Miss Ross did try to help me find a job!

Writing about myself is a task I have been thinking about doing for a long time. Ever since the day I met Martin Luther King at a speech he gave to an audience of young people at the University of Minnesota in 1963.

This was the beginning of my life as an observer of all the experiences that have presented themselves to me in the years that followed.

After I graduated form high school, my parents gave me a ticket to New York where I was accepted into New York University’s Fashion Institute of Technology.

The ticket came with the a speech from my mother telling me. She and my father did their best in raising all of their children and the idea of independence was most important for us to understand.

When we left home we could only return as a welcomed guest for a short time.

She was really kicking me out in the sweetest way. None-the-less I was being invited to leave her home.

She did let me know that she had faith, that I would be fine. I had no false ideas of how cold and unwelcoming the world would be after I left home. It was also exciting for me. I was in a world where I could explore my true and honest feeling about love and the search for happiness. I had read the novel “Another Country” by James Baldwin, an openly gay black man who wrote about New York, and many of its characteristics, expressed by the people he wrote about.

The one important thing was that he introduced me to a character a man who suffered from the fear of liking men in a sexual way.

This character had not resolved with in him self that he could have been all right, if he had only understood that he really didn’t choose to be a bi-sexual.

It was just how he was wired. 

It was only after years of therapy that I come to this conclusion. I would go to New York and find people like myself. Good people who just happened to be attracted to people of the same sex.

I went to New York with an invitation from my sister Myrna, who had three kids.

She had a job and day care was not in the budget for her and her family. So! I became the baby sitter. We lived in Queens, which was a forty-minute ride by subway to Manhattan. The big city, with buildings so tall that when you looked up to see the full length you might get dizzy and weave while walking.

I found navigating the island of Manhattan quite easy as the city is built on a grid.  Numbered streets from the smallest in the south of Manhattan to the larger number at the north of the island. Fifth Avenue divided east and west. The smaller numbers are on the eastside and grew bigger going west. I never got lost.

My favorite part of Manhattan was and still is “Greenwich Village”. The streets and the buildings look like, what I came to recognize as Dutch.

One can really see the European influence in most of the southern end of Manhattan.

The “Village” as it’s called is a lot like its Dutch sister “Amsterdam” in its permissiveness of alternative ideas and life styles.

I saw many people, who looked so interesting, rarely had I seen people like these in Minneapolis.

Money could have been an issue if I had desired to eat in a restaurant or have a drink in a bar, but the truth is that the feast was taking in all of the sites I saw just walking those twisted, narrow, cobble stone streets. I loved it.

Back in Queens, life was not so interesting. My sister who had a very free spirit was having a hard time adjusting to life as a married woman, with three kids. I witnessed many arguments between Myrna and her husband Leon.

I began to feel that I may have been part of the problem, and decided to ask my folks if I could come home for a visit to collect myself.

The plan was that I would go back to New York and get into the school F.I.T..

While in Minneapolis I reacquainted myself with some old friends and made a few new friends.

Things get a little fuzzy in memory at this stage of my life because so much happened. One thing was the birth of my daughter; another was going to nursing school, meeting Mitchell Willey, Lyle and Brian Nystedt, Jerry Kelley.

I auditioned for two musicals and got into both. The first was “Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd where I played a character called the “Negro”. I had a cameo role where I sang the song “Feelin Good”. This role was reviewed in the Star-Tribune and received excellent words of praise from a very critical critic, whose name I can’t remember.

The second musical was “West Side Story”. I auditioned for a part in the Chorus and landed the part of Tony. There was a little upset in the cast because Tony was a white boy and I am not, but they decided to go with me. I sounded like a Tony needed to sound.

In nine months or so I had convinced my friends Mitchel and Lyle to go back to New York with me. The excitement of the three of us moving to New York made us feel very strong and bonded, as brothers would be.

I asked my brother Eddie if we could stay with him as he lived in a very large apartment with his new wife Martha and her daughter Dawn.

He agreed to letting two of us stay with him, but Mitchel had to find another place to live. Mitchel had a friend still in Minnesota named Michael.

This arrangement lasted till my brother couldn’t take the idea of his gay brother and his white boyfriend taking up space in his home anymore. He was very patient with us till he couldn’t take any longer.

Off we went to find a place where Lyle, Mitchel, and I could live together.

What we found, proved to us that we were indeed close friend. Three of us were making very little money and could only afford a really small studio apartment in south Chelsea. A fairly nice neighbor hood in Manhattan.

I never went to school but I did have lots of fun and enlightening experiences My introduction to Marijuana, and dancing all night with the help of diet pills supplied to us by a doctor who liked to watch us dance all night.

