The Night I Met Andy Warhol

It was a cold and rainy night in Venice, CA back in 1977. A group of friends and fellow co-workers at New West magazine (a short-lived sister publication to New York magazine) were off to the Warhol opening at the Ace Gallery in Venice. We were quite the arty brat pack back then bouncing from art openings to movie screenings and working all hours of the night designing and putting out a bi-monthly magazine. Arriving late to the gallery feeling no pain (okay, so it was the late 70s!) there was a crush of people in the gallery space and at the end of the room was a tall white luminous figure with a platinum blonde wig slightly askew and a very tall Native American man at a table signing giant posters of the show. When I got to the table to buy my 2 posters for $10, the pale to the point of being translucent Andy Warhol shook my hand, thanked us for coming and signed the posters along with Russell Means. I was thrilled to have met him and actually have something of his signed. That poster (I gave the other to my parents) moved around with me for over twenty years in a big cardboard tube because it was so big I couldn't afford to justify spending $500 to frame it. It finally got framed and hangs proudly in my living room, an homage to times long past.