*Mapping Through Selective Memories*

‘A Self Portrait through Objects and Others’

You may read along or select the link for a guided audio tour for each one. Every time there is a highlighted passage in the text it corresponds with an image in the frame.

It was suggested I make a self-portrait, something I have never done before. I began the process by looking through my stuff. Sorting through my collections I have saved they are composed of objects coming from disjointed experiences of my life. Every so often I have reached out and held onto a scrap. The assembled bits are the small survivors of larger stories.

Most of the history of my existence has passed by without evidence. Much of this has been purposeful. I used to try to capture every second through a lens while removing myself from the actual happening. I came to the conclusion that documenting is meaningless without actually participating. Thus the pieces I have saved carry their meanings from being a part of the experiences they came from when I remembered to grab onto a relic. Of course not all can be shared and much is left out.

Without the others many of the objects would be meaningless. The people who have been a part of my life hold great significance in many events that have transpired. I include in these pieces objects in various forms, created by, received from or inseparable from my memories of others.

Going through my life’s fragments is not an easy task. Memory can be a hard pill to swallow, at times it can be overwhelmingly nostalgic and difficult, others joyful. When I put together what I have saved the pieces begin to become alive again bringing back the time, place and series of events that brought them into my life. These 11 framed sets of memories linked together through tangents compose a small sampling of paths crossed and the series of events that are part of my life story.

#1: Shoeshines, burned popcorn, destroyed car and random finds

I had moved back from England and stopped going to college. I lived in a small furnished apartment in a house that was called the ‘Dragon House’ in Denver because it had a dragon on the roof which was owned by a very old woman named Marion who was a Quaker and spoke Esperanto.

I got a job by responding to a newspaper add that said ‘Shoeshine, me?’ working at a car wash shining shoes for a woman named Genie who ran a shoeshining ring. She had chairs on the 16th street mall, the carwash, a hotel & in a cowboy western bar the Stampede. I would wear the apron ‘a touch of polish’ and pull rags from it. I got two other jobs also. One was at the Mayan movie theater selling concessions and another as a waitress. I was told I burned the popcorn more than anyone who had ever worked at the Mayan. It was probably true. I got along with almost nobody as it was very exclusive and I never got invited to the upstairs office. I did make one friend who worked there however. His name was Charles. He would talk into a small hand held tape recorder saying things like ‘it has been a very busy night we have sold a lot of bagel dogs’.

I met one man whose shoes I shined, later I served him popcorn and once again was his waitress. Each time he would look surprised and say ‘shoeshine girl?’ One day I woke up and looked out the window of the dragon house and saw my Mazda had been turned into a ball of metal. Someone had hit it head on and pushed it into the car behind it. It was totaled. I shined someone’s shoes with an ankle monitor later that week. I told him my car story and he said he would buy my car for parts. He came and towed it away and gave me $400.

I went back to school the next semester and took a performance art class. In one piece I performed I shined people’s shoes and told them stories about all the jobs I had and boys I had kissed. I also continued to work shining boots at the Stampede and made a short film about it. The other day I was walking down the street and passed a free box of books. I pulled out one at random. Strangely enough it was called Shoeshine Girl; I think I was meant to find it.

#2: Love, hate and small squares of rubber

I was traveling with two friends and one guy named Jason with whom I did not get along with at all. We traveled to Berlin and the phone card we got to call a friend of a friend we were staying with was ‘the LoveCard’™. Our host was involved in some anti-government action that he could not write about in email so it is uncertain exactly what. I did however pick up the ‘no yuppies’ sticker from him. Our traveling group next set off for Prague. We arrived after midnight and when we got out of the train there was some kind of an art installation with these small hanging black and white faces. I took one.

A man approached us and asked if we would like to come to stay at his hotel. I do not remember how it transpired but we accepted. It was called the Purple House. We went to a bar and I engaged in a conversation with an old Chzeck man. He was very drunk and my friends were mad at me because I brought him to our table. I was mad at them because I hated Jason. I secretly wanted to make them suffer. Later Jason decided he would buy some hashish. He was sold a small square of rubber instead. It cost over 20 Euros. This I found quite funny and kept.
 

