Sera's Toast

       

      The sun sets on his east Texas pasture, taking the day with it in a silent blaze. Wayne rambles over bumpy roads, rounding up memories as if he could drive them all home and park them in his driveway for show. Retelling his heroic past from a Lazy Boy chair, his wife of 65 years, Judith, nods respectfully, though she's heard it all before. His thoughts are now comfortably scrambled in vodka and Coca-Cola. His best friends these days, two Aberdeen Terriers, herd him toward the bed. His farmer-sized hands steady him against thin walls. Wayne leans against the bedroom door shutting it with his weight then hits the mattress with a thud. Like centurions, the terriers file in, surrounding Wayne's long, lean body.

      Judith puts her ear to the door. With the sound of his snore, her shoulders drop and her back straightens. She lights a Virginia Slim and sits down to enjoy the first quiet moment of the day. A halo of smoke gathers around her head when she hears a knock at the back door. Placing her cigarette in a crystal bowl, an ashtray souvenir from Germany, she lifts herself from the easy chair. Seraphina has come to return the lilies Judith had placed on the New Year's altar. Sera, that's what Wayne called her for short, is a widow, an old friend.

      He had once said to her, "Listen sweetheart, that’s a pretty name but it's longer than you are tall. Can I just call you Sera?"

       

      She was a "good-natured gal" he had always said. She had to be, married to Sonny, his partner in a Venezuelan oil drilling company in the '60s. They made the deal one night over a bottle of Jack, in a thatch-roofed bar in Caracas. When they stumbled through the door together, arms over shoulders to tell Sera, she raised her glass. In a mixed accent of Portuguese and Spanish she proposed a toast, "Well, eef we loos it all tomorrow, we jes start over. Sheers!"

      They had a hell of a run until Sonny started stealing and Wayne sent him back to Texas on a second-class charter.

      As the bouquet passes between Judith and Sera, a quaking blast from the garage shakes red pollen from the stamen onto the white, wilting petals.

      There are not many unpredictable night noises so far out in the piney woods. Dogs bark at owls and every now and then, a coyote. Exxon/Mobil trucks occasionally rumble on and off of the property to check their wells. But when the dogs are asleep, there is only the lowing of distant cattle to suggest waking life.

      Before Judith can gain a grip on the flowerpot, she sees fire clawing at the back door. Startled, she stumbles over soil and shards from the shattered lily container shoving Sera toward the front door.

She yells for Wayne, but there is no reply.

      The terriers scatter, disappear as the bedroom door flies open. Wayne lay still and quiet, but for the snoring. He blows air through his nose and lips, like a horse nicker and rolls onto his side.

      The two women struggle with all six feet and two inches of his dead weight until he flops to the floor.

      His eyes peel half open as he sits up. Grabbing him under his shoulders, they drag him outside, just as flames overtake the home.

      It is only a prefab house, not like the handsome homes they had known before retirement. But it held nearly every reminder of their combined 140-some years of life.

      Coatless and shoeless in the cold January night, the three are now monoliths in the field. Sera's stature is noticeably diminutive next to Wayne, her arms outstretched to wrap and warm the couple.

      Flames burn, blot out the stars.

      In minutes, the home is reduced to cinders. Indifferent to their loss, the flames turn and begin to feed on surrounding tree branches. The fire department calls. They are lost. The small dirt road turnoff is not visible in the night. A short red truck follows the glow on the horizon, getting there in time to save a few Venezuelan trinkets but not in time to save the two tiny terriers. The three watch the horror with tear-stained faces, imagining what must have become of the loyal companions — staring, glassy-eyed, no tears left.

      The final flame is exhausted. A blanket of pitch dark covers the now open field, like an old quilt with stars for pinholes.

~end~

~end~

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008: Port Arthur native reinvented himself and art

Port Arthur native Robert Rauschenberg spent the last hours of his life in the very place he had wished.

"When I die, I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to work in my studio," said the internationally known pop artist at a news conference in 2005 in Lafayette, La., where he had an exhibition dedicated to his late mother, Dora.

