Bring Back the Mlle. Guest Editor Contest!

In the April issue of Vanity Fair Magazine there was an article about the fabled Barbizon Hotel for Women, which served as a protective place for single women to stay in Manhattan. I wrote a letter to the VF editors about my brief stay there when I was a Mademoiselle Magazine guest editor back in 1961. Part of my letter is published in the current (June) issue of VF on page 62. But since they only printed the beginning, I wanted to share the whole letter (below) because there was a point that I’d like to make: There is no opportunity for young women today to get a foot up the ladder of success in the arts like the now-dead Guest Editor contest (and other, similar contests). Instead there are only reality shows which encourage bad behavior and drama instead of actual talent.

To: Vanity Fair letters

Reading the article by Michael Callahan about the Barbizon Hotel brought back memories of the day in June 1961 when I walked into my closet-sized room there, fresh from sophomore final exams in Appleton, Wisconsin, to find on the narrow bed a single red rose and a list of the month of activities that awaited me as a Mademoiselle Magazine Guest Editor.

They included interviews with celebrities whose work we admired (mine was artist Larry Rivers), silly photo shoots in Central Park, a makeover, a movie premier, a champagne airplane dinner flight over Manhattan as the sun set, fashion shows and P.R. breakfasts, many featuring caviar, which I had never seen before.

As we headed from the Barbizon toward the Mlle. Magazine offices each day, we Guest Eds smirked at the Katie Gibbs girls who were forced to wear white gloves, heels and stockings to their lessons in shorthand and typing.

That month-long taste of New York sophistication and glamour threw many innocent young women for a loop—just as it drove Sylvia Plath’s character, in The Bell Jar to toss her fashionable clothes off the hotel roof, suffer a nervous breakdown and ultimately attempt suicide.

(When I was there, Plath’s book hadn’t yet been published, but I heard rumors of how her 1953 crop of Guest Eds suffered food poisoning in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchens-- an episode recreated in The Bell Jar.)

While I was there, I saw Guest Editors change their names to sound more sophisticated, pursue the divorced son of Editor Betsy Talbot Blackwell in hopes of scoring a job, try to talk themselves onto the Today show and desperately volley for a place on the masthead (even though you pretty much needed independent wealth to pay for the necessary wardrobe.)

We were received by Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden. There was always a de rigueur cocktail party at BTB’s apartment overlooking Central Park with a strolling accordionist. (One of the Guest Eds. later told me, “Every time someone started speaking French, I’d dig my heels harder into her cork floor.”)

The young man who was assigned to escort me to the Mlle. Dinner Dance (with Lester Lanin’s orchestra) later asked me to meet his parents at their Long Island country club on the weekend. (He also taught me to eat an artichoke and introduced me to my first Communist—at the White Horse Bar.)

With my Midwestern naiveté, I dressed in “slacks”, but when he arrived to collect me, the Barbizon fashion police at the desk would not allow me to walk the several yards from the elevator across the lobby to the exit. I was sent back to my tiny room to don something more appropriate.

Yes the Barbizon’s rules were insulting and repressive to the women who stayed there. It’s fun to regale my daughters with tales of the bad old days for young would-be career women. But in the Mademoiselle Guest Editor Contest, we had something that is no longer available to ambitious young females. (The program ended in 1979, the magazine folded in 2001.)

We were judged strictly on our talents, not our looks, wealth or personality.

We won the Guest Ed spots, through a series of try-outs—three as I recall, rating our work in art, photography, writing, cartooning, or poetry—unlike Glamour’s Best Dressed College Girls—who were chosen on the basis of how they looked in photographs of three outfits.

Among the women who got their first break through the Mlle. Contest were: Betsey Johnson, Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Carol Brightman, Francine du Plessix Gray, Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Linda Allard, and of course Sylvia Plath.

Today, ambitious young women have no opportunity to be judged on the basis of their talents. Their only options are American Idol and reality shows which promote appearance, sexual attraction and outrageous behavior over actual talent in the arts.

