Before Fame
September 12, 2013 by mountainmornings
I remember once going out to dinner with the family, and arranged before us on the table were your typical paper placemats. Except that on these cute little mats were a number of what looked like high school portrait pictures. The mats were titled something like “Before They Were Famous.” There in the corner was the key, and you had to match the picture with the star. So long before smart phones and portable gaming devices, long before reality TV produced celebrities, a family had the chance to actually interact by guessing which adolescent girl was now Cher.
Tonight, if you’re lucky enough to live in the New York metropolitan area, or have access to WNET channel 13, http://www.wnet.org, you can tune into a documentary at 10:30 that shines a light on some of our generation’s most acclaimed modern artists. But it’s like a dream within a dream, because we get a glimpse of the early life of these men, before Studio 54 threw stardust around them, through the lens of a friend and photographer, William John Kennedy.
Full Circle: Before They Were Famous
FULL CIRCLE: BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS is the story behind a series of photographs of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana taken by William John Kennedy in 1963/64 just as the 2 artists were on the cusp of fame. It includes terrific footage of a rare interview with Robert Indiana at his home in Vinalhaven, as well as moments with Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead.
The Director of the Warhol Museum, Eric Shiner, is interviewed and we gain his insight while we watch the evolution of an artistic icon. But if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the musical score of this film, and those of you who know him may recognize a certain something. Because the music was created by my son, the Rocker, and like any good mom I’d recognize that sound anywhere. From the moment he picked up a violin in first grade, and our Corgi accompanied him, throughout high school with his band in our garage, I’ve become his biggest fan.
I was thinking about him yesterday, on the anniversary of 9/11. Because I knew where my daughter was; I had called her in DC to tell her what was happening and I knew she had left the federal building she was working in and started walking back to her apartment in Adams Morgan. And I knew where Bob was; he was waiting with rescue personnel at the dock in Highlands, NJ for burn patients who never came. But I didn’t know where my son was. He was supposed to start his first after-high-school job on that beautiful Fall day, and they had called to tell him not to come in, but I couldn’t find him.
He was out at Sandy Hook with his friends on the beach, watching the plume of the Twin Tower’s smoke drift out to sea. And the collective trauma of that day was familiar, that sense of suffering brought me back to 1963 when I learned that our President had been shot while I was in gym class at my NJ high school. What does that say about a generation marked by such a tragedy?
Because even before his band, The Parlor Mob, became famous, before the world tours and the Paris Vogue cover shoots and the iTunes Best Rock Band of the Year award, I was always proud of my son for following his own heart, for playing outside of the lines. As the Bard likes to say, and I may have quoted this in his senior yearbook, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
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MountainMornings 
And what a wonderful man he is!
Thanks Ellen, and his girl is pretty special!
Chris Sent from my iPhone
I always love how you combine a couple of powerful themes and bring in your family. Those days are indelible in our memories and yes, shape generations. Let’s hope there aren’t any more like them.
Thanks Lisa. I agree, we need to evolve beyond war. I’d like Captain Picard to just “make it so,”
Chris Sent from my iPhone