With his only sister, Janet Begneaud, by his side, the artist known to many as the Pope of Pop, for his kindness and optimism, died of heart failure at 10:53 p.m. Monday in his studio on Captiva Island at the age of 82. At the artist's behest, his ashes will be spread on the beach in front of that studio Sunday with only his family and loyal staff members present, said Byron Begneaud, Rauschenberg's brother-in-law of 52 years. Memorial services are being planned for New York and Florida at a later date, as yet undecided, Begneaud, Janet's husband, said.

"He and Janet had a special bond," said Begneaud, speaking with soft R's and a slight drawl by phone from Lafayette. "Janet's been holding his hand for about six weeks. He had been in intensive care, but they moved him to his studio and cleared a path for him to see the bay."

Rauschenberg spent most of his life near the ocean, including many years in New York. But it started in Port Arthur, where he was born in 1925, at Gates Hospital. Rauschenberg often talked about his humble beginnings in Southeast Texas. His family, like many other American families, fell on hard times during the Depression, but using their wits, his family scraped by. In the Rauschenberg household, nothing went to waste. His mother used to sew remnants of fabric together to make clothes for the family. In an interview with the New York Times, Rauschenberg admitted his mother went so far as to make a skirt out of the back of the suit that her brother was buried in because she didn't want the fabric to go to waste. It was that culture of transforming trash into treasure that ultimately made Rauschenberg a star. He preferred to create his pieces out of second-hand store finds, items he found in the street and in trash bins and objects he had on hand, versus canvases or anything store-bought.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home by parents Dora and Ernest, he left Port Arthur and the idea that he might become a minister, to attend college in Austin in 1943. But he was expelled within a semester because he had trouble reading.

"Milton was not a scholar," remembered Dovie Horton, a member of Thomas Jefferson High School's Class of '43. "I later found out he was dyslexic."

Rauschenberg said he was "spared the shame" of returning home from college when he received a letter from the draft board. The U.S. Navy trained him to be a neuropsychiatric technician. He was to bathe and wrap corpses.

"No, I was not forced to fight. What I saw was much worse," Rauschenberg said in the Lafayette press conference. "I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business."

After the war, the young man, still known as Milton, hitchhiked home to Port Arthur only to find his family had moved to Lafayette.

"Janet wasn't there in Lafayette very long before she was named Sweet Potato Queen. She was a beauty and Milton was always sweet and gentle," Horton said.

And Milton wasn't there long before he left for art school and renamed himself "Bob."

"When people got to know me better and just assumed that I had some dignity, it became Robert then. So now I'm known as either Robert or Bob," he said.

Reinvention was the hallmark of his career. He worked in every medium---in theater, dance and even engineering, he created set designs, lighting designs and costumes while reinventing what the entire world thought of as art. Rauschenberg attributed much of what he learned about creating and reinventing to his time spent at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He collaborated with art world giants Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Josef Albers; dancer Merce Cunningham; and musician John Cage.

In 1953, he moved to New York City, where he met aspiring artist Jasper Johns and designed window displays for Tiffany's to make ends meet while exploring the New York art scene. Their work in the 1950s would become the link between abstract expressionism, which dominated the art world in the '50s, and pop art of the 1960s, and is still influencing artists today.

Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, a prestigious contemporary art exhibition. (Mark Tobey and James Whistler previously had won the Painting Prize.)

Amid fame, he did not forget his hometown, visiting several times in the '80s and '90s for benefits for Lamar State College-Port Arthur and the Museum of the Gulf Coast.

"He was a very generous person," said Sam Monroe, president of both LSC-Port Arthur and the Port Arthur Historical Society. "He liked people. He met people. He showed interest in everybody."

In a previous interview, celebrated photographer and Beaumont native Keith Carter of Lamar University agreed. "His approach influenced everybody in my generation," Carter said.

Donna Meeks, chair of the Lamar University art department, puts Rauschenberg in the same league as Picasso and Duchamp. "He is one of the three most significant artists in the 20th century," she said. "I don't think artists today work without knowledge of Rauschenberg."

