. I don’t like hot tubs, but I ran with the concept, anything to stall her attention. But it wasn’t the proper place for a spa, too close to the dead end public alley. The small shallow pond at the center of the yard, where she wanted pollywogs and plants, wasn’t right either. The raccoons got to the plants and fish there, but it was too close to the rental cottage and cabin for a hot tub. This original pond needed to be expanded to once again entertain water hyacinths and frogs beyond the raccoon reach. For now, the tenants deserved their privacy, so that was not the proper place. So, I started digging the hole in a secluded place among trees, on a hillside, which will allow views and privacy. Another pond had once upon a time graced this spot, but it was filled in when we arrived at the homestead. If it isn’t a hot tub, it will be a deeper pond, where raccoons can’t ravage the stock of koi and croakers. It’s still being decided, because of the expense for a spa, in a yard and home that are my pride and joy, much to her chagrin. She believes she deserves that honor, as my bestie, and right she is. But she mentioned the tub to start, so I carry on in defense of my focus on roots, and home, and family, and love — all abstract ideas until they get discussed, planned, and built. A friend says it’s “creative tension” that we enjoy through all our caterwauling. She’s my soul and inspiration, but that lovin’ feeling sometimes seems to be lost.
I met her on a Sunday, when my best friend introduced us. Mike was gay, I was straight, she was snark. Curvy and luscious as Marylyn Monroe in her hippy way, but brunette, dark, better than a blonde wash. He avoided letting her meet me for months, knowing we would go nuts for each other. He wanted his two good friends to remain his best friends, without becoming lovers. It was inevitable, so he succumbed. She lived in an apartment in a house on Ninth Street in Boulder, a unit that two older folks rented to students. One of the first times I visited, I brought a bouquet of giant dahlias, for her birthday, a dinner trek to Gold Hill. Her boyfriend was immediately alarmed, smelling the flowers in defense. Dahlias don’t smell, they’re wildly colorful to attract bees. I seized the day.
Rae worked in the library, and always had her dunnage ready for river trips if the CU rafters needed an extra body to balance the boat. Carefree and fun loving she was, and still sparks that feeling among new friends, and older ones who find it hard to keep up. We ventured on acid trips, reading Eliot in Chautauqua, and pushing rafts through the shallows where the Yampa meets the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. After getting to know her as my girl years later, one friend who had lived on the hill in Boulder recounted how he had seen her regularly ride her yellow Motobecane down College from Ninth Street headed to Norlin, holding one handlebar while coasting, always dressed in black, with long flowing hair, triggering the vision of a salubrious Wicked Witch of the West. I can see her allure through his eyes. She got to me in a crazy way. Her bedroom featured experimental double exposures from her days at Columbia, Indian bedspreads triple layered setting off a variety of florid swirls, with plants hanging from macramé, and a longhaired Persian cat named Pussums. It was so Boulder and so exotic to this city boy in the mid ‘70s. I couldn’t help but punt some lyrics about her.
“Going Berserk”
I wake up in the morning
On my way to work
Cry my laughing eyes out
how it’s gonna hurt
When I see you tonight
Stretch will all my might
till I’m close as can be
Sweetheart can’t you see
I’m going berserk over you
My body’s out of control
Going berserk over you
Tearing my hair out too
Give me pills and booze,
something to keep me from eying you
From going berserk, and
scratching my eyes out too
I eat my lunch in private
Afraid I’m gonna scream
Don’t want no people watching
Where’s that magazine
Can’t wait to see you soon
Go driving to this tune
till I get you alone and
disconnect the phone
Cause I’m going berserk over you
Put my foot in my mouth
Going berserk over you
Biting my toenails too
Give me satisfaction, a little love’ll do
Not one thing if I can’t have you
Or I’ll go berserk, and seek confinement
Take my life for you
Going berserk
Nuts through and through
I’m gone berserk
Out of control
Berserk
Sell my soul
As her black clothes and flower-in-your-hair apartment defined her fashionable panache, her cars told a parallel story. Rae would roll her old black Bug down the hill to the service station because the gas gauge didn’t work. Oh those hippies loved their itinerant Beetles. When I first met her, she was driving a beat up blue Toyota, the successor to the black Bug, what she could swing after the Beetle went belly up; she pushed it next to the cemetery on 9th Street, abandoned it there. I would high speed the blue Corolla over dirt roads to the gravel pits near the Longmont Diagonal for midnight swims after a concert. Blasted the muffler once, which didn’t seem to bother her. After we became serious about each other, she afforded herself a brand new white Corolla, $3000 cash, to make the commute to Denver on the weekends. Someone proceeded to bang into it out front of my Capitol Hill apartment in Denver. Didn’t seem to bother her. That was one of the few items I’ve ever known her to purchase new, and pay retail — I think it was so cheap she couldn’t pass up the deal, but she wanted the dependable commute, as the Japanese were flooding the market with economical imports during the gas crisis of Carter’s administration. We