#3: Frog eyes, vomit, and the life and times as a Welsh survivalist and a British schoolgirl.

This square of my life comes from time of my life spent in Brighton, England. The Andy sticker came from a friend who wanted to learn how to paint things exactly how they are and saw no point in doing it any other way. I remember he painted a bulletin board and a pencil once. One of his projects was a sticker with his face of which he made big posters of and wheat pasted them onto dumpsters in London. The Mother Theresa card I stole from him, I am not sure why I did that now. But he told me it was very wrong that I stole a mother Theresa card. Andy abandoned art and is a lawyer now. Our former painting teacher once told me he wouldn’t give him a reference because he doesn’t support lawyers.

Birdie, a Welsh friend, gave me a comical picture of himself as a schoolboy taken with his eyes closed. He came to visit me in Denver once having taken a bus from Ohio he was none too thrilled about. I went to visit him a bit back and he brought me to a wonderful ‘dress like you are from the future’ party in a barn in Tembley, Wales. I went as a survivalist thanks to a pink raincoat from the pound store. He went as some kind of samurai with a tinfoil mustache, shoulder pads and a white jumpsuit. He ran into his younger brother who had of his own accord dressed in a very similar outfit. It was a bit confounding how it happened.

Eric had a tattoo that said ‘a man cut in two by a window’ and another of a pair of scissors. We each hosted our own radio shows his was ‘the Tentative Eyebrow Ring’; mine ‘Coco’s Cabana’. Eric asked me to come along one night on a meeting with Jof because he was afraid to hang out with him alone. Jof on our first night hanging out he got us thrown out of a bar by reaching around to serve himself a beer.

On the walk home a group of what Jof named to be ‘townies’ picked a fight with us. One of them kept yelling at me ‘What you looking at frog eyes’ while Jof screamed repeatedly ‘you are a repressed homosexual’. We went to my flat which was 3 stories where I was living in the basement which doubled as the kitchen and living room with an mdf wall on wheels separating it with four other people. Of this I saved my keys. Jof managed to knock over the wall in his state of drunkenness and vomit on himself. I pretended to be asleep while Eric cleaned it up. He was very mad at me for this. Jof and I later went to an ‘Eyehategod’ show where later that night he got us kicked out of a club when he ran into the DJ booth and changed the record.

I went through an unfortunate time of being out of money when I couldn’t find work as I did not have a visa. One of my jobs was promoting ‘the Real School Disco’ with a British girl named Fleur. We dressed up as Catholic school girls to hand out fliers. She would pick me up on her bike and pedal while I would sit on the back with my feet out in our schoolgirl gear. We never quite managed to fill the club. As it were Fleur later became a school teacher.

Walking around the city the phone booths were filled with sex-add fliers. One night in a fit of broke, drunk exertion I ran around the city with friends and grabbed all of the fliers coming back with stacks of hundreds. I hung onto the one, never did call it though.

#4: My life as a cleaning fairy and a savior with Scott Baio and the Lithuanians

I was working as a cleaning fairy which involved cleaning houses of college students who were moving out in Boulder. I had to make a tax id because I was an independent contractor. I made myself Jessie R Cleaning Fairy. Somehow, a few Lithuanian girls got Visas to do this for the summer and came to Colorado. The people who owned the company called them ‘the Litheys’. Originally there were three however one of them looked like a super model and quit being a cleaning fairy because her professor from home fell in love with her and invited her to Greek or Turkish island. We all secretly hated her.

I took the two that stayed under my wing. They always made lunches with pasta and lots of mayonnaise which I began to partake in. We would clean out refrigerators of food and turn it into their salads. There would be pickles and hot dog bits, whatever we had to throw out that was still good went into the pasta salads. We got in trouble once when we were caught painting our nails on the job. I drove a Saab under the influence of the cleaning fairies. They all drove Saabs. It broke down constantly.