Rauschenberg is survived by a son, Christopher, 56, a Portland, Ore.-based artist and photographer.

Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn

By Donna Rae Wisor
For The Examiner
January 9, 2009


A portrait of Parks in his “autumn years,” with hand on face, a head of billowy white hair and signature mustache, reveal a man in a crackling season---just before spring. His point of view from behind a camera, his “weapon of choice,” rose far above the heap of racism and poverty that were his adversaries. The photographic, cinematic, literary and musical works of Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks (b. 1912 – d. 2006) look toward a horizon without boundaries, to freedom.

The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) will exhibit his works from Jan. 17- April 12, with an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m.. Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. will lecture.

“He was an inspiration for many generations of people, and not only artists," Brookman said in a USA Today interview in 2006. "As someone who grew up in an environment of poverty and racism, he made it his mission to end that, and he used art as a weapon to do it."

The son of a Kansas dirt farmer was not severely daunted in 1941, at the age of 28, by comments from Editor Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar. Brodovitch said he admired Parks’ fashion pictures, but could not hire people of color due to being a William Randolph Hearst publication.

Why should he be daunted? Parks had been homeless and starving in Chicago before he worked as a busboy at a country club, he was nearly murdered while working as a porter at a flophouse and as a piano player in a brothel. He almost froze to death riding the ‘rails’ to New York where fate would have him join an all white orchestra. It didn’t last long though; the leader absconded with their salaries.

Photo clerks who developed Parks' first roll of film, had applauded his work and pointed him to Frank Murphy's women's clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota for fashion assignments. Parks’ work caught the eye of Marva Louis, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis' wife. He soon developed a portfolio.

Parks chose to work for the notable photographer Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration after he won a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1941 for his photographic work at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. By the time he finally caught his big break at Vogue and Glamour magazines he had paid his dues. It was there he established his international reputation as a fashion photographer.

Fashion was only one of many subjects Parks could interpret. Life magazine recognized his talent in 1948 and for 22 years Parks' documentary work chronicled poverty, crime, school segregation, Communist demonstrations, the return of U.S. Korean War veterans, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Panthers. His 1961 photo essay on a poor and dying Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, brought donations that saved the boy's life and paid for a new home for his family.

He covered fashions in women's garters, prison riots in New Jersey and gang wars in Harlem. His portraits include notables such as Winston Churchill, Grace Kelley, Alexander Calder, Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, Ingrid Bergman, Duke Ellington, Paul Newman, Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand, and his literary contemporary Langston Hughes.

Parks is best remembered as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Branching out from his photography in 1963, Parks went on to direct many films including The Learning Tree, based on his autobiographical novel. Parks composed music and even a ballet. Among his numerous books are: A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror (1990), Arias of Silence (1994), and a retrospective of his life and work titled Half Past Autumn (1997), which was made into an HBO special.

The youngest of 15 children, Parks was born into a black family in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas. His father, who provided for the family by subsistence farming, was extraordinary. Parks tells how his father, once, without provocation or permission, checked into the hospital to donate all of the skin from his back and back legs to a young burn victim. But it was his mother who died when he was only 15, who was the main influence on his life.

“I never wanted to diappoint her,” he once said.

A high school teacher told Parks and his classmates not to waste their family's money going to college because they “would only be porters and maids.” Parks never finished high school but by 1998, he had been awarded his 56th doctorate.
"I never allowed the fact that I experienced bigotry and discrimination to step in the way of doing what I have to do," he once said. "I don't understand why other people let that destroy them."

Parks was married and divorced three times. His wives were Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and Genevieve Young, a book editor whom he married in 1973 and divorced in 1979. For many years, Parks was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt, a railroad heiress and clothing designer. Parks was a close friend of Muhammad Ali, and godfather to Malcolm X's daughter Quibilah Shabazz. He is a co-founder of Essence magazine, and wrote a ballet called Martin, in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr..

Gordon Parks and his influential work continue today to be an enduring force in society for the emotional and intellectual response they elicit, according to Melissa Tilley of AMSET.

In a 1998 interview with PBS, Reporter Phil Ponce asked how Parks could explain the fact that he’d had such a remarkable life.