would’ve handed it down to our son but a neighbor totaled it as he was showing his youngster how to drive; the huge steel bumper on his truck mangled that old Toyota when his son swerved. The inside had already been disassembled by thieves ripping out the tape player and speakers, those were our early days on the industrial fringe of Baker. The glove compartment lost its cover in one of the frequent rifles through the vehicle; we turned it into a Star Wars diorama. Punk music stickers otherwise adorned the interior: “Nazi Punks F**k Off” and “PRML SCRM MTHRFCKR.” Didn’t seem to bother her. She was no longer driving the Toyota. It had become my work truck for landscaping jobs, and our punkster son labeled it like his room. Bought a used Subaru, cause we were still practical and cheap, and Sandy Lee at a dealership on South Broadway convinced us it was the new “it” car for families.
“Still Shopping at Sears”
The long cars at the stoplight
spinning their wheels in the snow
Call to mind friends of mine
always on the go
They spend their money right and left
on pretty boots and gaudy suits, and
Never a fight over credit that clears
While I’m just driving my Ranchero
Still dreaming, still shopping at Sears
Sailing into the Cruise Room
lovely girls all about
Talking among themselves
while I take up the shout of
Drinking cheers, from around the world,
that decorate the walls
But no one lends an ear
To a fella puttin’ on the dog
Still dreaming, still shopping at Sears
The girl I left in Chicago
spends her time now with media types
She found a job in radio with people
ambitious, well-wishing, but full of hype
I left her to enjoy herself
she’ll be better off without me
I moved to Denver, left a career
So while she’s shopping those hip boutiques
I’ll be dreaming, still shopping at Sears
The girl in that song was the dame I left for bluer skies. She had a new orange Pinto that I immediately cushed into a car stopped just front of me. No damage, but to the relationship; it bothered her. I was untethered and she was ringing the pole to find her stance.
Cars with DRae represent her continued emphasis on economy and utility, with just a bit of luxury thrown in for fun. After the Subaru, handed over to me for camping and hauling, she purchased her first Saab from the family of our boy’s friend — it was under a tarp and the kid said it was a Volvo, one more hippie accoutrement. She drove a Saab till recently, always used, sometimes lemons, mostly cool and comfortable. That’s her city look, her jet console by her side. Cars I hardly care, but she started off driving a Spitfire she could barely afford, so her choices may seem carefree, but they’re calculated to telegraph her in-crowd status. After totaling the last of the factory Saabs, a black 2011 outfitted with blue doors after someone backed into it, and her repair shop down on Lipan having been sold to a developer, she decided to go Italian, and bought herself a year old Alfa Romeo, moonlight silver, it outshines all the other sporty sedans.
“Nickel and Diming Me”
I’m playing roulette
and I can’t stop bettin’
on those reds and blacks
that’ll bring me fortune
I’m putting my mark on you baby
and there’s just a chance that
I’ll see it through
So quit nickel and diming me
I’ve got no time
Till maybe someday
Buy you a car and call you mine
Waltz with me girl
I won’t miss a step
Till you’re tired, I’m dragging
The music let’s up
We hop in my car
Catch a ride downtown
Afraid all I got is a mobile home
So quit nickel and diming me
I’ve got no time
Till maybe someday
Buy you a car and call you mine
Quarter horses steamin’ down the track
Taking in the sun, but
I won’t sit back
To hear your abuse, screamin’ and crying
About money and clothes and dinner tonight
If I win a quinella
Ah, it’ll turn out right
So quit nickel and diming me
I’ve got no time
Till maybe someday
Buy you a car and call you mine
Never bought her a Cadillac, but a brand-spanking new ’77 white Toyota brought her fancy to Denver more often, to show me a good time. I lived in a second floor apartment with a nice balcony in a house on Capitol Hill turned into four apartments, just down the block from Queen Soopers. I collected Fiestaware and kept a clean place, polished the floors, enough to impress a smart dame like her. She brought her first friend from Boulder by one evening and I greeted them in a long indigo satin robe — I had just showered after a day of dirtballing at the Denver Botanic Gardens, where I was summer help. Her friend gawked as I strutted. Another time she hosted a dinner of artists at my place — painters, potters, musicians, architects — who argued over their evolving stature versus New York City artistes. This was booming regionalism, and the Boulder contingent wanted to squat and lift. It was exciting to a Jesuit boy from North Denver. My friends in their own ways wanted to flex their literary and painterly skills, but didn’t know how. They were buggering. Here was an artistic community who knew they were good, and wanted respect. She led them through this, as she courted me, taking photographs. I even took a course in modeling, as she persuaded me that I could do it. I think she was overly enamored with two pairs of jeans of mine that featured twin zippers in the front, mimicking the front flap on sailor bellbottoms. I may have hankered after the modeling when one of my friends told me I was too good looking to be an artist. She was so fine that she wanted to be behind the camera, directing the action: bombshell with a Minolta, although she reminded people occasionally that she had been courted by Playboy and Norman Mailer, too.