I brought them to the flea market and Elitches. I also brought them to see the Scott Baio Army at a roller skating rink one night. We drank whiskey and roller skated around as the band played in the middle of the rink. When they were going back home they had a fake awards ceremony in the basement of a house. They gave me the award ‘The one who saved us’. I was honored. I later got a lovely postcard.

#5: Very important things

This hosts my first pen pal letter who I let down. I was in the first grade. She was from Japan and her letter had lots of lovely origami, writing and 5 yen. I never wrote her back and felt quite guilty about it for years. Still do in fact. My middle sister made me this doll when I was around 4, she is 3 years older than me. I think it came out beautifully. My best friend in the 1st grade made me a leather monkey coaster. There is my grandfather’s compass, he, I never met. There is also a small portrait of Sparky who was my family’s parakeet for 8 years when we were growing up. My grandmother lived with us and was allergic to everything with hair. So all we could have were fish, frogs and once I even made a crawdad into a pet. (Corky). Sparky was the only one I ever counted as our real pet though. He died when I was in basketball camp; I came back to my sisters holding a small shoebox he was in. Also my grandmother gave me this daguerreotype. We think it is of a relative but were not entirely sure. I found it on her dresser one day. Also there is the little fuzzy guy. I call him Hodgie. I am not sure what his relationship is to my family but my mom has one and so do my sisters. He is very important.

#7: Getting lost on inactive volcanoes, a German party invite and Thanksgiving dinner in England

This has a map I took to find my way to the top of a no longer active volcano on the island of Alicudi one of the Aeolian Islands that is near Sicily. It is where I met Jenny who would become a dear friend. I found her through an advert in the window of a grocery store in England that said, ‘Gardening in Sicily?’ I had a month off and called it. I took a plane, bus and a couple boat rides and made it there.

On this particular hike I got spooked when I made it to the top and saw some kind of animal carcass in a cave. I took the wrong way down and got stuck on little stone goat hills that I had to jump down from. I finally made it to a sloping dirt portion and slid down it. I was on the uninhabited part of the island and had to swim around to get to the front. I ruined my camera. We picked olives and later she mailed me olive oil made from it. Her neighbors, a German couple had made a party invite. They made too many & Jenny used them as scrap paper. There is a note on the back telling me she found my sock.

As well on this trip I ventured to Sicily and made it to the Cappuchini monks convent. It was only open about 2 hours a day and was filled with mummified corpses who were dressed in the clothes of whatever profession they held in life. I paid a monk a small amount of money to go in and was the only one there.

Later Jenny moved to a tiny rural town in France called Rouvenac. I visited her 6 years after the first trip spawned because her partner had just passed away of a heart attack. I helped her chainsaw wood for the fire, and prune rosebushes. We also made a bench and buried a small heart with his ashes that she had made with the writing ‘le coeur de mon roi’ (the ashes of my king). She took me to see many castles through windy roads. The morning she drove me to the airport it was very foggy and I caught my plane home with just two minutes to spare.

#8: A little interlude about my friend Patsy

My friend Patsy sent me these little squeeze bottles from Japan. They are meant to store soy sauce or other fixings for your lunch. I met him about two months before he moved there. When I got these in the mail they matched perfectly with a little trash can I had gotten earlier from a dollar store on Federal street in Denver. I took their picture to send to him but never remembered to send it. He also mailed me a little map I am unsure to where, and a CD. He had been at a club in Japan and got into a fight with this man from Nigeria when he accidentally knocked over his stack of CD’s. Somehow in the shuffle he grabbed one and I inherited it. If you are listening to the audio tour I have included a sample of his music.

#9: Crispus Attucks meets Michael and la vampire

I moved to Mexico City because my sculpture professor’s fiancé lived there & I wanted to learn Spanish and go to art school. I helped him with an installation which he gave me a piece of it. It was a clear glass jar with a handkerchief that said Crispus Attucks with small GI Joes in the top. I kept the handkerchief. I became an art student at the ‘Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas’. I made a copy of my ID that would fit in my wallet because the other one was too big. So the one pictured is actually a fake.

