Reading Tip

Just Kids is a wonderful story told in plain, sentimental, but the truest hip language you can imagine by Patti Smith. The NY Times raved on the cover of the book review a few weeks ago and I was so excited with its giddy reception because I feel like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe are a part of my family - so huge an influence have they been on my life and subsequent style. I hadn't even though about garden - I only knew a tulip from a calla lily by virtue of those sexy Mapplethorpe flower images.

I'll never forget the feeling that came over me the first time I saw this image of Patti Smith in the NY Times

And this is a picture that Robert Mapplethorpe took of me a few years later.