Aquarius Theater staff ode to Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham is not a basketball legend but in this case the New York Times photographer whose assortment of candid fashion photos comprise the popular Sunday feature “On The Street.” He is also the subject of a documentary by Richard Press that I ducked into yesterday at the Aquarius. (I have a New York Times fixation, starting with being given a copy of Gay Talese “Kingdom and the Power” as a high school journalism award and including having trained not one but two eventual Timesmen on my high school and college newspaper staffs; I probably have 2,000 stories clipped and filed from the venerable “fit to print.” ).

I got a kick out of the fact that the staff at Landmark’s theater dressed in honor of Bill. I snapped (on my crappy cell) this shot of Rachael and Carolina, then got Carolina to indulge me, and further our respective and overlapping odes

to Bill Cunningham, by walking by me on Emerson as I crouched to catch her shoes.

Here is Bill’s post for today; I counted 46 shots:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/fashion/01STREET.html?=fashion

The film had a subplot about artists (including Bill Cunningham) being evicted from their life-work space studios at Carneghie Hall which reminds me of my own lobbying for a Nathan Oliveira studio at 209 Hamilton here. Also, that Cunningham started as a hat-maker reminded me of my old friend Mary Michelle Little, the Raleigh-based milliner.

I also liked the music, which I noticed was done by my friend Brooke Wentz at Rights Workshop, especially the John Lurie stuff. (Carolina said she liked the Velvet Underground stuff; I wondered what the song-parody was they feted him with on his 80th birthday)