My first friend was Luis who became my boyfriend. We stayed in touch many years and he mailed me prints he made of him as a boy and his mother.

I wore a Michael bracelet frequently. There must have been an excess of Michael fabric in Mexico City because it was sold in lots of places, just the name Michael. It became a joke that every time anyone asked me who it was I would make up a different story.

I moved to a new house with a friend named Polina. She noticed I collected small things and gave me a bunch of matchbooks ‘for my collections’. She also painted on T-shirts and gave me ‘La Vampira’.

My friend Simba was in a Mexican surf rock band called the Welcome Tapetes. He got his name because when assigned to draw a self portrait he drew Simba. My friend toy story got his name in a similar way..This type of music is a big part of the lucha libre scene and wrestlers often have matches before shows. He invited me to join and I played the keyboard and sang off key. I told them I couldn’t sing when I joined and they told me that didn’t matter. I saved a set list of the first show I played with them. I was quite terrified but somehow I thought as long as I ad-libbed and sang in English nobody could actually tell it was off key…

#10: Jessica as Secretary B and a wonderful female employee

I spent some time after I graduated college working at a video store in Boulder called the Video Station. It was the proud host of Colorado’s largest movie and adult selections. The adult movies were ordered by # but we had to clean the discs and all got quite familiar with the best titles. One of them being, ‘my ass is haunted’. I ran the cult selection and became increasingly good at making more and more subsections making re-filing boxes a very difficult task for my fellow workers. I created the always needed ‘female wrestling’ and ‘Nunsploitation sections. We shared the selections we would play and on one particular bad choice of mine ‘Bat Thumb’ my manager Noah began calling me ‘Responsible for this Atrocity’. He later purchased for me the coveted Heavenly Bodies VHS tape. I also received news of a very complimentary letter that was given to my bosses of my very excellent customer service. I never got that pay raise.

I became weary of living on my $430 every two week pay checks over time which were sub-financed by my 8 am Saturday morning receptioning at a hair salon job where I was inevitably hung over and the occasional Cleaning Fairy shift. However as soon as I left the video station all of my sections were immediately dismantled, therefore I left no legacy.

I found a job as a legal secretary in a non-profit thanks to my Spanish skills. On my first week the staff went rafting in Greeley and my new boss Joel who sidelined as a fiddle player in a contra-dance band entrusted me to drive his wife’s car back to Boulder. I stopped on my way at a small antique store and got some old pictures. Later as I began to excel in my role as ‘Secretary A’ I was offered a slightly higher paid position as a ‘Secretary B’ which involved passing a typing test and composing a ‘Table of Authorities’…no easy task I assure you. It is true as the comments say. I could have improved upon my organization.

#11: Who is Arthur H Baker, Bad portraits, the Dead Sea and Louie Vuitton

My dad wrote me this letter. He is an attorney. I saved it because it is the only letter he has ever written me. He writes in all capitals when he writes. I am not sure why. When I was growing up he would accept all kinds of payment for his work as a lawyer. So we would always have about 4 vcr’s and every so often a Russian doll or a van would show up. I am not sure what his connection was to Alfred H Baker, he may have been another attorney who ordered too much paper. But all of the paper we had around the house said that on it and when I wanted to draw it had to be on the Alfred H Baker Paper.

He came to visit me in Europe once when I was in college in England and we spent Christmas in France where my friend’s mother lived. When I was there I got my portrait drawn in charcoal with the plan being to send it to my mother. Unfortunately I came out looking like a bad Jennifer Lopez and never gave it to her. I also saved this sand he brought me from a trip he and his wife took to the dead-sea. They got baptized in it. He gave me it for Christmas last year with a fake Louie Vuitton handbag (not pictured). I donated that to my friend Adam who hosted the Louie Vuitton anarchist variety show from which I received a handmade one as a prize.