"I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived," he said. “And now, I feel at 85…There's another horizon out there…But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.”

Death and Art

By Donna Rae Wisor
As published in the Beaumont Enterprise 2007

In the world of art, the big money is in death, to a salesman.

Three of the top auction houses in the country hit record sales with contemporary art this week just days after the death of one of the artworld's greats, according to Artinfo.com. Rauschenberg, a contemporary of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol died Monday at his Captiva Island studio in Florida at 82.

Two days after his death, Rauschenberg's 1963 oil-and-silkscreen canvas “Overdrive,” sold for $14.6 million, according to Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction, New York, Website. “Red Body,” his pencil, gouache and solvent transfer on paper dated 1969, sold for $993,000, exceeding the estimated selling price of $500,000 to $700,000. And “Slug,” sold for $2.84 million, a 1961 combine painting estimated to sell between $3 and $4 million.

It's hard to say what that means when you consider that only three years ago in2005, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased his 1955 masterpiece, "Rebus," for about $30 million from French billionaire Francois Pinault.

The sale of a billboard-scaled Andy Warhol, Detail of the Last Supper for $9.5 million, was reported as a "mild distraction" Wednesday, compared to a sizzling duel over a Francis Bacon which went to an anonymous European telephone bidder for a record $86.28 million. The gavel went down at Christies Tuesday, on a 1995 Lucious Freud for $33.64 million, making it the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold.

All of those record numbers do mean something.

"The contemporary art market is booming," said Beaumont local and internationally-known artist Keith Carter, whose works have also been sold at Southebys.

Carter chalks it up to the economy and said there is nowhere to put your money right now.

"If you invest in a piece with a good pedigree, the returns are staggering," he said.

This is almost always the case if an artist dies.

"Unless there was a price change really soon before the death, an artists' work begins to sell for more, usually because no more can be produced," said Catherine Couturier director of John Cleary Gallery on 2635 Colquitt in Houston.

"On past artists of his caliber, like Lichtenstein and Warhol and Picasso, obviously they all have increased many, many times over the years," said Jane Eckert, of Eckert Fine Art Gallery, who represents Rauschenberg in Southwest Florida, in an interview with Mary Wozniak in Newspress.com.

Even if an artist never sold their work in the first place, death may result in sales. Just look at Vincent Van Gough who hardly earned enough in his lifetime to rub two Francs together. His fame grew rapidly after his death in 1878, particularly following a show of paintings in 1901. Fastforward to 1990, when his Portrait of Doctor Gachet sold for $82.5 million at Christie's.

The latest Rauschenberg to hit the auction block in the wake of the artist’s death is his famous series “Anagrams ( A Pun).” Signed posters and prints ranging from $990to $9000 can be found on eBay today and do not appear to have changed much over the past weeks. But that doesnt mean much.

"A lot of people, including myself, like to hold on to the work until the market stablilizes. That creates a demand. Right now, like in the case of Rauschenberg, obituaries are being written. Everyone is paying attention, even those who don't usually pay attention ," said Couturier.

Most people are not likely to be able to afford art at these prices. Rauschenberg once quipped, "I can't afford me either."

But he could afford a lot more than Van Gough and more than most artists alive today. The New York Times Reported Tuesday that he had purchased a modest beach house on Captiva in the '70s, working out of a small studio. Before long he became the " island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York."

In fact, he ended up owning 35 acres and some 1,000 feet of beach front, nine houses and studios, and a 17,000-square-foot studio overlooking the bay.

On the other hand, Rauschenberg did not likely see a penny from the auction houses.

"The auction is what is known as a secondary market," said Carter, admitting he doesn't have much to do with that end of things. "Artists don't participate in the secondary market."

Rauschenberg founded Artists Rights Today (A.R.T.) to campaign for artists to receive a royalty on resales of their art and testified before Congress in favor of royalties. Congress has not yet responded with a law.Other Rauschenberg paintings sold recently:

A portion of the series, which includes 236 paintings created from 1995 to
2002, was sold for $825,000 yesterday at Sotheby’s, according to the auction
house Web site. The vegetable dye transfer art work called “Easel [Anagrams (A Pun)] is created on polylaminate and was expected to sell for between $500,000 and
$700,000.