So in this enlightened era, despite all the hurdles I faced trying to get a foot into journalism back in the early sixties, I remember the Barbizon, with its parietal rules and the Mlle. Guest Editor contest with nostalgia.

And I have a plea on behalf of young women in the hinterlands of the U.S. who would like a first step up the ladder: bring back something like the Barbizon and the Mlle. Guest Editor contest!

Joan Paulson Gage

The Pill and the Crone Generation

On Mothers' Day the world will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive birth control pill developed by doctors Gregory Pincus and John Rock at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, only a few miles from where I live.

Feminists in 1960 cited the pill as the most important discovery since fire. But for my generation, it turned out to be a mixed blessing, although it has saved countless women from dying after backstreet abortions and has helped families around the world stop having more children than they could feed or care for.

In 1963-64 when I was a 23-year-old graduate student at Columbia University in New York, I knew women with unwanted pregnancies who flew to Puerto Rico, got in a taxicab at the airport and asked the driver to take them to an illegal abortionist, where they would pay a lot of money for a procedure that took place in horrific conditions. (I know one who came back from Puerto Rico only to discover the baby was still growing inside her. She ultimately had it and put it up for adoption.)

When I started dating the man who is now my husband (40th anniversary coming up in September), I called the Columbia University health services and asked for the name of a gynecologist. They suggested a woman with a practice near Park Avenue on the East Side.

I went to see her and after she examined me, I asked for a prescription for the new birth control pills. (They were marketed as “Enovid”.) She wrote out the prescription and then asked me if I wanted her to do the blood test then and there.

“What blood test?” I asked.

“For your marriage license,” she replied.

I told her that I was not scheduled to be married. She stared at me, visibly shocked and disturbed, but said nothing and handed me the prescription. Embarrassed, I left and on the way out, I paid for my visit with a check. It was a small amount — something like ten dollars. As time passed and my bank statements came, I eventually realized that the doctor never cashed my check.

Thinking back, I decided that she may have feared that I was there undercover, testing to see if she would give the pill to a young woman who openly said she was not getting married. (I’m sure all her other patients lied.) Giving me the prescription may have been illegal or risking her medical license. I don’t know.

(I just looked it up and, sure enough, the pill was not legal or available for unmarried women until 1972. So I was a criminal in 1964—or my doctor was.]

Today, with birth control pills constantly advertised on television — citing them as good not only for birth control but also to cure acne and just about everything else — young women may not realize how difficult it once was to obtain any kind of birth control. (Now there are whole aisles in the drug store called “Family Planning!”)

My grandmother, who was married to a Presbyterian minister in Oklahoma Indian Territory, had two college degrees before 1900, but she also gave birth to nine children, the last one when she was 49 years old and had snow-white hair. My mother told me how her mother wept when she learned she was pregnant with the last two.

The birth control pill is definitely a great boon to womankind—even though it did not have the anticipated result of lowering divorce and eliminating all unwanted pregnancies, much less eliminating poverty and war. It has definitely given women more control over their own bodies and fate.

But those first birth control pills taken by my generation in the sixties had much higher levels of hormones than today’s pills (higher than was necessary, it turned out.) Those first pills caused blood clots, and some of the women who took them died. And though I don’t have medical expertise and am certainly not a doctor, I suspect that the breast cancer epidemic that has touched nearly every woman of my age in some way may be partly the result of the amounts of hormones we received during our fertile years from those first pills.

Why do I suspect the pill contributes to breast cancer? Because every time I go in for a mammogram I’m asked how many years I took it and which years they were.

So on the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the birth control pill, we can give thanks for the benefits it has brought to the world and to women in particular, but we should also stop to think of those pioneers who took the first birth control pill and did not survive to enjoy their crone-hood.

Cinco de Mayo and my Studio

(Please click on the photos to enlarge)


In honor of Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday that is celebrated more in the U.S. than across the border, I’m posting some photos of my studio, which is a celebration of Mexico, its art and folk customs. It’s also an informal exhibition of treasures collected during travels to Mexico, Greece, and India. It throws Hindu gods, carved wooden crucifixes, figures of saints and angels and goddesses together in one overcrowded space, but they all seem to be happy together.

