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Lot Essay
RAY, MY FRIEND
In early 1957 I dropped out of my senior year at Yale to take a crack at writing for theatre in New York. My first job was in a zipper factory in the garment district. Within walking distance was the Village, most especially the San Remo bar and in it I met something more important to my life than Yale. I met the lunatics of art.
The first was Soren Agenoux who was involved (sometimes as contributor, sometimes as thief) with both the Living Theatre and Andy Warhol and his cohort.
Soren asked me to come to a coffee house to meet a friend, Ray Johnson. Ray's friend Richard Lippold joined us. Ray came in exhausted from creating a mural on the stairs leading up to the Living Theatre on Fourteenth Street. He colored the walls by running up and down, winged with crayolas, four hundred and sixty-four times. It was Soren who calculated the number. Ray said he didn't like it and was going to paint over it. Pink. We laughed. Ray looked solemn, cutting his eyes around to count the laughs. He received laughs more often than he sent them.
Ray smoked Lucky Strikes. I sent him a poem March 19, 1959 about Lucky Lindy making certain to include the refrain "LUCKY STRIKE" since unlike the Dadaist Ray, I was fearful someone might miss the joke. He surprised me by sending in a business-sized envelope a collage of Lindy standing next to his Spirit of St.Louis airplane that included two Lucky Strike targets cut from a cigarette pack.
Thus it started, the long generous flow of collages, witty, humorous, gorgeous, which I pinned to my cork board not realizing they formed an accidental narrative of my friendship with Ray.
I moved on from the zipper factory to Hollywood where to my great amazement I ended up Columbia studio head in 1970, a job I soon scampered out of to become a film producer and writer.
The collages continued to come, fewer with the years. They ended up in a box in my closet until, in 1991 the Lannan Foundation expressed an interest in what was in my closet. I spread the works on a table, more than fifty, and sent a photo thru a friend to Ray. On March 7, 1991, I came in and heard Ray's voice on my answering machine:
"I have just looked at the color photos of the Lucky Strike collages that Janice brought back. I'm gasping here at their beauty and their quantity.. dot dot dot."
In early 1957 I dropped out of my senior year at Yale to take a crack at writing for theatre in New York. My first job was in a zipper factory in the garment district. Within walking distance was the Village, most especially the San Remo bar and in it I met something more important to my life than Yale. I met the lunatics of art.
The first was Soren Agenoux who was involved (sometimes as contributor, sometimes as thief) with both the Living Theatre and Andy Warhol and his cohort.
Soren asked me to come to a coffee house to meet a friend, Ray Johnson. Ray's friend Richard Lippold joined us. Ray came in exhausted from creating a mural on the stairs leading up to the Living Theatre on Fourteenth Street. He colored the walls by running up and down, winged with crayolas, four hundred and sixty-four times. It was Soren who calculated the number. Ray said he didn't like it and was going to paint over it. Pink. We laughed. Ray looked solemn, cutting his eyes around to count the laughs. He received laughs more often than he sent them.
Ray smoked Lucky Strikes. I sent him a poem March 19, 1959 about Lucky Lindy making certain to include the refrain "LUCKY STRIKE" since unlike the Dadaist Ray, I was fearful someone might miss the joke. He surprised me by sending in a business-sized envelope a collage of Lindy standing next to his Spirit of St.Louis airplane that included two Lucky Strike targets cut from a cigarette pack.
Thus it started, the long generous flow of collages, witty, humorous, gorgeous, which I pinned to my cork board not realizing they formed an accidental narrative of my friendship with Ray.
I moved on from the zipper factory to Hollywood where to my great amazement I ended up Columbia studio head in 1970, a job I soon scampered out of to become a film producer and writer.
The collages continued to come, fewer with the years. They ended up in a box in my closet until, in 1991 the Lannan Foundation expressed an interest in what was in my closet. I spread the works on a table, more than fifty, and sent a photo thru a friend to Ray. On March 7, 1991, I came in and heard Ray's voice on my answering machine:
"I have just looked at the color photos of the Lucky Strike collages that Janice brought back. I'm gasping here at their beauty and their quantity.. dot dot dot."