George Wentz - A lifetime becoming a child again

By Donna Rae Wisor
Originally published in Metropolitan Beaumont magazine Jul/Aug 2005

Artist George Wentz, Beaumont, 62 once walked 40 miles round trip between San Jose and Palo Alto, CA, to see a Pablo Picasso exhibition. His artist ‘legs’ still carry him quite naturally after a half-century of painting and writing--only now from a wheelchair in South Park in a home his father built.

Among his first patrons were Sol and Merriam Rogers of Beaumont, who collected his work for more than 35 years beginning in the late ‘60’s. The Rogers bequeathed many of those pieces to family, including their daughter Joelle.

“My mother, Miriam, started collecting George’s work years ago and it always appealed to me both in text and in its sensitivity. George is one of the few artists whose work I have held on to. I find his work hopeful and meaningful,” said Joelle Rogers in a telephone conversation from her home in Houston in 2005.

His paintings can now be found in the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Sinatra estate, John Denver estate and the Liza Minnelli collection and untold hundreds of homes in Southeast Texas.

The pre-1970 graduating classes at Lamar went through a program with
a decidedly commercial art emphasis. Wentz rejected this.

“I enjoyed and absorbed everything I learned at Lamar. Then I spent a long time unlearning it.” said Wentz.

Wentz was one of three artists in the country accepted in 1979 to Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, CA, now called the Montalvo Arts Center, and was once the home of Senator James D. Phelan whose legendary hospitality made Villa Montalvo a magnet for the artists, writers and actors of his time, including Jack London, Ethel Barrymore, Mary
Pickford, Douglass Fairbanks, and Edwin Markham.

“I was able to spend a summer in a huge studio, in beautiful surroundings with the peace
and quiet I needed to really paint,” said Wentz.

And really paint he did.

Many recognize his expressionistic flower paintings, gestural lines and exquisite use of European color. His French and Cajun-French roots speak clearly through his European use of color. Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” come to mind. The effect of numerous tubes of acrylic on one canvas creates a ‘plastic’ or sculpture-like quality. His vibrant brush strokes recognize the art of Van Gogh yet maintain a definitive
Wentz thumbprint. He has a diversity of styles, ‘gestural’ painting being the most recent, as seen in Grouch Marx Parade, 2007. He calls himself, “for lack of a better term,” an abstract expressionist. Many would say he is colorful both
in his art and his nature.

"He has one of the sweetest natures I have ever known. I don't remember a time that I have ever seen him with
anything other than a smile on his face,” said Michael Matthews, a dealer and the organizer of the upcoming Wentz benefit on Saturday, Dec. 13 from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Insisting that a childlike quality is the key to great art and invention, Wentz says he used to keep a little cloth cap in the glove compartment of his Buick back when he was able to drive.

“I have had that cap since I was a very young child. My Grandfather liked to call it my ‘opossum cap’ because he was always going to teach me how to shoot opossum. I love Beaumont. Life here was like something right out of a Horton Foote play,” he said.

Those whom Wentz loved best were his family and his parents Ray and
Annie Laurie Wentz. He cared for his mother for three months before she
died of cancer in 1991.

“She said I was going to be one of the best writers in the country, but I am a painter first,” he said.

After Annie Laurie died, Wentz took care of his father, Ray Wentz, who
died in 1999 at the age of 94.

“I got to know him so well then. I had to reach deep inside myself through that time,” he said.

Wentz believes he might have inherited an aptitude for the arts from a long line of artists in his family including his cousin from New Orleans; Marce Lacouture who recently released a CD called “La Joie Cadienne” and his cousin Jo Ellen Johnson an artist from Galveston. His late Aunt Mamie Hafler- Graham was well-known in the early days of the Beaumont Community Players. He also inherited diabetes and a psychosis causing him three nervous breakdowns. A victim of a violent attack that occurred in Beaumont several years ago, Wentz says he never quite recovered from that.