My mother and her parents understood houses, rentals, ownership, and modeled many scenarios of do it yourself habitats. We absorbed the lessons without knowing the tricks, so we made up our own. Once she decided I was the guy, we rented half a duplex from friends who were setting up housekeeping. We lived in that alternative world of artists and musicians and gay guys who liked to party. It was on First Avenue and Delaware, across from a grocery I swore I would never live near. People in New York were moving to the Lower East Side, and Baker was the equivalent in Denver at the time. Walabis, one of Denver’s punk bars, was nearby on Broadway. We renovated for six months — sweat equity. I threw beer bottles in the front yard to motion that there wasn’t much to steal in this dump, since theft was exploding as new residents bought the blight. She catered to the two guys who owned the place, always funning and snark. One of the guys was opening gift shops full of edgy tchotchkes. Rae knew design mattered. Regardless of the fact that we were both English majors, we were eager to explore together the worlds of art and fashion. It was a time of play with people and drugs, clubs and abandon, working we were to not get by, but get played.
A shared back yard made for a party space, with us sponsoring a black and white clothes event, and only the guys from Wax Trax wore red as a goof. Eight months in, the owners let us know they were flipping it, moving into bigger and better turnovers. We had painted the living room midnight blue — I’m sure they rolled their eyes over that, but they were covering their walls in bamboo. House style became important, and we sought to startle, but bummed to have to move. The neighborhood was changing fast, with federal grants luring alternative types into buying in Baker and Curtis Park. Gay men and young straight couples were moving into parts of a city that families had fled. Gene Amole wrote an article giving up on the Mayan Theatre, luckily preserved despite his reservations (his relatives lived in the hood, and all he could reminisce about from his Bear Creek suburban enclave was the demolition of other movie palaces, but not the Mayan). We had walked by a property close by that looked like the mountains to me, and reminded her of camps in New England. Three river rock houses on a corner lot, on the fringe of industry. It was Colorado gritty, commercial, and country.
We moved the five blocks, a passel of friends pushing shopping carts down the pavements, with one borrowed pickup carting the larger items. My mom bought the whole crew pizzas. We didn’t have much, but we were moving into a house and property unique in Denver, with the friend who had brought us together — he and his mother were partners in the property, as he was just moving back to Denver from a library in Chicago, and his mother was willing to bankroll his share. A trio of characters moving into a ramshackle house, dilapidated yet comfortable, a cobble stone bungalow with two smaller houses that we could rent. No one saw the potential but us. It wasn’t potential we were after; it was cool, on the fringe, forgotten, potent for its history, and we were an alliance, friends with tentacles reaching out across our acquaintances to make more connections, dancing partners, drinking buddies, clothing connoisseurs. “Little Reata” Rae named it, after one of our favorite movies, Giant. It became our beer garden and wine bar, her palace for friends from the provinces, from Boulder and Nederland. One of the first install we shared was a foot of a banister rail we grabbed from Garrets Salvage, Rae had found rectangular pieces of stained glass, and we inserted the glass into the holes for the balusters and turned it on its side to become a handrail for the downstairs descent into a sunroom, the Our Lord Jesus studio at our historic abode, as we decorated it with milagros and crosses, rosaries and Mexican holy figures.
