Last week, I emptied out my storage locker and brought everything here to my apartment. I don't have much except the Y'all archives, which consist of several boxes of videotapes, recordings in various formats (many of them obsolete), and a couple boxes of memorabilia, mostly things given to us by fans: drawings, letters, cards, etc. I feel like the curator of a very important collection. . . .
One thing I unearthed is a watercolor sketch my grandmother made many years ago, in the 60's I think. It's a panoramic view of the downtown intersection near where she lived in Waukegan, Illinois when I was very young. The crosswalks are busy with all sorts of people, stylish-looking men and women, children, even a sailor. (There's a big naval base in Waukegan and I remember visiting my grandma and seeing sailors in their bell-bottoms and Popeye hats, almost always walking in two's and three's.)
The painting reminded me of how my grandmother used to say that she was a "city person" and how much I liked the sound of that, because I thought my grandmother was the coolest person in the world, and I loved visiting her in her little downtown apartment, I loved the door buzzer and the accordian gate on the elevator, I loved eating crackers and canned sardines for dinner, and I loved going down to the candy store in the storefront of her building for caramel popcorn.
Starting with that first taste of urban life, I grew up knowing that I'd eventually move to New York, and I did, and I lived there for many years thinking that I'd never leave. But I did. And when I discovered the outdoors, the pleasures of living near the land, desert, mountains, forest, weather, animals, for a while I thought I might not be a city person after all or not any more.
Maybe some day I'll move to the desert. It seems like a good place to end up. (A good place to die at any rate because it's so dry your body will become dessicated and return to the elements faster.) But when I came to San Francisco last year to finish Life in a Box, I knew I would stay. I had the same feeling I had the first time I visited New York. The same feeling I had when I used to visit my grandma in Waukegan.
-- Stephen Cheslik-DeMeyer at the late and missed luckygreendress.com, February 2006