Our house is an antique New England farmhouse and every other room is decorated in character, with Windsor chairs, blanket chests, stencils of pineapples and antique quilts. But in my studio I’ve gone crazy with primitive art and color and my favorite collectibles. (As I mentioned the other day, I seem to collect EVERYTHING.)

One wall is all book cases and cabinets built to hold my books on art and photography. In the cabinets below are craft supplies and many glass-topped display cases with my antique cased images (daguerreotypes and ambrotypes) sorted according to category.

That makes it all sound organized, but, as you can see from the photos, it’s pretty much a mess, which I think is an artist’s prerogative. (Who said a messy desk indicates a creative mind? It certainly wasn’t my mother!)

Right now it’s messier than usual because I’ve been pulling out my watercolors of Greek scenes and people in preparation for the Grecian Festival art exhibit at our church, St. Spyridon Cathedral, coming up on June 4, 5 & 6.

While photographing my studio, I realized that it’s not only a celebration of Mexico and India, it’s also a celebration of women (especially Crone power!) There are so many angels, saints and goddesses, subconsciously chosen, I think, to direct their divine powers toward my painting and photography.

And everywhere there are handmade textiles and embroideries, carvings and paintings, mostly made by women and attesting to their religious or political beliefs and hopes.

Most of the women in Mexico and India who sold me their handiwork are living on the edge of poverty, using their talents and skills to survive. I feel very fortunate that I can not only travel and admire their work and afford to buy it, but that I also have a room of my own to display and enjoy it.

If you look closely at the photos you will see:




On the wall – hupils—embroidered blouses from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec-- which the indigenous women still wear as part of their local costumes. The various designs and colors identify the village they come from.

Hindu gods and goddesses—all in a row.

Retablos—paintings on metal asking for a favor from a saint or thanking the divine powers for favors received.



Greek votives figures (tamata)—silver or tin shapes that are hung on icons, to do pretty much the same thing.

Dolls from my vast collection of dolls of the world—including women and children dressed as Zapatista leader Commandante Marcos—masked with guns and ammunition belts!



A book of Graciela Iturbide photographs.

A cross made out of bottle caps

Kites of paper designed by the famous Oaxacan artist Francesco Toledo who celebrates his Mayan ancestry.

Day of the Dead posters from Oaxaca.

Wooden animals (Alebrijes) carved in Oaxaca of copal wood

Carved textile stamps from India for making block-printed fabrics.

An embroidered pillow from Guatemala, of a man walking through what appears to be a graveyard.

A plastic tote bag with a sequined Guadalupe.

Garlic against the evil eye.

Painted bowls made from gourds



Purses made from antique hupils

A Greek shadow puppet

Lots of antique photos

Photos of my kids when they were young.

Hail to the New York Coffee Cup!

(Please click on the photos to enlarge)


I’ve mentioned before that I love reading New York Times obituaries, because I keep finding out about wonderful people I’ve never heard of (like the man who invented the Frisbee) who have led remarkable lives.

Imagine my delight when I saw on the FRONT PAGE of The New York Times on April 30 a photo of the wonderful “We are happy to serve you” blue-and-white paper cup with the Greek design that is so familiar to New Yorkers. The headline was: “Thank Leslie Buck, Dead at 87, For the Black, No Sugar, to Go”.

I read it and learned that the man who designed the cup, Leslie Buck was not a designer and not Greek, but was a survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His parents were killed by the Nazis. He came to the U.S. after the war and with his brother, who also survived the camps, started a paper cup manufacturing company in Mount Vernon, NY in the late 1950’s.

Leslie Buck joined the Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Conn. in the mid-‘60’s and eventually became its director of marketing. According to the Times, “Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success.”

He named the cup “The Anthora”, which his son said was taken from “Amphora” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent.