She had a plan, I was the man. We bought the place and she scurried off with her best girl on a round-the-world trip — she did the Roman Holiday and Odyssey parts. Gone a few months and returning to get pregnant, the first among her artist friends who was willing to take the plunge, dive into motherhood and family. She says she was the host, but I felt the donator diver plunge. “Father” to be, “my pleasure,” since I had little idea what that meant. All the shoes in Italy she bought, beautiful heels and slings, but her feet grew in pregnancy, and never again, outside of trying them on prior to purchase, could she wear them. It didn’t slow her shoe fetish, as she counted a decade ago over 75 pair in her closet, mostly purchased at her favorite thrift store or at the Cherry Creek Sidewalk Sale which she visited for years with best friends and her mother. She especially treasures the blocky strapped sandals that feel like butter whether she’s strolling the sidewalks or hiking the hills. Her closet started as a small room in the garden level of the bungalow we had bought, but eventually expanded through cubbyholes into a catacomb of clothes. It was a walk-in, but more along the lines of a Turkish bazaar, with clothes and shoes fitted into the contour lines of an old basement, with spotlights to illuminate the corners of her closet. Anyone encountering it for the first time was blown away, with the organization and the volume of clothes, not color-coded like Goodwill, but style and weather centric. She would move her clothes every winter and summer, but I could never figure out where she moved them. Bins, back racks? Was it like rotating stock on store shelves? A few bags of clothes ended up at Goodwill or ARC during those times, maybe a bag traded at Buffalo Exchange or another vintage reseller, but the closet remained the same size. It was like the House of Leaves where the inside was bigger than the outside. Always a mystifying joy to see this fabric exchange, this magical transfer of seasons of clothes.
We first cleaned up the larger one bedroom cottage on the property for rent. A college gal studying to be a nurse at Loretto Heights started paying some of our mortgage, but the little cabin, a tiny house of 300 square feet, became a four-year project of learning the trades for me. Gutting it, designing it, hauling and hanging drywall with hired friends, after watching friends in the other trades install new plumbing and electric. I became a journeyman handyman, learning the skills of hammering, drilling, and painting. Rae engineered the design and her father finished it off doing carpentry for windows and cabinets, while she cut and installed tile counters and floors, lessons learned as a potter. We turned a garage, which admittedly had been a simple studio, into a place with a separate kitchen counter and bathroom, a living space for a couch and entertainment center, a short walk-in closet with a loft for a mattress above it. The range of folks who rented it never failed to amaze us, because anyone who loved the property we loved, from a mixed Lakota jazz singer, to a punk drummer who subsidized his earnings by dealing dope, to an award-winning photographer for the daily paper, to a kid who had just come out flaming, after graduating from high school in the north suburbs — indeed, he didn’t last long, too far flung the walk from Broadway to our house. The cottage and cabin came to represent the community that encircled our craftsman style compound in the first decade of our life together.
In the early going, our favorite homes away from home were Barnegat Light, where her uncle and aunt had a summer house, and Puerto Vallarta, which had become the Mexican hot spot for gay men. We travelled to Mexico before our son was born, with the guys who had rented the duplex to us, and later when our boy was three with our best friend who was our son’s godfather, and his lover. We always stayed at a nice rental up Gringo Gulch. Days were spent wandering down to the beach, eating street tacos, before ordering Coronas and huachinango-on-a-stick from beach vendors. She loved the beach and waves more than anything else. I didn’t know better and got burned a few times, but eventually learned.
Rae’s love of Barnegat still knows no bounds, although the old house is gone and the place has upscaled beyond our means, and Hurricane Sandy probably washed out the tip of the island, she remembers it fondly as I was introduced to clamming and eating blue claws, in a house where we could all fit — her uncle and aunt, her parents, and the three of us. It was a block to the bay, and a block and a half to the ocean. Uncle Bob had a boat and he loved to take his favorite niece out fishing. Her father Mike was always fixing the place up, as Bob worked for IBM and didn’t have the contractor skills her father had learned as a bridge mason and building his own home. I observed that a man should be able to handle tools, and made that my estimable goal in renovating our house. We didn’t have much money, so trading out labor for the expertise of friends allowed us to work through the place room by room. My specialty was landscaping, since that is what I worked at when we first wed. As the grounds super at a large apartment complex, I had been given free rein to plant perennials and summer annuals across all the garden beds, learning from studies of Denver parks and my early employ at Denver Botanic Gardens. I would shower Rae with five gallon buckets of flowers cut Saturday mornings when everything was in full bloom. We had punk displays of color that rivaled Martha Stewart starting out. Rae was hesitant to display her appreciation, always saying she’d rather have vegetables. So, I planted ornamental vegetable gardens to elicit her love.