“Congestive heart failure and diabetes nearly got the best of me this year. But all of the wonderful friends I have here give me the will to paint, and that is my life,” said Wentz.

Wentz has had several 'brushes' with death. But each time, with an
ecstasy of will, he manages to ward off the grim reaper. These experiences "cancelled everything but truth," he said.

Wentz recovered with a new twist in his brush stroke, reinventing his style and surprising himself. He has recently returned to pen and ink drawings.

These simply constructed drawings reveal the inherent quality in all of his works---joy and playfulness.

Wentz has plans for more reinvention and painting.

“I want to get back to nature. I want to be the kid I was— when I’m 95,” he said.

For more information about the George Wentz Benefit, call the tattered suitcase at 832-4500

Bob and Me

It was one of the times of my life, meeting Bob Rauschenberg. I call him Bob because that is what he named himself in 1947, in a bus terminal, the day he arrived in Kansas City to attend the Art Institute, when he was only 22 years-old.

You know the question about about who you would dine with if you could go back in time? I usually answered Picasso or Cezanne or Gauguin. What was I thinking?
Why go back in time when we've got Bob right here in the 21st century? Or at least we did, until Monday, May 12, 2008 at 10:53 p.m. when he died at his Captiva Island studio in Florida.

It's understandable to me that he would want to shed himself of Milton Ernest, his given Christian name. During his so-called formative years in Port Arthur, some called him Miltie or mispronounced his last name — “Rooshenberg.” I like to think the new nomen,which reads the same in both directions, foreshadowed the reflective and palindromatic nature of his work—a body of work that rocked the 20th century art world. But this is no art history piece or critique, rather a memory of meeting a man, a very famous man, whom I hold in high esteem for playing by his own rules and being bright, generous and kind about it.

I was told, before heading to the press junket for Raushenberg Festival Week in
Lafayette, that “Mr. Rauschenberg was quite the drinker.”

I liked him already.

The opening of his new exhibition there, “Scenarios and Short Stories,” was dedicated to his mother, Dora.

I liked him even more.

Lafayette was chosen for the opening mostly because it is his family's home. His parents and sister Janet moved there from Port Arthur while he was away, serving in WWII. It was to be the last opening of an exhibition of his new works.

Pictures of Bob had revealed a fair-haired man with a bright white, energetic smile, reflective, alive. In my mind, there is always a breeze blowing through his hair. The man in person is the same, only better because I could approach him.

Preparing for the press conference, questions ran over and over in my mind. What do you ask the single most prolific and influential living artist in the world? All of the other writers there, from Art in America, The Times Picayune, The New Yorker, they would already have figured it out.

A lesser man might have appeared withered in a wheelchair, but Bob has presence, a
projection of character that only living in the moment can produce. His entrance set the cameras to flashing and the reporters to firing the questions. I was told I asked the most. It was out of pure nerves if I did. Trying to bring it home, as it were, I said that near his hometown in Texas, was one of the few remaining independent artist co-ops in the country, The Art Studio Inc.. "Mr. Rauschenberg, what do you say to these artists in the trenches who are struggling to keep such organizations thriving in this country?"

"You are the artists," he said emphasizing the you.

He said to throw a party, raise some money. As artists, we should be able to throw the best parties in town with the best decorations, using the least amount of money.
He wasn't just throwing advice around. He started the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 1999, a non-profit devoted to, among other things helping artists in crisis. It was a foundation that didn't require so much paperwork, like others, he said.

As he left the building, I ran ahead of him to snap a candid. Embarrassed by my paparazzi style, I apologized. Bob gave me a big open smile and said, “Nice socks.”
I wore them, multi-colored and striped, in his honor. He was once quoted as saying that a pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.

Speaking of parties, I had really been looking forward to the one planned for that night. It was held on an estate named Moonshadows where Bob was staying. I was chauffeured a distance from town to a plantation home on tree-covered, grassy knolls overlooking a lazy Louisiana waterway, draped in Spanish moss. Bob's pal Dickie Landry was playing saxophone with a Zydeco band. Crawfish canopes and demitasse cups of gumbo were served with chilled white wine. Men in seersucker suits, carried silver-tipped canes and wore panama hats. Pastel-bedecked ladies of the museum guild ornamented the garden.