The three of us boys from Minnesota started to become more independent as time went on. Our interests were not so much in staying together as finding what was out there for us as individuals. Mitchel was accepted into Andy Warhol’s factory of performance artists. Where he became an actor known as “Dorian Gray”. Like Dorian Gray, Mitchel was a beautiful young man. Totally taken with the life he was living, among the weird and famous.

He died of aids a few years later after he found his way into a fairly well known movie.

Lyle was the socialite of the three of us. He still lives in New York where he is near  the lives of famous people, present and historical’ who have lived and continued to live the lives that a lot of us envy or not. I feel that we could be friendlier, but I sort of abandoned our friendship when went off with to California with a designer that I fell in love with.

His name is Julio! Julio was a designer of the first order, with names like Norman Norell, Oleg Cassini, Judy Garland, and the one and only Diana Ross. He had a talent that caught the eye a wealthy couple from New Jersey, the Morris’s. They gave him the backing for a store of his own on the upper eastside of Manhattan in the 60’s.

It was an elegant store with a design studio in the back where Julio constructed his collection. We had been in a relationship off and on for eight years or so, and I helped him in anyway I could by giving him the money that I had made at Saks Fifth Avenue. I never had to buy clothes. He made most everything I wore. I looked great!

I had worked my way up from the boy who maintained the mannequins to the lighting designer for all the windows of the outside of the store.

Julio and I lived together. It was a wonderful life full of fun and fabulous people.

One day while helping in his store, dressing his front window, I received a call from a friend of ours who worked in a shoe store in the Village.

The voice was very excited asking for Julio, but Julio was not in the store I said.

The friend on the phone told me to find him because he had directed Diana Ross to Julio’s store after she had asked him if he knew of a stylish boutique.

I franticly searched by phone the where abouts of my talented boy friend.

Finely I found him and as the words “Diana Ross left my mouth, in the door she came. Still on the other end of the phone Julio was trying to make sense from what I was saying. When he figured it out he let out a squeal like I had never heard before.

He said he would be there as soon as he was able.

Well here I was looking at the pretty face of Miss Ross.

She was wearing an orange tie- dyed T-shirt bell-bottom jeans and clogs.

She had just had her hair very short, into a neat little Afro.

I had been listening to Stevie Wonder, who’s music made me dance around the store as though I was in my own private disco.

Miss Ross asked which cut on his album I liked the most? I said I liked every cut on the album.

Before I knew it I was dancing with Diana Ross in Julio’s

Boutique.

I can’t tell you what a feeling that must have been. I was in heaven.

I was in heaven until she walked over to where the albums were kept. She would not find any of her music.

I’m sure that she must have been a little disappointed finding no music of her own.

However she was very much the lady and offered to send me a few of her most recent albums.

Julio finely made it back to the store.

He arrived with Mrs. Morris and the party commenced. When the party was over Miss Ross had chosen most of the close that she wore for her promotions of the movie ”Lady Sings the Blues”. This was the beginning of a long friendship between the three of us.

For two years we would meet in our apartment, to prepare for shopping of fabrics for gowns and other clothing that Julio was to make for her.

Miss Ross was a glamorous person who spoke very fondly of her family, when she lived in Detroit. She asked if she could touch my hair to see if it had a texture similar to hers. Indeed it was quite a bit like hers. She talked about her plans for an upcoming concert and how she could stage it.

When I saw the concert I was delighted to see an idea that we had discussed. The opening of the show she descended an image on a screen of a long stair case and when her image reached the bottom of the stairs the screened parted and she came bounding out live on stage. What a thrill!

The following year Miss Ross announced that she wanted to produce her own movie. “Mahogany” was the title. Julio was her choice for her assistant designer for the project, and you can find his name in the credits at the end of the movie(Design assistant)or something like that.

This meant that Julio had to move to Hollywood and since Julio and I were more or less married, I went along. We were transported lock, stock, and our dog “Squirrel” to California. Even though it was a fantastic period in my life, California was not the place for me. I thought I was leaving New York with a job to go to in Hollywood. Wrong! The economy was a lot like it was in 2011. My job had been terminated. This did not sit well with Julio and our relationship suffered for it.

We stayed together for the better part of a year. Long enough for Miss Ross to invite us to her show at Caesar’s Palace.

What a surprise it was for me when she came down from the stage and gave me the mic and said, “Sing pretty”. I think the song was “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”.

I was very proud of the job I did when someone came up to me and said I could have sung the whole song he thought that I was a plant. Well I guess in that she knew I wanted to be a singer, I was an unrehearsed plant. She was proud of me she said.

Miss Ross did try to help me get a job at Motown, but things had gotten so bad between Julio and me that I just wanted to come back to the quiet, calmness of Minneapolis.

I think she must have thought me ungrateful for turning down the help she offered, because as close as I thought we were I could not get a message to her to explain what had happened. Oh well! Life goes on having had the experience my life was rich with the memory of the events of my days in New York.

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