Our yard became a cluster of outdoor spaces connected by paths that circled around and through the grounds. The front porch sheltered us from the street and nasty neighbors. It first featured a brushed aluminum couch and chair like the early furnishings in airports; Rae had found it at a tag sale a few blocks away, in a big corner yard that reminded me of the places in Nebraska or Iowa, plenty of room for grass and a garden, next to a solid brick house. (Eventually the lot was sold and a duplex built; too many of those large lots of garden space have been sacrificed for infill housing.) A set of bamboo ottomans, couch, lounge chair, and table and chairs pushed the aluminum to the back flagstone patio, where you could look out across the sloping yard from under the twin spruces. The red breeze path along the north side of our house crossed this patio before connecting to the sheds that once housed the homeless during the Great Depression — now a garden shed, and a vacant spot where the grape arbor had been, scheduled to rise as a modernist shed for the spa equipment; otherwise, it might become a kind of folly doubling as a climbing wall. One of the first useable spots was near the small pond at the center of the yard, surrounded by large elms, locusts, a huckleberry and a cottonwood, and large old-fashioned lilacs. Much of the landscaping was in place, but I was installing flagstone patios and brick paths throughout, so that people could tour the yard, as so many wanted. A picnic table near the pond served as our shady resort. A dirt driveway from the front that accessed the cottage and the garden level of our bungalow lasted the longest before its renovation, becoming an in-ground pool. Rae finally got her large body of water on the high desert plains when our son turned nine. She likes the party picnics around the pool better than intimate hot tub soirées in winter.
The pool became the most popular summer attraction for our friends who had earlier dismissed our property purchase as stupid hippiedom. Like my nieces and nephews who grew up in the suburbs, many of Rae’s friends were Boulder flaks, living comfortably as artists or working professionals, who didn’t care to pierce the night scene and music that we loved. I had early on told her that I wouldn’t move to Boulder, where the music scene was collegial, where the downtown scene was a bore. Her old friends still enjoy hiking up the hills, biking in the greenbelt. Woman Rae has galleries and museums and music to enjoy close at hand, by bike, scooter, or legs.
Denver sidewalk flagstones made up the patio, which I collected one weekend morning outside an architect’s office after they had been stacked replaced with concrete. A passel of guys mostly her friends helped me heist and install them. Around the pool, people sat in metal chairs from the 1950s refurbished in Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle colors. Stucco walls framed the pool area, topped with potted cacti and large sign letters signifying the family tree of D, M, and R. The letters and furniture were her doing, her finds on her frequent shopping sprees through flea markets and thrift stores. She populated the garden rooms with Mexican patchwork metal sculptures of a rooster named Cogburn and a turtle named Timmy; bowling balls mixed with gazing globes; sculptures from artists including a large steel rod ball, a standup steel inflatable float, five sixteen-foot articulated branches made of pine cylinders on steel arteries that weave in the wind on the site of an old elm stump. There are windmill blades, tractor wheel covers, an airplane nose cone, and a wrecking ball situated about. Periwinkle and English ivy, maiden and fountain and festuca grasses, bearded iris, daylilies, and blue salvia soften the artifacts and make the place look like an ancient homestead of curious origins and languorous change. I may plant the plants, but Rae rules over the sculpture in the yard, and the art in the house.
The eclectic mix of outdoor trappings flows throughout the house. Inside the front door, a cowhide couch faces two Saarinen tulip chairs, separated by a glass table supported by multi-colored aluminum and brass tubes. The entire house features a salon style show of Denver and Boulder artists, punctuated by a collection of tiny chairs. The bungalow’s ceiling has been raised to the rafters in several places, to accentuate the flow from room to room, and let more light in. Rae loves art, takes photographs, designs her own clothes, and travels the world seeking new adventures forever young. There is not a single style or design, nor a theme to the art outside of it being accumulated over decades from local friends and acquaintances. Modernist chairs mash with tiffany globes and graffiti carved by public school students on old school desks. A street style mural on a plaster wall mixes a movie theme of “Little Reata” with a jumping fish and dayglow sun, fronted by a modernist red cloth couch. The whole place could be branded the Altieri Art House, if I wasn’t still living there.