The design of the coffee cup became an instant New York icon, eventually as famous as the Statue of Liberty, and spawned many knock-offs. The Times obit waxed rhapsodic: “A pop-culture totem, the Anthora has been enshrined in museums; its likeness has adorned tourist memorabilia like T-shirts and ceramic mugs.”

Well, back when I lived in New York in the sixties and seventies I fell in love with the Greek coffee cups found in virtually every diner, and I started collecting the different designs. (Okay, I have a little problem with collecting EVERYTHING. Just don’t tell the people who run that reality show ”Hoarders” who keep having interventions with people like me.)

In honor of Mr. Buck, who designed the Anthora, I have dug out and photographed a few of my collection above—showing both the front and back of the four designs. (The cup in the middle, holding pencils, is ceramic and I use it in my studio. It shows the original design. ) I also have a soft, flat coin purse bought by my daughter from MOMA which looks like one of these cups—a NYC in-joke referencing the paper cups held by street beggars in Manhattan to collect coins.

Now I wish I’d collected more of the fabulous blue and white cups, because the Times said that they “may now be endangered, the victim of urban gentrification.”

Collect them while you can—just imagine what they’ll sell for someday on Ebay!

And while we’re on the subject of coffee cups, I’m throwing in a photo of two charming prints of watercolors that I bought a couple days ago. The watercolors are the work of artist John Gaston, who runs Gastonart & Frame, where I get my paintings framed. It’s on the Boston Turnpike in Shrewsbury, MA, and I think that Gaston’s watercolors of his humble coffee and pie are just as good, if not better than, the famous food paintings of Wayne Thiebaud, (and a lot cheaper.)

Diane Arbus and Spooky Twins

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)


Long before she killed herself in 1971 at the age of 48, (pills, slashed wrists, found in the bathtub two days later), the photographer Diane Arbus told a friend she was afraid that she would be remembered simply as “the photographer of freaks.”

Today that’s exactly how she is remembered for her searing, macabre photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) or else of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal,” as one biographer described her favorite subjects.

But one of her most famous photographs (on the left above) is not of circus freaks or mentally challenged people, but of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, N.J. in 1967.

This eerie photograph of young sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade has been copied and echoed many times—including in Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘”The Shining” with its twin girl ghosts. In fact there’s a TV commercial on right now (for kitchen appliances) with a pair of similar sinister girls.

A print of Arbus’s twins was sold at auction for $478,000 in 2004 and a couple of months ago I saw another one at the AIPAD photography show in New York that was priced at around $275,000 for a tiny print with Arbus’s notes on the back.

Let’s face it, there’s something intrinsically spooky about twins—especially identical twins—because it’s shocking to see the same individual, the same face, doubled and standing side by side. Maybe that’s why I (and many other collectors) love to find vintage photographic images of twins. They always seem to look like something out of Stephen King.

The 1/6 plate daguerreotype, #1, that I have above next to the Arbus twins, is my favorite dag ever. In my opinion it’s just as good – if not better -- than the Arbus image. The two little girls, who were photographed in the 1840’s or 1850’s, look amazingly like the twins from New Jersey. Compare the faces of the girls on the left in each photo.

The stern young ladies in image #1 are each holding a daguerreotype case inlaid with mother of pearl, and they wear identical gold-tinted pendents and dresses.

(In vintage photos it’s very common for siblings—not just twins -- to be dressed alike, because Mom would buy a long length of fabric and then the dressmaker would come around to stitch up clothing for all the kids from the same bolt of cloth.)

These are some of my prize twin images—all of them spooky. In the early days of photography, people were not only intimidated by this modern invention, they were warned not to move—certainly not to smile—because it would blur the image. Children were often strapped into a chair with their heads in a brace. No wonder they often look terrified!



Images 1 , 2, 3, 4 and 5 above are all daguerreotypes—the very earliest photographic process. Don’t you love the dour sisters in the checkerboard dresses in #3 (not a flattering pattern!) and next to them the long-faced girls in plaid. The sisters in image 5 I suspect, because of their somber clothing and jewelry, may be in mourning.