Bob was joined by friends from around the world and his family, including ex-wife Susan Weil and their son Christopher Rauschenberg.
One friend, famed dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown, was with him the entire week. Their admiration for each other was clear and never obsequious. Most of us had met her the previous night where she recounted a story about finding herself in a pickle at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, with a ballet to perform and no sets or costumes. Bob flew in from the U.S. to bail her out.

“With only two days to opening night, I called Bob. He was taken to a junkyard in Naples where he dragged in these huge, twisted, rusted metal pieces. He painted and drilled day and night, no one in the opera house bothered him. They knew something magic was happening. He bought soccer flags at the airport and used them as backdrops. We wore plain black leotards that Bob cut and fringed."

As they spoke, you could nearly hear the audience breathing.

At Moonshadows, other guests began to arrive in an attire less pastel. I began to
notice a lot of black. I thought, "Oh well these people are from New York. I overheard conversations about Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and other living artist giants as if they were next door neighbors in the city. Then I realized these people were wearing the black Rauschenberg Festival Week t-shirts. This would have been a serious fashion feau paux, considering Lafayette was putting on the 'dog' for this collection of mighty distinguished guests. But it was pure perfection, to quote Brown. Fans had cut and fringed their shirts as Bob had done for Trisha's leotards in Naples. It reminded me of an early '70s fad where we cut the ends of our shirts and pants legs into a thick flat fringe, like a dust mop. I was certain, at that moment, the fashion started in Naples with Bob and Trisha.

This was my payoff for spending more than 20 years finishing a BA, studying art history. It was people like this who were all about the art, and about listening and sharing that made me want to be a member of the church of art. And here I was with the Pope of Pop, Bob. He was sitting right next to me, sharing a glass or three of wine. In the conversational mix, it came up that I was representing a Beaumont/Port Arthur newspaper. Port Arthur being Bob's first home, they naturally wanted to know about the art scene there.

The dreaded question.

What is available for an artist in Port Arthur. Hmmm. Aside from the museum of the Gulf Coast, with a gallery dedicated to Bob, there is a gritty oil town on the choppy Gulf with the highest rate of poverty in the state of Texas. I guessed that if there was to be an art "scene' in Port Arthur it would be up to people like me to build it up.

"You do and I'll slap your face," he said smiling at me.

Startled, I jumped straight up out of my chair. I didn't know if I had just been complimented or insulted. Maybe both, or maybe it was the wine. Walking toward the grassy slope, heading away from the dwindling numbers I try to understand what I just heard. My response had been so immediate, so...knee-jerk. Why? I walk some more and I come to a conclusion. Because this man is electric. He knows how to shock. Then, walking up behind me is son Christopher Rauschenberg, looking concerned. A protective son, he hopes I am not going to make this moment into a thesis statement.

I returned to Bob's side, bent toward him and adhered my lips to his cheek, keeping my eyes on his. I think I surprised him too because his eyes opened really wide as he smiled that smile and laughed that laugh. Pure perfection indeed.

The big gala was set for the following night. But I had seen all I needed to see. Still,what's an experience if you can't share it with the ones you love? I drove two and a half hours back to Beaumont to fetch my husband. "You have no choice, you are going to meet Bob.

And he did. I introduced Jeff to him and I swear, it felt like I was introducing Jeff to my father for the first time.

The moon was full. The glass walls of the new museum reflected moonlight onto the white columns of the adjacent building turning them into smooth-bodied sirens. We found a grassy spot and watched museum patrons from a distance, gliding,speaking in muted tones. We heard that Bob had left the building. The lights on the portacache dimmed, the gallery doors slammed shut and the crowd disappeared like a ghostly dream.

Three years later, almost to the day, Bob died. Like his Erased de Kooning, Bob will also be difficult to erase from the world he called a canvas. Like his works, he has become greater for having once been at all.

And I have become more for having once met him.