These are the things that wrap Rae. Art in all styles and sizes, and black clothes of every denomination, with spectacular highlights, like the gray that streaks her black hair. For art to wear, she made a long winter coat out of Italian tapestries, brandishing a huge elk across her back, which made New Yorkers stop her block after block when they were still wearing furs. The curator of fashion at the DAM said her clothes would have been featured in exhibits if she had not made them herself, so fashion requires a brand, and Rae is indecipherable. She has fabricated junkstore couture for decades. She made me black vinyl suits, black and brown striped mohair suits, red and green wool twill suits, and vests from ties and tapestries and horsey cloth that look deco and western both. She recently bought a boiled wool felt scarf made of interlocking rainbow colored squares which she attached to a black satin skirt for optimal effect. She makes handbags that feature photos of Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and David Bowie. Most of her fur and fringe were decommissioned years ago, but the coats still stock the closet for inspiration and derivation. Clashing mixes of geometric patterns and textures shout attention to her latest calling card of fashion, not too different from the layering of those Indian silks from her days in Boulder. I want to archive all the outlandish dresses and ensembles she has fabricated the last few years, alongside the jewelry she fancies that accent the scenes. Then there are her glasses.
She’s been collecting those since the 12-carat gold wire rims she wore as a hippie. I could never imagine putting contact lenses in my eyes, and she forever experienced problems with them. We decided why not make glasses a fashion statement, an eye masque. Her pairs of glasses rival her collection of black boots. Red pairs, green, black, and blue, tan ones woven like a basket, steel laced to resemble a cheese grater, tortoise shell, clear frames, and black and gold 1950s starlet swirls, round, and square, oblong, and egg sized. Determined she is to maintain the same prescription, reluctant to change them all out.
Without witnessing the art in the context of this river rock bungalow, it’s hard to imagine the range of styles and multiplicity of forms collected by her. The longtime favorite is a red neon “Sale” sign that lights up the expanded kitchen. It is joined by a red neon double bar hanging in the stairwell to the garden level. A lineup of old radios looks down from the rafter in the back room, where a Melmac mobile hangs. A flowery six foot six-high-stacked wedding cakes porcelain monolith stands near the graffiti mural that can be seen through the west windows from the alley. An electronic bird tweets from a black box in the kitchen near her photograph of Mexican men chopping octopus at an outdoor market. Her photos of people from around the globe — an Arab kissing his camel, a pink-haired Japanese punk in the Tokyo subway, a Tunisian tribal woman who guards an ancient Roman bath — evince her worldliness and understanding of cultures and peoples and styles and domiciles around the globe. Paintings of industrial buildings, swarms of bees, and a fish bone, an acrylic antler, and a hive of yellow jackets poised on barbed wire reveal her connections to all things peculiar. A giant fishing lure sculpture hangs above the modern white tub in the bathroom she designed, with falling walls of stone, and a tile floor that resembles sand. It’s as if she used such a hook to catch all the ideas and styles and colors and textures and beasts that have crossed her path in life. Rae wraps herself in these experiences for all to enjoy in her daily devotional of dress and chat. She is a sight and a spoken pleasure to all.
This expose focuses on cars, clothes, homes, and art, all the things we wrap around ourselves and worship for their comfort, featuring some of the items that mark her unique. A girlfriend lost in her wake reported that other women think her egotistical — this from one who travelled and copped many of her idiosyncrasies. She deserves her ego, a compassionate companion to artists and people who struggle. She displayed photographs of the common cause of folks worldwide in “50 Years In Your Face,” the name of her Month of Photography show. She cuts and stitches homemade clothes that attract the attention of fashionistas. In her business, she trained people from around the world to sew her professional music gig bags, a business that employed a disparate group of women and immigrants. She collects art from Colorado, decorating a house that she wishes was in New England or Miami, though she has settled for the West, investing Little Reata with her own topophilia. Woman Rae has lived a life substantial, snark and quirky, famous to friends invited, occasioned, and left behind. Let her be admired, praised, and envied by those she has encountered in her life, and loved by her Piss Christ of a husband who is always trying to dig himself out of a hole he dug for her, embracing her wiliness and loving her distraction. Who says “creative tension” is so bad? We argue like George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the entire film play I had on records when I met her, so whether that was an omen I can’t say, but I love Rae to the nine-inch nails, and have willfully let her tie me to a chair and cut my hair through lots of yearning times. Hallelujah!