The girls holding books in image 6 are not identical, but the men in image 7 are mirror images of each other. I love how their top-knots curl in opposite directions. (Six and 7 are ambrotypes—negative images on glass—popular from 1854 to 1865.) People were always worried about how to pose their hands in these early days, and the photographer would arrange hands awkwardly like the ones you see here.



The two women in image 9 may not be twins, or even sisters, but I cherish them because they are feminists from the mid-1800’s! Written in the case behind their daguerreotype is this: “Mary, you and my self are still left single/ while others are double and full of trouble. Your KPL”



Photos 11 to 14 are tintypes, which became popular during the Civil War and continued into the 1900’s. The girls in 11 and the boys in 12 have high button shoes, and the ladies in #14, in ruffled skirts, are posed in a photographer’s studio. Check out the bathing beauties in #13, on a holiday at the seashore (but posed in front of a painted canvas background.)



The toddlers in # 15 are boy/girl twins. (Boys wore dresses until after age 5.) Their mother has written on the back of the cabinet card “Twins. Left, Louise Bertha Inez Forte. Right Louis Bertrand Forte. Born June 13th, 1893 at 2 p.m. in West Newton. Louis was born 5 minutes after Louise.”

An equally helpful relative noted the names of the young flappers in image #16, who look very chic in their cloche hats, as “Alice Antoinette Howland and Harriet Alma Howland, 1926.” Their relaxed pose in their fur-collared coats makes for a beautiful portrait, but none of the twins can compare to my ghostly, sour-faced girls from 170 years ago in image #1.

Grecian Festival Poster Tries

In Worcester MA, the biggest, best and most famous ethnic festival is the Grecian Festival held every other spring by Saint Spyridon Cathedral. It’s been happening for 34 years and brings more than 25,000 people to enjoy the fabulous food and festivities.

For all those years the poster was designed by award-winning artist Alexander Gazonas, who passed away several years ago. In 2008, the entire festival was dedicated to his memory. That year’s poster, based on the famous statue the Charioteer of Delphi, was his last design.

So this year a call went out for local artists to attempt a poster design for the festival, which will be held on June 4, 5 and 6. I submitted three poster tries – the rough drafts are above. The top one was based on an archaic pottery design showing a man playing a double flute while a woman dances, holding castanets in her hands. (I had to cover up their nudity a little—after all, this is a family event!)

The second design is a detail of a watercolor I painted last year showing three priests whom I photographed dancing at a summer festival near my husband’s village of Lia in the Mourgana mountains of Epiros in northern Greece, just below the border with Albania. The white-bearded man on the right is our village priest, Father Procopi. (Actually, he covers three villages and is very busy. Until recently he traveled from one village to the other by foot. Now he has a car.)

The third design is based on a classical head of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty.

I was very pleased when the committee selected my first design—the dancing couple—for this year’s official poster. At the bottom you see the final, finished poster as it was polished up by Sarah Kyriazis of New Market Media.

If you are anywhere near Worcester MA on June 4, 5 or 6 be sure to come by. You‘ll think you’ve been transported to Athens.

Here are some of the reasons you should visit: Greek music, food, (baklava! souvlaki!) dancers, Greek goodies for sale, including jewelry, crafts, books, clothing, icons and more. There’s a living museum and a kids fest, and on Sunday evening a raffle drawing. The minute you walk in, you’ll be filled with the uniquely Hellenic high spirits which in Greek are called kefi!

My Hunt for Emily Dickinson

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)


There are a few photographs of long-dead celebrities that are so rare, people will pay close to a million dollars for them. If you come across a previously unknown image of, say, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, to name a few, you have discovered a real treasure.

One of these iconic images would be a new portrait of Emily Dickinson. That’s what a professor at the University of North Carolina, Philip F. Gura, thought he had found on an E-Bay auction that he won on April 12, 2000. It was an albumen photograph (the bottom row above).

Later Gura wrote a delightful description of his torturous six-month search to validate the image. It’s called “How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay.”

