Miss Boogie's Adventures Part V

Miss Boogie has just returned from a fabulous week at Rehoboth Beach. She loves the boardwalk and sincerely hopes the “dog months” will be extended at least through May 1^st. April through October is far too long to be denied boardwalk and beach privileges. Miss Boogie finds the city commissioners to be rather speciest in their regulations.

Miss Boogie is a sun-worshiper. She gets it honestly enough from her first Mom, a sun-worshiper of the highest order, who oiled and foiled and broiled her way from precisely 10 a.m. to precisely 2 p.m., at Herring Cove or Race Point Beach every day of an entire Provincetown season. The first Mom once unfolded a webbed, aluminum beach chair in the middle of the backyard on Arden Road in the middle of January. It was a particularly bright day—there being half a foot of snow on the ground reflecting, blindingly, the sun in the cloudless sky.

The Mom, suffering she claimed from SAD, sat in the chair in her down jacket, khakis and boots with a two-foot mirror balanced on her knees to reflect even more rays to her upturned face and hands. Miss Boogie sat rapturously on the foot of the lawn chair.

Miss Boogie takes the sun quite regularly on the Clintonville Beach, as the back yard at Arden Road has often been called. She has her own sunglasses. They are actually the tanning bed glasses of the first Mom, but with their elastic band, and tiny dark lenses, they fit Miss Boogie’s small face perfectly. 

Lest you think I could make these things up, I’ve added photos this time from Miss Boogie’s album. Miss Boogie has quite an album. Both Moms once taught at the notorious Hasket Hall, home of The OSU department of photography and cinema. 

Miss Boogie with the 1st Mom and pal, Pepper, at the Clintonville Beach in January

Miss Boogie with Aunt Donna at the Clintonville Beach

The first Mom, a photographer, taught photography, and the second Mom, a filmmaker, taught, well, filmmaking. And so Miss Boogie roamed the studios, darkrooms and edit suites of Hasket Hall quite freely, attending classes and critiques, editing into the wee hours, meeting guest artists. (Miss Boogie confesses that picking up William Wegman, the great photographer of the noble Weimaraner, Man Ray, at the airport was a highlight. Though she wished Mr. Wegman had at least brought Fay Ray with him.) That is, when there was a Hasket Hall and a department of photography. The department of photography and cinema having been disbanded in a dramatic downsizing of the arts, after some gibberish about the arts not funding themselves like football and the “left-wing faculty.” But that is definitely another story.

When Miss Boogie wasn’t sitting for a photograph, or hanging by the snack machines in the basement, conning some starving student out of a cheese cracker or peanut M & M, she was helping hang a show or, her favorite, attending an opening in the Silver Image Gallery. Miss Boogie loved openings. She loved to wear her red bandana and prance in stylishly, fashionably late. If everyone was already there, talking and drinking, she could make her way directly to the hors d’ oeuvres’ table without anyone making a fuss. 

There were always tasty bits on the floor around the table. She quite preferred the faculty receptions to the student ones. Though she is fond of chips and pizza and corn curls and she adores students and finds them so smart, when they laugh and applaud and toss crisps for her to catch mid-air, her schooled palate appreciates the shrimp, pate, and cheeses that fall from the plates of the wine-sipping faculty even more. 

 Miss Boogie’s eye is as discerning as her tongue—one might call her an art hound. She had her portrait made with and has been photographed by the best. She has kept an album of her favorites. The first Mom, Uncle Chick, Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Susan Mabel, Ardine, Fred, James all became rather famous in their own ways. Miss Boogie likes to remember their promising beginnings, and to remember that she knew them when—rather like Gertrude Stein—when she was the doyenne of Hasket Hall.