Read it on http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/gura/

Gura wrote about Emily Dickinson: “Even though she lived when the new invention of photography was changing the ways people thought about themselves, there is only one known photographic likeness of her, taken by William C. North. It was made between December 1846 and March 1847, and shows a thin teenager suffering from what her family took as the first symptoms of tuberculosis.

“A second photograph of Dickinson has long been the Holy Grail of artifacts for scholars in my field…”

Gura paid $481 to win the albumen photograph with “Emily Dickinson” written on the back. As soon as it arrived from the eBay seller, the professor set about trying to validate it. He soon had calls from The New York Times and the New Yorker, who were vying to be the first with the news of his discovery.

Then NPR and many papers around the world were knocking at his door. After much trouble, Gura finally found a forensic anthropologist who was able to measure and compare various anatomical landmarks on the two faces (the original verified dag above left and the new-found albumen photo in the third row). This seems so much quicker and easier on TV shows like CSI and Bones!

Meanwhile two historians of costume analyzed the sitter’s clothing and determined that the albumen photo was a copy of an original daguerreotype taken sometime between 1848 and 1853.

In the one verified image of Emily — the daguerreotype at the upper left-- she is either sixteen or 17 years old. It was taken at Mt. Holyoke and is in the possession of Amherst College.

After all his research, Prof. Gura still doesn’t have a positive "yes" answer. But he believes that it is indeed Emily and quotes one reporter: “Although the forensic analysis of Gura’s photo strongly suggests the woman is ED, no one can say for sure. By the same token, no one apparently can say that the woman is NOT Dickinson.”

Something that was not reported by international media, (but is reported here exclusively on A Rolling Crone), is that I had a very similar experience to Philip Gura’s. But it happened exactly four months earlier. On Jan. 13, 2000, I purchased on eBay a 1/6 plate daguerreotype of a young woman who looked strikingly like Emily Dickinson. The famous verified Emily image is on the left above, on the right is my dag, which I purchased for $127.50 from a seller in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

The eBay auction had the title “Fine Dag – Lovely Woman – Emily Dickinson???”

But the seller was not making any claims that he couldn’t prove: “Purchased some time ago from an estate auctioned [sic] near Amherst, Mass. A fine daguerreotype…an intriguing and attractive young woman. …Some say she is, some say she looks like, Emily Dickinson. And some say not. Draw your own conclusion (there is one surviving dag of this noted Amherst author.) A fine daguerreotype either way.”

I studied the small photo on eBay and tried to compare it to the one verified dag. Like Philip Gura some months later, I waited in suspense for it to arrive. I imagined the excitement, the glory, the press attention if it proved to be an actual second image of the Belle of Amherst.

You must admit, looking at the two dags side by side, that the resemblance is striking. Even the style of dress and hair and the pose itself. (Emily is near a book and holding what I think is a flower in the official dag. In my image the woman has an adorable beaded bag hanging from her arm. They even seem to be wearing the same kind of dark bracelet, which may or may not be a mourning bracelet made of human hair.)

But I didn’t have to consult forensic anthropologists and costume historians to validate my image when it came. I took one look at the actual dag that lay in my hand and I realized she couldn’t be the real Emily, because, judging from the one true photograph, Emily had dark brown eyes and the woman in MY image had pale blue eyes.

I should have known this, because Emily once wrote to an admirer (who asked for a portrait) this description of herself: “I…am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur-and my Eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves – would this do just as well?”

So mine is not a priceless iconic image, and the world’s press is not about to come calling — as it did four months later when Professor Gura discovered his image of ED on eBay. But I like ”my” Emily anyway and would never part with her, because this woman was a contemporary, perhaps a neighbor — perhaps even a relative -- of the real Emily. She certainly has a remarkable resemblance to the mysterious and secretive Belle of Amherst, who wore white and refused to come out of her room in the last years of her life, talking to visitors through a closed door.

And then after her death, her sister Lavina discovered the 1800 poems hidden away in her drawer. The first volume was published four years after Emily diedin 1886 at the age of 55.